De.licio.us Bookmarked for Closing

It appears as if one of the most popular social bookmarking sites (and pretty strong brand name amongst certain circles) has been marked for what Yahoo calls being ‘sunset’. In other words, it will be riding off into the sunset and sent to the glue factory. Never heard that one? OK, I’ll say it in simpler terms. It’s being shut down.

The slide below was displayed over at TechCrunch and shows other Yahoo properties targeted for sunset-land including Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, AltaVista, MyBlogLog and a few more..

An update to the TC post pretty much put the final nail in the rumor and turned it into ‘fact’.

AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes is reporting that the products will be in fact shut down and that the slide does in fact originate from an all hands meeting at Yahoo, following yesterday’s layoffs. As if we needed more proof, Yahoo Product Manager Blake Irving has threatened to fire whomever leaked the slide.

The official response from Yahoo:

“Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond.

We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.”

For the few of you unaware this is PR speak for, “We confirm.”

What I find most fascinating about this entire thing has little to do with what is or is not being closed down. Rather it’s this Wikileaks like culture that exists in the Internet / tech industry. Things that are obviously intended for internal use to convey information to people who are on a ‘need to know’ basis are just as likely to end up on TechCrunch as they are in a VP’s office at the company.

Yahoo is a publically traded company that has investors who could lose a lot of money if any of these leaks lead to further activity that negatively impacts the shareholder value. There are any number of consequences that could result from this kind of internal planning being made public but people don’t seem to care.

I have read others who have broached this subject and they talk about honor, class and integrity. It appears as if these qualities are in shorter supply than ever at companies these days. We are not talking about government secrets that get everyone in a tizzy about what was or wasn’t shared, what should or shouldn’t be shared and if there are lives in the balance. On some level, those actions can be justified to some degree (Note: I am not the least bit interested in debating the whole Wikileaks thing. It’s not anything that needs to be done in this forum. I’m just citing the example.)

As for employees (who are paid by a company for their services, which are to help the company grow regardless of whether it can really be done or not), letting these sensitive ‘documents’ out into the wild? I think it shows an extremely low level of class and a complete lack of integrity.

I mean honestly, other than to hurt the company and endear yourself to the tech media, what is the purpose of giving this information to outsiders? It’s all for personal gain and it does nothing but create the potential for greater harm to those who are actually trying to work to help the company succeed (even if those efforts appear to be very misguided). I think it’s pretty pathetic.

Look, I am not perfect. When I worked at bigger companies I could be found engaging in water cooler talk that was questioning or wondering what in the world was going on. I am not claiming piety here. But one thing I would have never considered was giving company data to outsiders. That’s just short-sighted, ignorant and mean-spirited, in my opinion.

But anyway, for today I am part of the machine that uses the information that has been passed along. Maybe I am just as guilty as the next guy on this one by sharing it further. That’s one I’ll have to work on myself now, isn’t it?

What If the Customer’s Wrong?

I went to sign in to my personal e-mail this morning and what did I find but a lovely tattooed lady, the portrait of independence and personal style. In this vivid imagery, Yahoo! is telling me they’re where it’s at for a customized experience of the Web in all its social, informational and visually engaging glory.

Because isn’t that what users want? A platform that fits the way they use the Web? It’s the goal of a business to fill a consumer’s need, and it’s the marketer’s job to define that need and explain why said business is the right solution.

Technology companies have been leading the pack, even getting the credit for lifting the country’s struggling stock market, because they offer new, cutting-edge solutions, often times to needs consumers never even had before the Information Age changed the game forever.

But I can’t help but wonder. Have businesses shifted their service strategies too far into the realm of pandering to be truly productive. After all, what if the customer is wrong?

Admission: It’s a bit of a stretch to go from Yahoo!’s perfectly reasonable offering of a personalized home page to a larger criticism of companies that let their customers call the shots. But you follow me, right?

Okay, fair enough. Here’s a better example. Would you ever let your life be dictated by the Twitter mob? One guy’s doing it as an experiment dreamed up by his advertising firm. On Monday, David Perez will be at Twitter’s disposal for a week-long exercise in black-belt-degree submission. Just send a Twitter message to @davidondemand and he’ll do what you tell him to (within the law, of course). Supposedly, this isn’t just another scheme to get attention. Rather, it’s meant to demonstrate how advertising is becoming more personal thanks to technology.

So I’m supposed to view @davidondemand as some kind of progressive art installation? What exactly are we supposed to understand from this marketing mess? That the ad agency responsible will bend over backwards based on a customer’s whims? It may seem like the customer wins in that situation, but if suddenly that same theory became a trendy new school of parenting, there’d by thousands of angry, spoiled, fat toddlers running around demanding you hand over another puppy-cupcake duo.

Turns out, people are pretty awful at predicting what makes them happy. Furthermore, the more options you offer to meet any individual consumer’s desires, the unhappier that individual becomes. And of course, by letting the consumer dictate the offering, a business has no room for innovation. A business shouldn’t spend all day chasing the whims of customers who aren’t the experts in your field, who can’t visualize the full trajectory of the industry and who would be doing what you do if they did know it all.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s certainly a place for identifying business opportunities as they pop up. And this strategy can result in wins all around. The Hide Google Options plugin we developed recently was a fast response to a brand new problem and it quickly became one of the most popular ways to turn off Google’s three-column user interface and a link magnet that got us visibility and pats on the back from a relevant audience.

On the other hand, look at Google’s response to the user interface backlash. They’re not budging. They expect that users will adjust and are sticking to their guns. If I were a betting woman, I’d take one look at Google’s track record of success and side with them on this one. Sorry, Susan. [I freely admit that I just don't like change. —Susan]

For the final word, I’ll turn to another formidable force in the tech world: Apple. It’s fairly well known that Steve Jobs doesn’t do market research. And yet his company continues to set the bar for whoda-thunk tech devices that quickly become any American’s fifth limb. Rather than asking people what they want, they ask themselves what a great product would be and then strike out toward that goal.

Have you ever had an experience where trying to make a customer happy ended up backfiring? Have you ever found success by ignoring what a customer requested? Or do you think I’ve gone off the deep end completely? Share your thoughts in the comments. I promise to listen — even if we don’t agree.

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Yahoo Looks to “Create Central Hub for People’s Online Lives”

The headline comes directly from Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog. Sounds ambitious and it is. The cornerstone of this effort is the full integration of Facebook into Yahoo’s social “system”. The announcement of this update is the biggest change to come from Yahoo after making an agreement with Facebook back in December of 2009. Here is a look at what you can expect when you turn on this feature in Yahoo.

Yahoo says

Social networks have seen explosive growth in recent years. As the place that 600 million people visit every month, Yahoo! is in a unique position to bring together different social experiences from across the Web to a single place. This vision has been our guiding principle since we kicked off our Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) initiative in 2008 and started to rewire Yahoo! to be more open and social.

Today this vision is really coming to life in the Yahoo! products you use every day. We are starting to integrate Facebook in a big way, a result of the agreement we first signed with Facebook last December. People who use Yahoo! and Facebook can now link their accounts to view and share updates with friends across both networks. This means you can see your Facebook News Feed from your Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Mail, and other favorite Yahoo! sites and services. When you create and share content on our properties – including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Answers, and many of our entertainment sites, such as omg!, Yahoo! TV, and Yahoo! Music – you can share that content on Facebook.

If logged into your Facebook account and using the Facebook link on the Yahoo homepage you are taken to your Facebook page. You can “turn on” the feature to update your Yahoo account when clicking on the Quick View option. It was easy enough to connect and then disconnect if desired under the Settings tab. In other words, no convoluted directions and super secret passwords needed. Since Facebook is involved in this one it’s a relief to see that Yahoo hasn’t made it difficult to play or not play.

In fact, in the post Yahoo goes out of its way to address privacy and ease of use.

Our vision is to provide a central hub for people’s online lives, and we understand that requires a Web you can trust. That’s why today Yahoo! is making privacy settings even easier to use with a central dashboard. Called Yahoo! Pulse, this dashboard makes it simple to set and manage your activities and privacy on Yahoo!. See the updated experience at http://pulse.yahoo.com.

Now for a bit of irony or whatever you want to call it. When I clicked on the link provided for the Yahoo! Pulse dashboard I got this result:

I just have to chuckle when this stuff happens. Anyway, here’s to boatloads of social interaction on Yahoo!

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Yahoo Helps Users Track Updates More Easily

Well, I have to say that coming off a long weekend and having nothing to yell at Facebook for (at least to his point in the day) there is precious little else going on in the Internet marketing space. Believe me, I am not complaining because it can be nice when the industry takes a break to grab a little cheese with their whine. In other words, when no one is griping about something then there is not as much news. Just that statement on its own tells you something doesn’t it?

Back to reality though. Apparently Yahoo is working to make its mail service more social by allowing users to track other users more easily. Of course, considering how great these services worked out for Google and Facebook, Yahoo is being pretty cautious. They haven’t provided much in terms of innovation as of late so they last thing they need are changes that would produce a negative backlash.

TechCrunch reports

Here’s the product expansion in a nutshell – currently to see status updates for others in Yahoo Mail, you have to have a mutual follow, meaning both people have agreed to be “friends.” You can then see that user’s Yahoo status updates as well as updates on third party services that they have added to their Yahoo profile as well. In the new version there will no longer be a requirement for a mutual follow. So, like on Twitter, users can follow whomever they choose.

Ok, harmless enough. My question is though, who is using Yahoo to track their social media interactions? I have been a Yahoo mail user for a long time and I just never consider Yahoo for being the one-stop shop for my social media interactions.

Whether or not this is a viable option for you, Yahoo is at least trying to make sure that privacy concerns are not raised.

Yahoo Chief Privacy Officer Anne Toth, who has been with Yahoo since 1998, says that there will be no privacy surprises for users, who can choose to turn sharing on, turn it off, or make more granular settings. One thing users will have to get comfortable with is the fact that most of this data is by definition public anyway. The privacy settings simply allow those users to decide whether others can follow you, and get notifications on new content you’ve created.

So it looks like if anything has come out of the Facebook privacy debacle it’s that at least others have heard the cry of the masses (or just the social media insiders which is what I contend is more like the truth) and privacy is once again sacred……for the moment.

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