Looks like Yahoo! is moving pretty quickly now integrating Flickr with their other services. I’ve never used this site, but today upcoming.org (another Yahoo! company) announced integration with Flickr. This time, it’s not quite as deep as the geotagging update – searching Flickr for photos with special tags is no more than any third party could do using the Flickr API… But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.
Also, I searched the internet a little while ago and found that Flickr photos have started to appear in Yahoo! search results as of last Thursday. Read the Yahoo! Search blog entry about it, or check out a search for funny photos.
Overall, I think Yahoo! is moving in a really promising direction. For a while, it seemed like they were the has-beens of search and while they always had a lot of traffic, their actual sites didn’t feel very innovative or cutting edge. Now, however, Yahoo! has made a number of strong aquisitions and is moving towards a very personalized version of the internet. In my opinion, personalization, integration, and leveraging customer behavior will be the lasting impact of Web 2.0. AJAX is just an implementation technology that is popular right now, but the three aspects I mentioned earlier are philosophies that span implementation.
Yahoo! has a huge focus on leveraging customer behavior right now; they own del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming.org, etc.. Just try searching for good pictures on Flickr vs. Google Image search right now. Flickr will almost certainly return more interesting pictures for two reasons:
1) Flickr appeals to good photographers, who upload quality content
2) Flickr uses client behavior as feedback for the interestingness ranking
Flickr doesn’t need to solve any machine vision problems or determine what aspects of a photo make it interesting, they use the aggregate behavior of all their viewers to come up with a “good-enough” approximation. This is a very powerful technique that can be applied to many other domains. Most importantly, perhaps, this thought process could lead to better search results by adding the click-through rate of links to the rank of the target site, not just the fact that the link exists. Right now, it might be impossible to collect this information because no one company owns all the webservers in the world, but it’s something to think about.
On the other hand, Google has a head start on integration. While Yahoo!’s disparate aquisitions maintain their unique brands and have for the most part not shared services, Google emphasizes sharing user information across applications (Calendar, Gmail, Google Talk, etc.). This is Google’s powerhouse, and the way that they will convince users to continue to try new services and to use the Google version of an application even if Google comes to market late. As this week has shown, however, Yahoo! is certainly not standing still in this area. In fact, at this point, I think Yahoo! may have more APIs available for third party developer use than Google.
It will be interesting to see how much more useful the web becomes when companies begin to really incorporate all three of the lessons from Web 2.0. I, for one, am excited to be a part of it.
