Silicon Valley Musings

A friend that works at Yahoo mentioned that the SBC Yahoo web pages don’t evolve as quickly as the rest of the Yahoo sites. Most notably My Yahoo and SBC My Yahoo are quite different.

The recent upgrade to Yahoo News prompted me to reactivate my original Yahoo ID. I also ponied up the $19.95 annual fee for mail and moved all my Yahoo Group enlistments. I even created a new Yahoo 360 identity, but I haven’t re-invited everyone yet.

I am having my email forwarded to both GMail and Yahoo Mail. I am not quite ready to switch full time to Yahoo Mail. I have been using GMail for almost a year, so I am used to it. I have over 200 MB of archived email, so there is a migration issue.

But I also think the GMail UI experience is still more fluid (for the lack of a better word) than Yahoo Mail. I think the use of client-side Java scripts and grouping email by conversations contributes the differences in the experience.

I like the new Yahoo News. Now I want the My Yahoo and Yahoo News features to converge. I understand this is easier said than done in a large organization.

I really like the multiple tabs for each source that Yahoo News has added. It would great to have a Subject pane, where the tabs were user-supplied subjects (i.e. search terms) and have the search results interlaced by source.

Currently, the closest thing to this is doing a news search. For example, if you search on “filibuster”, you get all the articles with the word filibuster in the title or body of the article sorted by relevance or by date.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to try to match articles across key news sources discussing the same aspect of the filibuster debate? This type of feature would probably have to leverage the concept discovery work being done in the Yahoo Research lab.