In Defense of My Yahoo

Brad Feld talks today about what he believes is the coming irrelevance of My Yahoo, and presumably other portals. We talked about this the other day when I provided my initial defense of portals.

Like me, Brad has used his customized My Yahoo page for many years, primarily to track stock prices and news for the public companies he follows. He has decided that his My Yahoo page has become less useful because he no longer checks stock prices several times a day and because he feels like he’s missing newsworthy stories by relying on My Yahoo’s relatively static content.

As I said the other day, I still find My Yahoo very useful.

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I don’t check my stock prices daily either, but I really like having my entire portfolio listed on the left side of My Yahoo page- right below the overall market charts and summaries. I use the headlines, business, sports and tech stories in the middle of the page as a newspaper substitute. And I like the weather and sports scores on the right side. I think you can get more information faster from My Yahoo than you can sifting through a bunch of RSS feeds (having a separate RSS feed for every stock I follow seems highly cumbersome to me). Plus, as Fred Wilson points out, you can easily add and intermix any crucial RSS feeds with the other news feeds on your My Yahoo page.

One thing I very much agree with Brad about is the overwhelming effect of trying to list the news stories for all of your stocks on your main My Yahoo page. It is absolutely overwhelming. I tried it briefly and then decided to move all of my stock news to a separate My Yahoo page- you can have several and navigation back and forth is easy via the drop down menu at the top right of the page. So now I have a second page called “Investing” where I display the stock news stories. That page is still a little overwhelming, so candidly I don’t use it that much. But the information is there when I want it and it keeps my main My Yahoo page uncluttered and more newspaper-like.

As an aside, I use Morningstar for my stock news tracking purposes. You can customize your email alert preferences to get one email per day with links to all news stories about the stocks in your portfolio. I find this to be the perfect solution.

So while I am a big user of RSS feeds, I don’t think they serve the same purpose as My Yahoo or any similar portal. RSS feeds aren’t a good substitute for the morning paper, whereas My Yahoo is. That’s why I’m still a big fan of My Yahoo.

Only Their Hairdressers Know for Sure

First Yahoo was going to buy Digg. Now it’s not. Yahoo gave up on search. Wait, no they didn’t.

I feel like I’m at the playground with my kids and all of their friends when someone runs up to me every three minutes and shares a breaking story about who used potty talk and who isn’t sharing his or her toys.

When I speak of bloggers talking at and not to each other, this is what I’m talking about. Someone throws a topic out there and like a nineties dot.com stock everybody buys it immediately. Few people stop to wonder if it’s a good buy or not. Most just start reporting the news and/or telling us what they think about it.

And while I’m on the topic of nineties dot.com stocks, if Yahoo does pay $30M for Digg, I am going to sell all of my tech stocks because another dot.com bust is headed our way.

Cool is good. Digg is cool. Traffic is good. Digg has a lot of traffic. To warrant a $30M price tag, however, lots and lots of revenue needs to be in the pipeline, not on the drawing board. Digg has revenue, but I’d be very surprised if anything close to a $30M price tag isn’t some combination of betting on the come (which lost us all a ton of money back in the nineties) and the greater fool theory (which is the basis of far too much of our markets at this point).

When I see these sites, even great ones like Digg, get mentioned in the same breath as $30M, I wonder what, if anything, we learned from the last dot.com boom and the portfolio killing bust that naturally followed.

In Other News, the Sky is Still Blue

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Yep, it’s still blue

Everyone is all a tither about this statement from Susan Decker, Yahoo’s CFO:

We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google. It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.

Steve Rubel says:

I have no interest in using a product that the company doesn’t aspire to make best of breed. If search is no longer hip to Yahoo, then Yahoo Search is no longer hip with me.

Steve, guys, what do you expect? Is is better for us and for Yahoo’s shareholders if Yahoo continues to tilt at the cyber-windmill by making the impossible a major part of its corporate plan?

Face it, no one is going to surpass Google as the internet search leader. I know, I know, I know- Google passed Yahoo and Alta Vista and HotBot (which was Google before Google) and all those other search engines not all that long ago, but the race is over. Betamax and LPs used to have the largest market share too. Should Sony/BMG make it a corporate goal to make LPs the new media of choice?

Of course not. The people who have to actually make the money have to be realistic. I think Ms. Decker’s statement is not only true, it shows that Yahoo is dealing with the what is, not the what was.

Rather than try to do the impossible, Yahoo should (a) buy Technorati right now, and then (b) follow Thomas Hawk’s Yahoo savings plan. Well, except for the TIVO part. I love me some TIVO too, but it’s dying on the vine thanks to abandonment by DirecTV and its deal-a-day approach to securing a lifeline.

Again, somebody tell me why Yahoo’s admission of the obvious is either surprising or disturbing?

iPod Killer on the Loose?

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Tom Foremski over at ZDNet asks if Yahoo Music could become the iPod killer. He digs the way Yahoo Music lets you access a ton of music from all of your computers.

Like Tom, I grew weary of administering my CD collection years ago. I ripped all of my CDs to my music server back in the late nineties. Actually I did it twice. First just the “good songs” when hard drive space actually cost something and later all of the songs once it didn’t. And while my music server works great when I’m at home, it’s certainly true that I can’t (easily) access my music from the road (I can get song files using FolderShare if I really need to, but getting a file or two is not the same thing as having access to my entire library).

Tom likes the way Yahoo Music lets you explore for new music via its recommendation engine. Yeah, that’s pretty cool and all, but here’s a suggestion for Tom: go try Pandora. Fill in just one band you really like and you’ll discover more good new music than you thought existed. I have over 25,000 songs (all paid for; none stolen) on my music server and within 3 minutes of firing up Pandora I was hearing great music from artists I’d never heard of.

Tom also likes Yahoo Music because it’s not the dying on the vine, ad-infested over the air radio. I certainly agree with that. Between Pandora, MusicMatch (my service of choice, which is owned by Yahoo) and XM, I haven’t listened to a second of over the air radio in years.

I’ve never owned an iPod and I’ve never used iTunes. Both seem too proprietary for my open source tastes.

I guess my thing is that you have to do both. If you have an older and/or extensive music collection, the services are simply not going to have all of your music in their online libraries. Plus, I like to load my legally acquired, DRM-free MP3s onto CD-Rs or DVD-Rs to take on the road, and I’m just not willing to capitulate to the DRM extortions of the record label cartel. But I do like to listen to ad free radio and to access at least some music I enjoy on the road. So I have a networked music server at home and a MusicMatch subscription for the road.

That’s my recipe for musical happiness.

Yahoo Buys del.icio.us

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As the blogosphere and related community sites continue to consolidate under the large and wealthy banners of the Yahoos, Googles and Microsofts comes news that Yahoo has acquired social bookmarking service del.icio.us.

I use del.icio.us for a couple of things. I use it to bookmark pages I want to go back and read later, and I use it to list and summarize the feed for my (now discontinued) Comments on Other Blogs page. While the site has been somewhat of a work in progress, it has become a useful and integral part of my web experience.

I suspect that the acquisition by Yahoo will be a positive thing- as long as Yahoo allows the service to remain mostly separate- like Flickr, and does not try to tie del.icio.us to Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 service. Flickr has only gotten better since Yahoo bought it and I see no reason the same can’t happen here.

A good day for Yahoo. And probably a good day for Technorati too, as Google’s price for Technorati probably just went up. My advice to Google- buy and buy now because if Yahoo gets in front of you again, Yahoo plus Flickr plus del.icio.us plus Technorati will be a huge lead in this race for web dominance. Technorati is definitely the jewel left on the board.

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del.icio.us, yahoo, technorati

Yahoo Does VOIP, But Will I?

Om Malik reports that Yahoo is about to launch a big VOIP initiative. eBay buys Skype, everyone’s favorite VOIP service and now everybody has to get in the game. Here’s my experience with VOIP and a list of what I would have to have to make the switch.

I used VOIP in my office for about a year. My setup was via a Cisco phone and a service out of Dallas that was hoping I’d love it so much I’d talk my firm into switching to VOIP. I didn’t take up the banner and no one at my firm gives a hoot what I think anyway, but I did note some benfits and some drawbacks to VOIP.

The Good: the sound quality was excellent; it was cheap (it was free to me, but the regular rates were cheap; I could take the phone home, plug it into my network and use it just like I could at the office; and the phone had a lot of neat (but complex) features I never got around to learning.

The Bad: I had to use a new phone number, while everyone in the world still used my regular office number; even with VOIP there was very little computer/phone interactivity (I’ve longed for years to be able to dial from Outlook by clicking on a number); the phone was a corded phone and I hated being tethered to a phone (I use a wireless headset with my other phone); and it was too big to lug around with me (making me think Skype or some computer based service might be a better fit for me).

I like the idea of computer/phone convergence, so what would it take to get me to switch? I would have to be certain of these things:

1) That I can port my existing number there and if I later want to I can switch it back, easily and quickly.

2) That the 911 thing has been completely and permanently addressed- I need to be completely convinced that if I call 911 I will always get someone who knows where I am.

3) That the loss of service when the power goes off is not as big of a problem as I think it is. My power goes off several times a year. My phone service has never been off.

4) That the computer and the phone are effectively converged without me having to install a bunch of extra software on my computer. The Skype (or competition) program is fine- but I don’t want to have to rely on add-ins to dial from Outlook, etc.

5) That I could find a bluetooth headset/headphones that work and are durable and reliable. Make them double as headphones for listening to music, and make them work with my cell phone too- all without a dangle. My laptop and my cell phone are bluetooth-ready- just connect to them the way the Motorola earpiece connects to my cell phone.

6) That email, voicemail, text messaging, IM and file sending would be seamlessly incorporated into the program.

7) That the service would be cheaper and stay cheaper than regular phone service.

Give me this and I’ll give VOIP a whirl. Otherwise, the potential gain is not worth the hassle. At least not yet.

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voip, skype