New to Yahoo! Search: Yahoo! 360
Monte: Right, right. Agreed. And so what are some of the dynamic changes that are going to be made, if any, to the technology because of this move? What were some of the differences in the past; and, now that this is going to be molded up under one brand, is there anything that is going to be significantly changing? What are people needing to be on the lookout for?
Tim: Well, I think we’re constantly working to improve our search products via the Algramic side, which I’m directly involved in, or the Pay for Performance side. We’re constantly working on improving those and making them more relevant and giving advertisers better targeted leads. So, I don’t think specifically, you know, I can’t into specifics on this is how we’re going to be changing the P for P products or web search. I can talk about some recently released things that we changed on the search page or in the Algramic product; but I really can’t talk about specifics going forward.
Monte: Okay, well let’s talk about some of the things that you just announced. I understand that you guys just launched a product today. Why don’t you tell us a little about it.
Tim: Yea, we just launched a product that came out which is called Yahoo! 360 and it’s really a…it brings together social networking with community and blogging. So what this does, it allows you to go in and utilize a lot of the Yahoo! services in one place. So, it might be Messenger, Photos, Yahoo! Local, Launch Cast Music, Yahoo! Groups…also do blogging; and you share that with all your friends. So it brings together all the services and allows you to share those services with your friends. So, you can …so if you have your photos, you can… it is somewhat similar to the service that Google launched but it integrates all of the Yahoo! services. I mean, that was the main problem with our cooz. People went in there and they were like… I connected with all my friends, what do I do? And what this allows you to do is you can create blog, your blog there, you can have all your photos and all your Yahoo! stuff and share that with your friends.
Monte: Oh, that’s cool.
Tim: So, I think it’s really cool; and right now it’s invite only; so, it’s sort of propagating from Yahoo! employees; but, if you go to….if you type in 360 into the search box you’ll see there’s a little Yahoo! shortcut which will lead you to a page where you can sign up to be invited when the product opens up to general availability. But, I’ll also be sending invites to a bunch of different people in the industry. So I would expect a bunch of SEOs…it spreads pretty quickly so I would imagine people would be able to get an invite pretty quickly.
Monte: When do you anticipate the general release or launch of that?
Tim: I do not have data on that right now, but I would image….Monte, I can send you an invite reasonably soon…so you can…you know in the next day….you know today or tomorrow morning and then you can check it out and invite other people.
Monte: Oh, cool. So you wouldn’t mind if I sent it across our 15,000 customers then.
(both laughing).
Monte: So if you get a lot of personal emails for invitations, you’ll know where it came from. (both laughing). No, just kidding, just kidding. How about the Yahoo! Developer Network?
Tim: That is something people have been asking for for a long time, ever since I was at [inaudible] and then at [inaudible] everyone wants to develop applications, people obviously want to have access to more queries as well as having access to more services. Like, people were interested in the web; but with this, we give people access to our Speller, we give people access to Yahoo! Local, they get access to our Image Search database, as well as our Web Search database. So, you know, as well as the Video Search which is a new product we just announced pretty recently which is quite popular. So this allows people to build applications on top of these data feeds and it has been very popular. We’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of response we’ve gotten. We’ve had over 20 people build applications that are available on our page if you go to the Yahoo! ….got to Developer.Yahoo!.net you’ll see a whole community as well as documentation around this. We have a [inaudible..wicky], a web log, as well as a whole list of applications. So, you can go check that out and also just get access to these applications. The one nice thing is that we’ve bumped up traditionally for a lot of the services out there. You’ve been limited to about 1,000 queries per day, and we have actually bumped this up to 5,000 queries per day.
Monte: Oh, that’s nice.
Tim: So, yea that’s pretty nice; and if people have a really interesting application that they need 10,000…or research application or some other application they need more than 5,000, they can also always contact us and we can potentially work something out with those people.
Monte: Okay, great. And does the Yahoo! Developer Network have a cost to it…umm, to those that subscribe?
Tim: No, it’s entirely free.
Monte: And the 360 Network as well?
Tim: Uh, yea, the 360 Network is entirely free as well. I mean, obviously if you have photos and you decide you want them printed and sent to you, you’ll have to pay for the photos or any Yahoo! services you do off of 360, but to use 360, to have a profile and to share your information and have a blog, that’s entirely free.
Monte: Wow, that’s very nice. And so this kind of differentiates Yahoo! from the competition.
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