6 years at Yahoo!
July 3rd, 2009 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).
- 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.
Wilf
Yahoo!7 Technical Director
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