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).
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!
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.
Last week Yahoo!7 hosted Geek Girls Dinner in its Sydney office. With over a hundred geek girls and their guests coming from across different companies the event was a huge success!
It was yet another opportunity for we Yahoo!7 Engineers and the local geeks to mingle and to share the huge knowledge base.
The event started with a welcome speech by Neil Wilkinson, Technical Director, Yahoo!7. He welcomed the geeks and, I should say, inaugurated the ceremony officially.
Allan Shone and I, who are both engineers here at Yahoo!7, spoke about Yahoo Query Language (YQL). I did the presentation introducing YQL to the geeks, showing its awesomeness using examples. Allan showed a working demo of his mini project and got the wows from the crowd!
The lightning talks were very cool with Georgi Knox talking about “Gaming”, Candace Wong about “Automated User Interface Testing”, Jenny Gordon about “Configuring a Cisco Router” and lastly Thomas Given-Wilson gave a very amusing talk about “Recovering from Linux”.
The evening went on in an exciting and geeky fashion. There was plenty of food, drinks and gaming on Guitar Hero and Foos. Yeah it’s not a Yahoo! event without Foos!
A big applause should be given to my fellow Yahoos, Karen Williams, Jay Buasri and last but not the least, Claudia Jayne Mikaelian, who organised the event and made sure all the strings pulled together on the night.
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!
Last week Yahoo!7 hosted Geek Girls Dinner in its Sydney office. With over a hundred geek girls and their guests coming from across different companies the event was a huge success!
Subscribe to the blog!