Posts filed under 'General'
October 9th, 2009
Most of you are probably familiar with Yahoo!7 Shortcuts that appear at the top of certain web search queries, such as Weather Sydney.
We’re now enhancing shortcuts to include business listings in the Yahoo!7 Search results page to get you to your local business information faster.
A significant proportion of our queries have a local intent, where users are looking for busines details, organisations, events, and other information within a specific geographic area. The new Yahoo!7 Local Shortcut gives users the local info they need to make decisions about where to eat, stay, shop and play, even faster than before.
For example, if you search for "Restaurants Manly", a range of results are returned ordered by a number of factors including distance from search location, category and rating. For example, give it a try now: restaurants manly.
For business chains, we’ll show up to three stores nearest the search location.
For example: Bunnings Melbourne.
If you are looking for a nice restaurant that had been recommended to you by a friend, say Strangers with Candy Redfern (one of my favourite restaurants!), you’ll see a "business card" display for the business, with relevant information such as address, phone number, ratings and number of reviews.
We’ll be activating more and more of these "business card displays" as time goes by, so stay tuned!
The business data displayed is provided by our data partner, TrueLocal.com.au, so if you’re looking to have your business found in Yahoo!7 Search, make sure your business is included. If it’s not already, you can add it here.
So give the Local Shortcut a try. As always, we’re keen to hear what you think!
Justin O’Neill
Product Manager, Yahoo!7 Local
May 29th, 2009
Over the past two years there has been a lot of discussion about the closure of Yahoo!7 360° and the transition to our new profiles experience that we’ve had in the works. Today, we’re able to firmly say that on July 13th, 2009 Yahoo!7 360° will be closing down and you’ll be asked to move into your new profile on Yahoo!7, by July 12th, 2009.
While we know that many of you have faithfully used this service over the past few years, our goal has been to find a way to unify your social experience and connections across all of Yahoo!7 and anywhere you travel across the Web. So, while we’re sad to say that we will no longer be supporting Yahoo!7 360°, we’re excited about this larger plan and hope you’ll transition over and be a part of it, too.
We also want to reiterate our commitment to preserving your blog content. We have been working to make sure we put the right mechanisms in place so that you can move your content and minimise disruption. It is with this thought in mind that we’re happy to introduce a new blogging feature that is integrated into your profile. You can find more information on this below.
With your new profile on Yahoo!7 you’ll be able to connect with other people on Yahoo!7, and share your updates and activity with the people you meet on the Web.
While we know many of you are frustrated by this decision, we’d like to address some of the main questions you might have. If your question has not been addressed, please see our Help pages and list of frequently asked questions for more information. If you’d like to discuss this change, or, ask a question that was not addressed in the help pages or in the content below, please visit the Profiles News Blog at: http://www.yprofileblog.com/. Though, I can’t promise to answer every question, I can promise to create additional posts on common issues and trends to make sure “hot topics” are addressed.
Why is Yahoo!7 360° closing?
Though 360° gained a strong core of loyal users (you) who enjoyed the service, Yahoo!7 has been reprioritising some products to help us deliver the best possible experiences to consumers. The decision to close Yahoo!7 360° and transition users to Profiles is part of this larger strategy, but we had been waiting until we had an alternative solution that we could offer to our community of Yahoo!7 360° users until we officially shut down 360°.
It’s been almost two years since you first announced 360° was closing—why shut it down now?
Before we could retire 360°, we had to find a sustainable and adequate solution for your personal information. We know how important your blog entries and profile information is to each of you, and we wanted to be able to maintain the integrity of this content. Rather than rushing the process and risking data loss, we worked on a broader solution across Yahoo!7 that would meet our future goal of providing you the best possible social experience while at the same time protecting your privacy and data. We’re happy to say that we now have a solution that satisfies all of these requirements.
What is going to happen to my blog?
We know that many of you decided to blog in 360° because you enjoyed sharing your content with the people you met on Yahoo!7, which is why we’ve created two options for your blog and all of its content.
The first is: you can start blogging on your profile on Yahoo!7 — we’ve created an all new blogging tool that will let you post content and also allows you to integrate photos right from Flickr. Once you create an entry, your post is automatically pushed out in your updates stream to your connections, saving you the hassle of sending out links to your latest entries.
A second option that we’re providing you is the ability to export your blog and all of your content and to any of the supported blogging systems (don’t worry — they’re popular sites like WordPress, Blogger, and MoveableType). We’ll even generate an archive with all of your entries and photos and will send you a link to download the archive.
First you shut down Mash, now you shut down 360° — why should I give profiles a shot?
We understand you might have doubts — in the past few years, you’ve seen a couple of social sites come and go, and it means a lot to us that you’ve stuck around while we’ve tweaked each experience. Know that we’re committed to having a universal profile across Yahoo!7, and we’re committed to working with you to improve and evolve this profile to make sure it’s what YOU want to use. That doesn’t mean we can implement every piece of feedback you provide, but it does mean we’re listening, and we are going to do our best to make sure your interests are incorporated into future releases and versions of your profile.
What about customisation and photos? On 360° I can change the look and feel and upload multiple photos—can I do this with profiles?
At this time, your new profile does not have all the features and functionality of your 360° profile. However, we are looking at incorporating new ways of expressing yourself through your profile.
In regards to uploading multiple photos, your profile on Yahoo!7 allows for only one primary photo for now. This is also something we’re looking at improving/expanding based on your feedback.
We know that you will have lots of questions about 360° closing and how it will affect each of you. Be sure to check out the Customer Care help pages (including the FAQ’s) to help make this transition as smooth as possible.
Thank you.
Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager
May 6th, 2009
Welcome to the official Yahoo!7 blog aptly named Yodel Down Under.
We’ve not called it a corporate blog on purpose as we intend it to be (in the true spirit of blogging) not too ‘corporate’. So the reality is that it will be a bit ‘corporate’, but the plan is for a range of people from across the Yahoo!7 business here in Australia to post blogs – everything from what goes on at Pier 8 & 9 (Sydney head office) to new products launched, techy stuff for developers and interesting things from the world of online advertising.
“Cripes, just launching a blog now – isn’t that a bit 2004?” Indeed. We’ve in fact had a few different blogs going for a while but thought it might be useful to bring them together into one place and talk about more than just our products. Call it the “greatest hits” of current Yahoo!7 product blogs – with some new stuff too.
Got something to say to us? Cool. Just keep it clean and tidy (no swear words, or discrimination etc etc – you know the drill) and we’ll do our best to address your comments.
All I have left to do is introduce a few of our bloggers – there will be more to come, so this is just an initial taste of what to expect (can you tell I work in PR and marketing). Drum roll please……
Amanda Millar (me) – I’m the PR chick and Aussie developers might also trip over me at one of the Yahoo!7 Open Session events which I help organise.
Sebastian Urban – Technical Yahoo! and occasional foosballer. Seb leads the Search engineering team. If he had three wishes, he would use the second one to create a Lego minifig that looks like him.
Morgan Williams – Morgan’s specialist subjects include Mail, Messenger, Flickr, other online communities and Britain in the Dark Ages.
Harry Burt – Harry heads up the marketing crew here. He’s a Brit but we forgive him.
David Morrison – David is the Media Production Manager. He makes sure all our Media websites are ‘wow’ experiences for our users.
Neil Wilkinson (Wilf) – In additional to having a fully entrenched nickname, Wilf is a pointy-haired geek and long -time Yahoo!7 technology lover/developer/manager.
Aidan Beanland – Aidan is our resident surfer (in fact he’s on leave surfing right now) and SEO (mini) god. Aidan knows how to optimise both the ocean and the internet.
Let us know if there is something in particular you’d like to see on the blog – we’re pumped and we hope you are too!
Amanda
Yahoo!7 Communications Manager
Tags: Yahoo!7
Subscribe to the blog!