Something Community is Happening at Yahoo
At Blogher (yeah, I know you don't want to hear that word again for at least a year, but heck, attribution is the reason this time!) I had conversations with two folks from Yahoo - Havi Hoffman and Randy Farmer (Randy, sorry I forgot we met at the Social Software Symposium. I have a wretched name/face memory. Ask my children!). Havi came up to me early in the day and that was my first clue. Then, I was really surprised that they both said had me in their blog feeds. Large faceless corporations rarely read wacko bloggers like me, right?
You see, past experience has made me believe Yahoo was not a community sort of place; not the kind of place that would smell of community spirit. Afterall, this was the beheometh that ate my precious egroups, and from whence one could never get an answer about a problem on Yahoogroups. (I've had a group on Yahoogroups since August 1999)
But things have been a-changing. People I know and respect in the community world started going to work there. Yahoo 360 emerged and was more nimble and community-like than it might have been. Flickr was aquired and has not been (please, keep it that way) ravaged by an unthinking machine. (I just put my flickr stream into my 360 page. Now this is starting to COOK!) Good signs. All of a sudden, Yahoo is beginning to be a positive word in my vocabularly.
I asked Randy about this when we got some face to face time. In a politically incorrect manner, I asked him if was real. Straight on he told me yes. From the top. In the form of actually staffing the community group (up from something like 3 people in the dark days to 150.) Hiring smart people like danah boyd and Elizabeth Osder (via Staci Kramer on PaidContnet). Stacie wrote that Osder will be responsible for what Yahoo Media VP Scott Moore tells me is one of his top three initiatives. (The other two are broadband and the user experience.) Moore said Osder's hiring is 'a clear indicator of our intention to go deep in social media and user-generated content.' Her initial task will be to set up a plan that integrates Yahoo's growing phalanx of social media tools -- Yahoo 360, Flickr, etc. -- with an emphasis on interesting user-generated content. 'Figuring out how to harness the power of that self-expression and user-generated content, not only the willingness and desire to share, is the essence of what is Elizabeth is going to do for us,' says Moore. Part of her job is to figure out what kind of resources will be needed. Adds Moore, 'This is a real initiative and a real focus for us. We'll do what it takes.'
Now I work mostly in the NGO/NPO (non governmental orgs, non profit orgs) world where free tools are lifeblood. I believe there are more non profits using Yahoogroups than any other tool after email. We love and hate it. It has been emulated by a consortium of NGOs.
What if we imagined a partnership between Yahoo and a consortium of NGOs? What if we identified 2-3 key things international development and community networks needed to make Yahoo really work for them? It would benefit the groups. And I believe it would benefit Yahoo's product development. Now this might seem counter intuitive because designing for international networks means, at this time, desinging for often less than stellar access. Dialup. Rotten telephone infrastructure. Why would that be good for Yahoo's wealthier broadband customers?
Because it would do two things. It would be the acid test for a simple interface for second wave adopters and it would open the longer term world markets. Growth will not be in the US. It will be in a multilingual world that looks for things that are often different than a north American product.
Why is this important? Two reasons in my view. One is that we need to support productive connection with each other across boundaries and to offer that connection not just to the priveledged north. Productive connection may be one of our only hopes to keep from destroying each other. If we know each other, it may be harder to blow each other up. If we learn with each other, we will preserve resources often wasted in NGO competition, or worse, knowledge lost.
So can a Yahoogroup save the world? Naw. But it might be a step in the right direction. And that step will be firmer if it is easy to use, bandwidth and cross culturally friendly.
That said, I'm happy to be feel the community vibes emanating out of Yahoo. Can you say YAHOOOO!!
community, yahoo, community_indicators
posted by Nancy White at 6:59 AM
15 Comments:
Yahoo thinking about the non-broadband people? I think you are fantasizing. I'd love it if this fantasy of yours became a reality but I'm not overly hopeful.
Too many folks in charge are saying broadband is here and let's program to it because that's where the money is. :-(
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Hey, Denise, I have been told before that I live in lala land.
But I do think there is a biz case to accomodate non broadband now, with the theory (not sure if it is sound either) that broadband will get there. I know, the political implications with national owned phone companies alone are huge, but what is the use of waking up in the morning if we can't dream, eh? :-)
No use at all and that's why I just keep asking for tools and options that reach a wide range of people and not just the mainstream or the folks with the wallets.
I am obviously having a bad day and wallowing in negativity - or was, now I'm over it and back on track. Probably because it is the weekend, a working weekend but still a weekend. ;-)
Hey Nancy,
Finally glad to have met you at BlogHer. I also checked out what Yahoo! is doing with 360 and it looks intriguing.
But, for NGO soources, you may want to check what Gatheroo is doing -- a mix of Yahoo Groups and Meetup using CivicSpace which is open-source and offering the service for free (thanks to some grants they've raised) :
http://www.gatheroo.com/
Check it out.
Some internationals actually have faster connections than the US. Yahoo! is lagging behind in these places because local competitors never had to think about slow access in the first place.
Liza, thanks for the link. I'm off to check it out. Blues, yeah, true, some do. Some don't -- the worse situations I've encountered have been in Africa, mostly due to tenuous telephone systems where connections get dropped so often, it is hard to load a page.
The other issue is cost. Some folks pay by the minute, while I wallow here in unlimited use of my DSL line.
In some international forums where I participate and work, this is a highly political issue. Complicated, interesting and usually far more than I "get" at first. Only wading in does it start to manifest in all its complexity.
I'm blathering. Should not comment after Sat night dinner with wine!!
"What if we imagined a partnership between Yahoo and a consortium of NGOs?"
Legal structure for this could be a sort of openpatents or Creative Commons type thing for the technical work and specifications. Go debate at wiki.creativecommons.org
"What if we identified 2-3 key things international development and community networks needed to make Yahoo really work for them?"
That's easy:
1. Easy import/export of open content in all languages in mediawiki format, as getwiki has.
2. No-page-refresh user interfaces that work well over slow dialup and cell/mobile phone lines. This may require use of some proprietary languages for now, but, over time, something like Python could be supported uniformly.
3. Easy integration of yahoogroups to wikis, so that yahoogroup posts had stable standard wiki URIs and could be reference with stable standard links like "en: yahoogroup: openpolitics: 34" (for message 34) and "en: yahwiki: openpolitics: trolls" (for the wiki'd article on trolls in that namespace associated with the group).
"It would benefit the groups. And I believe it would benefit Yahoo's product development." Yup, clearly.
"Now this might seem counter intuitive because designing for international networks means, at this time, designing for often less than stellar access. Dialup. Rotten telephone infrastructure."
That's 90% of the customers in the world. And of course everyone who is using any mobile interface ever.
"Why would that be good for Yahoo's wealthier broadband customers?" Because those people are basically watching television, not doing real work in the real world as the mobile users or the low bandwidth rural users are. No one cares what people who spend too much time sitting on their butt in front of a screen thinks, the influence of those people is decreasing. Those who say "broadband is here and let's program to it" are simply competing with television or with desktop or P2P type applications.
"Because it would do two things. It would be the acid test for a simple interface for second wave adopters and it would open the longer term world markets. Growth will not be in the US. It will be in a multilingual world that looks for things that are often different than a north American product. "
Both correct. The simple interface for the less technical or younger or less anglified user, will also have a simpler vocabulary and be tested to much tougher standards.
Yowsa, Craig, thanks for all those ideas. I'm going to point a few people to your suggestions and am now putting off doing the dishes to go check your website, http://hubley.org/
By the way, and I think this needs to be a new blog post/conversation, but I sense you spend some time in wikis. Have you noticed any different patterns in adoption and use in different cultures? (using the word broadly)
OK Craig's post was great! And he keeps using the magic word, "wiki". I like him!
Nancy,
I've also been struck by the way that "community" seems to be in the DNA of Yahoo!'s offerings -- not just in terms of their recent acquistions but also in the developer community, API documentation and extensive use of RSS.
And I like the idea of making clear how nonprofits can use these tools and baking some of those uses into the tools themselves.
A couple of quick points:
1) is it better to think of mobile access instead of dialup? Don't know but I wonder if the adoption of mobile devices (notably cell phones) will change the equation there. Particularly internationaly. And it seems like the biz case you make would be even stronger.
2) how can users of Yahoo!'s tools connect to causes -- can there be widgets that show users action alerts on certain issues of interest? How about an "issues" box in the Yahoo! 360 profile? How about philanthropy as a part of the corp profile in Yahoo! finance?
Mobile? Hmmm, you're still talking about the wealthier folks and not those who deal with dial up and horrid connections because that's all they can afford.
I need to spend more time thinking about the "mo" aspect of community. I hate my cell phone and I need to get over that.
We have to get Mobile Jones involved in this conversation.
Mobiles are pervasive in many places where even dial up is not happening. They are often far cheaper than land lines in other parts of the world (It's only here in the US, I believe, that they are more expensive!) People outside the US use far more mobile phone processes and features than we US (older?) folks do!
MoJo, where are ya?
Nancy is so right. For example, this article in the BBC about 97% of the population in Tanzania having access to a mobile phone. In addition, how cell and wireless data gets to locations that as Nancy points out have zero landline access.
Note in Tanzania there is no intention to deploy wired networks. With short supply resources, if you can only deploy one network it should be wireless.
For developing countries in particular, they are joining the internet at a time when skipping past wired networks makes sense, and requires that those wanting to reach them must think past our personal realities. Mobiles are the great liberating social communication tool, and this fundamental human activity so far exceeds the need to compute.
Btw, even in the US you can sign up for unlimited messaging and browsing for between $15 to $25 per month. Compare that with cable service internet service, and even these prices will continue to fall over time.
Craig, the entry level mobile phones that are common in the developing world need a combination WAP + SMS application to do the kinds of things that a wiki does on the web.
These do exist, btw. The other thing to remember when bring mobiles into a web world is that mobile users measure interaction in minutes, whereas PC user measure interaction in hours. Not unlike TeeVee as you mentioned.
Other tools that are important for information exchange for mobile users is email (still a very social and powerful information tool), syndication. The current syndication tools are designed for web consumption in that they don't have a stop and resume functioning for the intermitten nature of mobile networks. Many email providers build their instant delivery on SyncML, because it was designed for mobile use and networks.
Consider Atom which is an all too common syndication tool for Typepad and other publishing tools. Atom doesn't allow delivery of binary data, and it's another all or nothing delivery mechanism. Atom does no error correction, so if your signal drops you must start the whole feed download over, again. This leads to a more expensive service, potentially, a time suck and a lousy user experience.
There are some realities about the mobile environment that web based service providers don't have in their DNA. This must change for everyone's sake.
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