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Jeff Goldblum tops the lot

July 3rd, 2009 Filed in: Online Industry 1 comment

Last Friday was an extraordinary day. First we awoke to the tragic news that both Farrah Fawcett, of Charlie’s Angels fame, and Michael Jackson had passed away. Then came the rumours, fuelled by Twitter, that Jeff Goldblum had fallen to his death, famously leading to Richard Wilkins announcing on the Today show that this had been confirmed by the New Zealand Police. Fortunately for Jeff, if somewhat unfortunately for Richard, the rumours were false and this was just the latest in the line of celebrity hoax death reports.

However, in Search we noticed something unusual. Sure Michael Jackson was big news, and we were seeing big spikes in traffic, but Jeff Goldblum searches were proving way more popular. In fact, on Friday June 26th, there were over three times as many searches on Jeff Goldblum as on Michael Jackson. So how could this be?

By 8am Michael Jackson was pretty much blanket coverage across all online major news sources but things were strangely quiet around Jeff Goldblum on the major news sites. With the advent of Twitter rumours of this nature have the ability to spread rapidly. Traditional news sources, rightly, need to check their facts before publication; but this leaves a period of time where there is effectively an information void.

As the public looked to answer the question “Is Jeff Goldblum dead?” they turned to Search for the answer. After all, who doesn’t love the thrill of being amongst the first to find out the true story?

Have a great weekend everyone.

Tony Kinner
Search Product Manager, Yahoo!7

Tags: Farrah Fawcett, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Jackson, Richard Wilkins, Search, Tony Kinner, Twitter

Your Flickr on Twitter

July 3rd, 2009 Filed in: Communications, Online Industry Add comment

This week we launched our Flickr2Twitter integration. Now Flickr members can share their content straight to Twitter!

There are two options to set this up:

1. Via “upload by email” to use your unique email upload address to post your new Flickr content.
2. By setting up the “blog this” feature to share your existing Flickr content.

Here’s an example of what a tweeted photo looks like:

For more info on setting up Flickr2Twitter check out the following three FAQs:

• How do I Twitter my Flickr photos?
• Can I post to Flickr and Twitter from my mobile?
• How do I Twitter from Flickr?

Tim Nunn
Community Product Manager, Australia

Tags: Flickr, photos, Tim Nunn

6 years at Yahoo!

July 3rd, 2009 Filed in: Online Industry, Techy Stuff 2 comments

The other day I passed my six year anniversary of working for Yahoo! in Australia. During that time I have worked as a mobile engineer, a media engineer, a media engineering manager, and now as the technical director. I’ve experienced a huge amount of progress during my time so far here, and ever new day is a new and interesting challenge in this thing called the World Wide Web.

Being an anniversary of sorts, I was inspired me to look back as to how the company and indeed the internet has evolved during the past six years. Our Frontpage looked like this six years ago…

These days, the creativity and beauty of what we find is somewhat advanced…

Beauty can be considered only skin deep, but the amount of content, personalisation and creativity that goes behind the presentation layer really sets the user-experience apart from the internet as it was those years ago. Web Search is so far advanced into delivering me answers (even when I’m not sure what questions I’m asking), communication has advanced beyond plain text emails into social networking, and pages don’t just show me flat content, they update themselves as I interact with them: more like an interactive application than a printed page. If I have an opinion on information I find, I can share my thoughts on the subject and see what others might have to say.

More and more, the internet is about allowing me to access the kind of information I want, when I want it, and it makes me wonder what more can change to my data more accessible and easier to consume. When it comes to having a ymax chip inside our heads with a head-up-display inside our retinas, I’ll probably be an early adopter, but I do have a couple of opinions in how the internet could be speeding up progress in the shorter term (comments welcomed btw).

1. Pages should be fast! These days I expect instant response from interaction I engage in. It is so last century to click on something and put the kettle on before I get a response. Tools like YSlow, building pages with speed in mind, and generally simple rules like using CDNs, limiting HTTP requests per page and optimising the hell out of the delivery of pages are not just desirable, they are a must!
2. Content should (where financially possible) be open. What I mean by this is that although there are some big internet companies out there with some pretty clever people working for them, this pales into insignificance compared with what the millions of developers worldwide can create using open APIs and open data that the large companies can provide. If a company opens its APIs, it gets feedback and innovation in what can happen with that content online. The internet is far better off for these innovations, and it inspires the big internet companies to improve.

So whilst people’s computers increase in performance and (wow, even Telstra in Australia) home/business internet access improves, in my mind the one thing that the internet can really improve on is global innovation through technology that companies like Yahoo! are sharing.  Try the Performance, Yahoo! User Interface library and Yahoo! Query Language for ways that performance, user experience and innovation through data can be achieved.

The internet is never going to stand still; neither should the innovation that fuels it.

Wilf
Yahoo!7 Technical Director

Tags: Neil Wilkinson, Yahoo!, Yahoo!7, YQL, YUI