In the earlier times of Yahoo’s growth, they and most other websites worshiped stickiness as a virtue. Keeping people within the periphery of the top-level domain mattered the most.

But time flies and people’s habits change. A Reuters report cited Yang, commenting at a Yahoo-sponsored advertising conference, saying Yahoo would try to return to making its big properties “starting points” for web surfers.

“Openness is upon us,” said Yang. “There is an opportunity for Yahoo as a huge publisher to play the open game and do that as a strategy.”

Yahoo has made strides in opening technology, like with Pipes, and support for several languages to connect with Yahoo’s Web Services.

On the social networking side, Yahoo has made several acquisitions in the space, such as Delicious and Upcoming. They lack a single strategy of melding the best of the technologies they own into something Facebook-like, that would be greater than the sum of its parts.

It’s easy enough to identify what Yahoo, and Yang, needs to do. They have a lot of pieces that need to be connected together, in a way that people can use them effectively from one interface.

There’s just one problem: Yang. He told Business Week he doesn’t want Yahoo to be Facebook, nor does he want to replicate other sites.

That’s a noble position, but it may not be the one the big institutional investors, those who have gravitational pull when it comes to money matters, want to hear. Yahoo has the assets in place, as Yang said, but if he doesn’t let the engineers play with those toys to help the company roll with the times, what good did all of the non-advertising purchases do for the company?

Yahoo Moving On Up The Stock Charts

Can't see nothin' in front of me
Can't see nothin' coming up behind
I make my way through this darkness
I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me
-- The Boss doing, what else, The Rising

It may be too soon to call it a return to Internet glory, but Yahoo’s recent rise in its fortunes has been glorious. Yesterday’s close of $26.51 represented a 12.38 percent gain over the past month.

That period included a low of $22.52, Yahoo’s price on August 28. After drifting up and down through early September, Yahoo has been gaining nicely through the rest of the month to date.

Forbes cited several reasons contributing to the rise (The rise! Think of it!) of Yahoo:

Yahoo! has benefited from a confluence of events: new partnership deals, value investors looking for bargain-priced stocks and persistent rumors that the company is a takeover candidate.

Investors with an eye on the distant horizon were pleased to see Yahoo! announce a string of advertising-related deals: It bought ad networks Blue Lithium and Right Media, and it struck a new advertising arrangement with social networking company Bebo.

Forbes also cited a slowing tide of executives exiting from Yahoo as a sign of stability. But Yahoo did see a very recent executive departure in early September.

Other important folks below the corporate level have been departing. Valleywag noted the departure of two co-founders of Yahoo Pipes. One of them opted to join Google, and that can’t be a great sign for Yahoo’s idea incubator, Brickhouse.

Maybe it is just the return of takeover chatter, but it would be good for the Internet at large if Yahoo’s fortunes continue to rise. Competition between the major Internet players makes for much better products and services from those companies for their users.

Try it out – search on a term like "esri" then scroll through the results on this map interface. The app grabs news from google news (yes indeed, GISuser.com news gets crawled by this news crawler – a great benefit of getting your news listed here) and displays on the map where you can then scroll through the results, view a synopsis and click-through for a full read if the caption looks interesting. To top it off you can get the results as JSON or KML… sweet! See the News Map Pipe HERE

The results of this search for "esri" news using the pipe shows a hit that has been pulled from GISuser.com news headlines. Source of inspiration was a post on Mapperz via BlinkGeo!

Comments

I’ve become a bit of a feed freak and need to go on an RSS diet. RSS should fuel posts and speed up my ability to stay current on the topics of my choice. But as my feeds are currently organized, RSS is slowing me down. With more than 5,800 posts marked “Keep New,” do you think I’ll ever be able to reference them all? Really Simple Syndication my arse.

As an experiment, I left my Bloglines account untouched for 24 hours to see how many new posts would accumulate. I’m following 159 feeds, which includes blogs, news sources and a couple of aggregated feeds. Todd And’s Power 150 for example. That feed doubles the number I’m tracking.

There’s enough duplication across the aggregated and individual feeds that I’m going to jump into Yahoo! Pipes, strip out any duplicate subscriptions and create several custom feeds organized by topic.

How do you handle RSS overload?

RSS is delicious uploaded by nickgerakines

Comments

Tag:

How about you? Have you tried any of the new RSS Mashup Editors? What do you think of them?

On Thursday I was talking with Mark Lucovsky at Google and he was explaining why Google’s Mashup Editor doesn’t yet have the flashy UI that PopFly has. He reminded me of my experience with FrontPage and how that frustrated me everytime I hit a limitation of its editor. I’d drop into HTML, try to change things, and then the code would change or I’d be frustrated because it wouldn’t let me do what I wanted. Lucovsky says that’s why the Google Mashup Editor team hasn’t done a flashy UI yet. It’s the philosophy of the Google teams: to make sure you’ll always be able to do what you want to do and then put the purty UI onto it later to make it easier to use.

Sounds interesting, but wonder what the real devs who are playing with these tools are thinking? Of course I can already hear what Lucovsky is thinking: what are the new devs who are 14 to 20 thinking?

Comments

(i.e. use http://www.mapelli.info/tags/feed/feed-week/ don’t use /feed/feed-week).

This is a simple and effective tip valid both for your posts and your feed optimization that can help you in many ways:

1. Involving Subscribers

• If you have a link to one older post in your recent posts, you help your reader to explore some older article he may have missed.

• If one of your subscribers is reading your post with a feed reader, a click on the link will take him on your old post page, this means an additional pageview, and can turn into a comment or some additional in-site navigation.

2. Getting new visitors

• If your post is published in an aggregate feed, because of a partnership, Yahoo pipes or social news sites, a link to your site may bring you new visitors that can turn into subscribers. I found this really effective, because some of my posts like my article on Digg’s new auto-bury feature have been published by webpronews and I received a few visits from the links I put in the posts.

3. Fighting Splogs

• If your post is “stolen” by splogs, you can find them thanks to pingbacks and referral analysis, and report them to google or their hosting service.
• Each time splogs republish your content, you win a backlink (ok, it’s not that much but it helps your technorati rating )

4. Giving some more work to thieves

• If someone wants to copy and paste your post on his blog pretending it’s his work, he will have to cut all the links to your old articles, and replace then with something that fits. If your links are deeply integrated into the post content it may require some work.

5. Optimizing Pagerank

• If you link to an older post, your current post will raise your old post pagerank, helping it appearing on higher SERP positions (for an introduction to pagerank see Pagerank Explained, if you don’t know what a SERP is you may read this introductional post)

Do you think there are other good (or bad!) reasons for deep linking? What have I missed in my analysis? Do you find it difficult to inter-link your posts?

Comments

G’s massive investment in infrastructure in the US is no doubt partly going to address this. It’ll be fascinating to see how it unfolds. Net neutrality is at least a debate in the U.S. today. In some nations and economic zones, there are very different terms for the debate.

Meanwhile, Yahoo has released a mashup service extraordinaire, called Pipes. It’s going to be worth a lot more study, but basically it provides an easy way for the layperson to pull disparate data sources into a web page — like a smarter more agile feed reader? Kinda makes my head hurt: does it compete with Google Reader or supersede it? Some commenters are saying it’s really nothing too new, and other products like RSS Bus would be better for those who are technically inclined. Stay tuned. (If you really know what you’re doing: Jeremy Zawodny points to something called GData.)

And meanwhile meanwhile, over at Techcrunch, Arrington does something we apparently no longer make time to do: reviews and compares new Hotmail, new Yahoo Mail, and Gmail. All of these web 2.0 apps get the thumbs-up, but Google comes in at #1. That’s about what I’d say. I actually use both old Yahoo Mail and Gmail, and don’t particularly enjoy new Yahoo Mail. I’ll likely consolidate everything in GMail, a decision I think you eventually have to make (one way or another, with Y or G) so you’re using the same calendar and IM app and not confusing the hell out of yourself.

Mail, at least, we already use. Both Google’s Co-Op and Yahoo’s Pipes probably deserve weeks of our time, and here we are blogging about engagement rings and Ted Stevens. Time to tackle the to-do list. Also, posting will be light for the next week due to SES London.

Other random thoughts to wind up the week:

And Technorati’s edgecraft: is it just me, or is calling a "buzz description" a "WTF" (as in "write a WTF for this query") pretty edgy? Edgy, I think. As I’ve told a few of you, my office building is owned by a commercial real estate company called WTF Group. Seeing that logo on the wall has gotten me through many a day.

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

We’re waiting to hear back from Yahoo about the Pipes service vanishing from the Internet.

(UPDATE!: 5:40 pm ET – We just heard back from Yahoo, and this is their statement on the state of Yahoo Pipes:

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-pipes-vanishes-2007-02/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-pipes-the-internet-to-you-2007-02 http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-pipes-the-internet-to-you-2007-02#comments Thu, 08 Feb 2007 11:50:38 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=35082 People using Yahoo Pipes will be able to mix and mashup data sources from all kinds of places on the Internet into combined feeds they can share with others.

Did Yahoo Join The Ted Stevens Society?

As a new effort, Yahoo Pipes will appeal to the more technologically comfortable people at first. The ability to combine information in a relatively easy fashion should quickly broaden the appeal of Pipes. Response to the recently launched Pipes from some of the most enthusiastic techie types probably was summed up best by publisher Tim O’Reilly, who lauded Pipes on the O’Reilly Radar blog:

Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.

Yahoo calls Pipes "a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment." Fans of Unix and Linux who understand just how useful the pipe function can be in those operating systems will understand why Yahoo chose the name. Even a Yahoo competitor found himself impressed by Pipes. Google’s Matt Cutts, a fan of pipes at the command line, also became a fan of Yahoo Pipes despite hitting an issue with the new service:

I took it for a test drive right after Jeremy (Zawodny) posted about it and hit an error message partway through, but I’m sure they’ll get it smoothed over pretty quickly. I was able to save a “module” (which appears to be a little chunk of pipe processing which is connected to an RSS output). Then you can click publish and you get an obfuscated url back. I tested the obfuscated url and it generates RSS just fine; the test module I made is safely tucked into Google Reader now.

Zawodny had posted about Pipes, and commented on the error Cutts found. As expected it was fixed quickly. At its core, Pipes allows for mashups of RSS feeds. Those feeds can come from blogs and websites, along with plenty of other resources that allow people to create a feed based on a query, like a search at eBay that returns a list of auctions for Chicago Bears apparel. The real utility for Pipes will come when someone creates a Pipe of such usefulness that others will pick up on it and tweak it for their use. Pipes can be cloned and shared, and we expect those features will bring in more users as really great Pipes are created. We’ll be interested in seeing how our readers in the search and e-business communities put Pipes to use.

— Tag: Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Bookmark WebProNews:

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-pipes-the-internet-to-you-2007-02/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/the-power-is-in-the-pipes-how-to-get-maximum-leverage-from-your-website-2003-06 http://www.webpronews.com/the-power-is-in-the-pipes-how-to-get-maximum-leverage-from-your-website-2003-06#comments Mon, 16 Jun 2003 15:04:03 +0000 Michael Southon http://www.webpronews.com/?p=4805 What is the most important part of your online business? Many people would say: “my website”. And that’s understandable – it’s the most visible part of an internet business.

But the real power in your online business is email. It’s the ability to reach your database of contacts at the click of a button. The efficiency of your email pipeline will determine how much money your business makes.

Your website is just a way of building your mailing list – by collecting the email addresses of your visitors.

In fact, we’re not talking about one list, but several. Here are the lists that I maintain – they’re all people who at one time or another have visited my websites:

- people who have bought my products (customer list) – people who have signed up to receive my articles (articles list) – people who have joined my affiliate program (affiliates list) – people who have signed up for my email course – people who have joined my newsletter

So why are these lists so important?

Because most of your visitors won’t buy on the first contact. Statistics show that most people will need to see your message 7 times before they make a purchase. So if you’re not collecting the email addresses of your visitors, you are losing out on a lot of sales.

But there is one list in particular that is like gold. It’s your list of previous customers. These people are predisposed to buying from you. In fact, some businesses make 80% of their sales from previous customers.

All well and good – but what do I do with these lists?

Here are some ideas:

– announce your latest product to your customer list – announce your latest product to your affiliates list – send your latest article to your articles list – announce your latest product in your newsletter – publish your latest article in your newsletter – announce ‘related’ products to your customer list (back end sales) – send your latest article to your affiliates list so they can use it to promote your products

For each list that you manage you will need (1) an autoresponder account or an autoresponder script and (2) a way of capturing your visitor’s email address.

(1) Autoresponder Accounts

An autoresponder account gives you the ability to manage a list without installing software – it’s all done on a remote website. Most autoresponder accounts will give you:

– an email address for subscribing – an HTML form for subscribing – seven or more follow-up messages – a confirmation email to you every time someone joins – the ability to broadcast messages to your list – the ability to personalize your messages – online stats – database of your prospects

Here are some sites that offer autoresponder accounts:

http://www.aweber.com/

http://www.getresponse.com/

http://www.responders.com/

http://www.proautoresponder.com

http://www.www.roibot.com/

http://www.infogeneratorpro.com/

http://www.replypro.net

http://www.auto-responder.co.uk/

Now, autoresponder accounts cost between $17 and $20 per month. And with most autoresponder services you can only manage one list per account. So if you are managing 5 lists, that quickly adds up to a hefty monthly bill.

But there are a few services that allow you to manage multiple lists with one account. Here are some of them:

http://www.rapidreply.net/

http://www.ezmailpro.com/

http://www.autorespond-it.com/

http://www.1automationwiz.com/

http://www.royal-responder.com/

(2) Capturing Email Addresses

The most popular way to get new subscribers to your list is a ‘subscribe form’ that pops up when your website loads. I get 25 to 30 new subscribers a day using this technique. The HTML code for the subscribe form usually comes with your autoresponder account.

Another way to invite visitors to join your list is an ‘alert box’. An alert box is a small gray dialogue box that pops up when someone visits your website. It usually says something like: “Please subscribe to my Newsletter. 5 Free eBooks when you join”. It’s impossible to ignore an alert box – you have to either close it or click OK to continue.

Alert boxes have two advantages over subscribe forms. Firstly, there’s no form to fill in, so it’s much easier for people to join your list. People who have switched from a subscribe form to an alert box report 3 to 5 times as many subscribers.

Secondly, alert boxes capture only “real” email addresses – the email address from the visitor’s client browser. You end up with very few Hotmail and Yahoo addresses, which means you’ll have a much more responsive list. For more information about alert boxes, visit: http://www.optinlightning.com/

So to sum up, use your website to build several optin mailing lists and you’ll have a private audience of people you can market to over and over again – it’s the key to running a successful online business.

(c) 2003 by Michael Southon

Michael Southon has been writing for the Internet for over 3 years. He has shown hundreds of webmasters how to use this simple technique to get massive free publicity and dramatically increase traffic and sales. Click here to find out more: http://www.ezine-writer.com/

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/the-power-is-in-the-pipes-how-to-get-maximum-leverage-from-your-website-2003-06/feed 0