Those comments where made about the last product I worked on at Yahoo: Yahoo! Live. I think it’s an addictive product and from what I hear users think so too – it could turn out to be the most successful Advanced Products team product.

What’s interesting is where those comments came from. Dan W pointed out this great post: Yahoo’s LIVE Deaf Chat Room! about how a group of deaf users were delighted by their experience on Y! Live. Those comments above were from this post and the commenters.

This wasn’t an accident. Eric Fixler on my team (and our intern Vibha Bamba) took the extra effort to research users with different kinds of abilities and what they would need in a product like Live. They brought blind, deaf, and physically challenged users into Yahoo and let them play with Y! Live. They listened to feedback, they researched how to make flash screen-reader ready. But most important: they just took the time to think it through: what would it be like for a deaf user to use Y! Live. Turns out that was a good move. I have a friend who is a sign language interpreter and he tells me that webcams are revolutionizing the way deaf people communicate. TTD is still around, but now people will just say get on skype to video conference. Much easier and faster.

I’m proud of the work that the team did (especially Eric and Vibha) and I’m so happy to see these kinds of posts.

So have you thought about how your product will work with all kinds of users?

UPDATE: I just noticed that Mike Quoc (the PM on Live) has a blog now. He linked to another similarly great post.

Yahoo! Live allows anyone to stream their own live channel. If YouTube is what happened (past tense), Live is what’s happening right now. Each channel comes with its own chat room and a “co-viewing” area where you can see the other people who are watching.

It’s a pretty amazing product (even in this early “experimental release” phase) and one of those products that the more that you play with it, the more you want to. They’ve also launched with ability to embed into your own site and a nice API.

I’m proud that I was a part of it and I’m incredibly proud of the team. From what I read, they are chasing after some bugs and the initial reaction was more than they thought (pretty amazing to max out your beta servers with zero official press mentions), but I’m confident they’ll work through all that. It’s a truly amazing team.

Read more Mike Quoc’s post at Yahoo! Next for the details.

And P.S. while the press is loving to Sh*t on Yahoo! these days, this team shows they can still launch an interesting, innovative product. And if rumors are to be believed, Microsoft is trying to buy Ustream for $50mm. I suggest they save the money – if the MSFT/YHOO thing goes through, you’ve got a great team raring to go!

After almost 10 years leading product teams at Yahoo, I’m moving on. I’ve been thinking for a while that I wanted to take some time off and press the “reset button” on my brain, but it has been a grueling coming to a final decision. And its complicated by the fact that I really love my job and the people I work with.

Looking back over the last 10 years, I am proud of the measurable impact I’ve made on Yahoo! I’m proud of the many years I was known as the My Yahoo! guy, bringing you the features you love and growing Yahoo’s audience significantly. I’m proud of my work with RSS at Yahoo, bringing openness to My Yahoo and many other products–including an RSS ad product. I’m proud of my time as GM of Yahoo! Search when I pitched the idea and launched sponsored search and helped move Yahoo from directory search to web search model. And I helped make a few acquisitions along the way). And I’m proud of leading an innovation incubator (Advanced Products @ Yahoo!) and launching a number of interesting projects. But most of all, I’m proud of the teams I’ve built and the people I’ve hired – to this day it is Yahoo’s people that make this place great.

If you’ll bear with with me in the coming days, I’ll post some of my favorite stories of those years and give you a little inside view of my proudest moments at Yahoo and the biggest mistakes I made along the way. And in general, I hope to blog a lot more, covering product management, the industry and people management. If you aren’t already a subscriber to this blog, grab the feed.

My next step is to take some time off to catch my breath and travel a bit. Then, I’ll be off on my next adventure.

It is always tough to leave a job when you are having so much fun and working with great people. Then again, that’s probably the best time to leave. I know that I’m leaving behind a strong, talented team. My team’s major projects are going well and two will launch early in 2008. And two people whom I admire and enjoy working with are keeping the torch burning. Chad Dickerson will be leading Advanced Products and Salim Ismail (my partner in crime over last few months) will continue to lead the Brickhouse program.

All of which made it possible for me to leave with ease, and I’m thankful for that. I’m not going too far, I’m still a fan of Yahoo. I’ll help in any way I can with my teammates’ upcoming launches, I can’t wait to tell people about them.

So thank you to all the people that I’ve gotten to meet and to work alongside, you made my decade. Wish me luck as I start the next one…

Now there’s a way to add those things to your blog. The new Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin for wordpress helps you insert those things. I’m not sure how often I’ll use them, but I installed the plugin to see.

Off the bat, I’m not in love with the Yahoo! Search ones (don’t seem to add much value – a link to search?) and I’m not sure why I’d link to Yahoo Shopping when there’s no revshare program in place. I like the flickr integration, you can very easily add pictures. It’s slick.

On the negative side, it’s a beta, and buggy – I can’t remove ones from this post that I don’t like without editing the HTML – I’ll report that to the team. Also, I’d love a way to say “I never want Search Links”. Looking to the future, I’d love it if this opened up, so amazon could write a plugin to replace Y! Shopping.

If you use Wordpress, check it out.

UPDATE: I neglected to say that I think this is all pretty cool and nice for a first cut. I’m excited about where this can go. And BTW, I saw a demo yesterday of something in a similar vein and I can only hope Yahoo keeps building these add-ons that make our blogging life easier.

And now here is a list of things hoping to trigger the shortcuts:

• Yahoo! Inc – YHOO
• 500 3rd St., San Francisco, CA
• Nikon D-80
• Please buy this for me: 2008 Mercedes-Benz SL-Class SL55 AMG Roadster
• Barack Obama

Reading it for the last few weeks shows that they are still trying to find that voice, but I know they aren’t looking to build a corporate mouthpiece. The first sign of that attitude was the pre-launch splash screen, which made no sense, but made me laugh:

I’m psyched to see my team posting on Next*, today is a post from Ayman about Zync, give it a read.

Props to Havi, JR, Ernie, and from my team: Keith and Matt (for the design). They were even nice enough to stoke my ego by mentioning my name in the footer.

Subscribe to Next* – Feed – +Add to My Yahoo!

Y! Kickstart is a professional network with a specific purpose: to connect college students, recent grads, alums and professionals to find jobs, internships and career advice.

We started with a simple focus: college students are about to go through a major life transition, finding their first job & career. For them, submitting resumes to job sites or companies seems like a black hole. College students are amazingly well networked on Facebook, but that network is about connecting with friends and is more appropriate for fun – in fact many students we talked to expressed frustration that “old folks” were coming onto facebook and forcing them to lock down their profiles or worse yet – clean up their act. Lastly, unlike someone like me who already has an established social network, these folks are just beginning to build their network.

So, enter Kickstart. It’s based on the premise that everyone does have a network: the school you went to, the frat/sorority you were in, the professional/interest group you are in, the companies you interned or worked at. Kickstart makes it easy to create and browse that kind of network. While we started with a focus on college students, I’ve already found it a useful networking tool for me to catch up with old coworkers and fellow alums.

Anyway, I could type for hours. The best thing for you to do is signup and give it a whirl. And when you do, search for me and add me as a connection.

Right now we’re in our “preview” release and we’re mostly focused on getting alumni and professionals to join. And, to give you more incentive: the US college with the most alumni signed up on Kickstart will get a $25,000 donation to their alumni program. So take a moment and reach out to all your fellow alums, you’ll be helping us out, I think you’ll find it a fun way to connect with former coworkers and alums, and heck you might even win the $25k for your school.

UPDATE 1: I neglected to mention, that like most all things from my group, this is a very early stage product. We know that it’s missing a lot, and that’s ok. I’d rather get feedback and suggestions and improve it on the fly than wait for months and months to launch – what fun is that?

If you don’t know about ZoneTag, you should. On its surface, it is a great mobile photo uploader for flickr. You set it up, and everytime you take a photo, it asks you, then uploads it to flickr. It’s a great way to get those photos off of your phone – and it does it in realtime. But it doesn’t stop there. It automatically geo-tags your photos based on the cell phone tower you are connected to AND it suggests tags for your photo based on what other people in that location have tagged their photos. So take a picture at the Sears Tower in Chicago, it’ll suggest all sorts of skyscraper tags. Take one here at our office, it’ll suggest Yahoo! It really uses the power of people to help make your photos more relevant on flickr.

• Zonetag Home Page
• Shane’s blog post about it

My favorite (and most eye-opening) part of the night happened very early on. A fellow Yahoo and I were chatting with Noah Kagan and my colleague said something to the affect of “you know Yahoo is a big company, so…” and talked about how you have to navigate the org to get things done. My colleague was right, it’s an art working the company to get things moving the right way.

But, ever the astute one, Noah asked “Why do you people always say that? You never hear people at Google say how big Google has gotten–even though it has–but people from Yahoo always say that.” His point: if you keep saying you are a big company, then you will be one. He’s right and he’s right to have called us out on that. I say it often too, and I’m particularly good at navigating the company, but still I shouldn’t have to and I shouldn’t just let it be. And, when I think of it, there are lots of positive things to focus on about Yahoo, why don’t I say those first: “you know Yahoo has a great platform so its easy to scale” or “we’ve got tons of traffic, we just need to decide where to send them”, etc.

I’ve never been a huge fan of the “postive mental attitude” cult or those “The Secret” guys, but in this case, Noah’s right. So starting today, I’m gonna stop saying “You know Yahoo is a big company”. If you hear me say those words, please call me on it. You know from my other posts that I’m committed to positive change, now I just have to speak like it.

I’ve known about this for months and I’m excited that it is finally done and announced. Bradley has a great post about it as did many, many people.

As a blogger, I love this concept. It’s a great way to see who’s come by and is a great conversation starter. (for example, I saw that Scott Rafer, CEO of MyBlogLog came by to visit my site – I know him and I was able to drop a note and say hi).

There was an internal hack at one hack day here at Yahoo that played with the same idea. I was able to see who came by to look at our internal Wiki pages. It was a great way to find people who were interested in my projects (and talk to them about it).

As much as we say that blogs are “social media”, they aren’t really “live” unless people comment. MyBlogLog solves that. Obviously, we have a lot to do to hook this into the greater Yahoo community, but I’m optimistic about this. Over the last year, Yahoo has launched many little widgets for people’s blogs, I’d hope we figure out how to combine MyBlogLog with all of those as an option (kinda like how feedburner combined FeedFlare into their blog stats package).

Anyway, I added MyBlogLog over there to the right, so be sure to join my community and let me see that you came by.

So hack day is on and I definately felt that spirit in the air. After a day of amazing sessions about our APIs and UI framework, everyone gathered in URLs (our cafe) to have pizza, meet each other and start hacking. I met lots of interesting people and the place was swarming with press and media (I didn’t expect that much press). Then the “surprise” entertainment was on. Beck performed an amazing one hour set on Yahoo’s lawn. He was backed by his full band and marionette versions of each band member. It was an awesome show – beyond just a simple concert. To cap it off, Beck’s puppets made a little video on our campus to celebrate hack day – very funny.

This afternoon we’ll have the hack presentations, and I don’t think anyone knows what we’ll get, but I hope that spirit continues.

P.S. I took tons of pictures, but there were so many people with much better pictures, I picked this one as one of my favorites.

The first I ever heard about a hack day was from Ken and the Jotspot guys. They had a hack day to have some fun and work on something that wasn’t on their normal “to-do list”. It was a great idea to innovate and give the team a breather from the day-to-day. As most people know by now, Yahoo took up the idea and now we’re sharing it with the world.

I sat in the audience for this last internal hack day. Of course I was impressed with all the amazing ideas and hacks I saw. Of course I saw tons of hacks that I thought could be integrated into real products. Of course some of these ideas showed real promise and could translate into real business value. But, I was much more amazed at the feeling in the air.

One of the best things that Chad, Caterina and Leonard have created is a feeling that everyone’s ideas have a place and everyone’s work deserves to be shared. Hack Day is a forum to share your ideas with a large audience and in front of Yahoo execs (this hack day was judged by Jerry Yang, a few SVPs, Sue Decker our CFO and a few other rockstar Yahoos). You could tell that all the people in the room were stoked to be sharing their ideas. But people in the room were also stoked to be seeing other Yahoos work. Everyone was supportive of their peers and I think everyone went back to their day jobs better off for it. The HAck Day team is making every Yahoo more innovative.

Now, in just a few hours, we’re starting Open Hack Day. Hundreds of developers from all over are coming to camp out on Yahoo’s campus and to hack using Yahoo APIs from YDN. Just like our internal hack days, I expect to see lots of great hacks. But I’m most excited to see that feeling in the air. The day starts with sessions about how to use our APIs, then people get settled in, then awesome entertainment and the hacking begins. The presentations take place on Saturday afternoon and I look forward to seeing people from different companies (sometimes competitors of each other) creating that supportive space – that feeling in the air.

If you’ll be here, please come up to me and say hi, and happy hacking. Let’s make it a place where everyone gets to shine.

One of the perks of my new job is working with an amazing team of developers that live and work in Bangalore, India.

So, for the first time ever, I’ve traveled to Asia, I stopped in Singapore and I’m now in Bangalore.

Yahoo has a few offices in BLR (the one pictured is on MG Road) and there are lots and lots of people that work here. In fact, there are more Yahoos in Bangalore now than there were worldwide when I started with the company.

I’m learning a lot on this trip, building some great relationships and I’ve been inspired by the spirit of the folks here. Everyone here is excited, passionate and wanting to figure out how to get the best stuff done quickly. (especially the APG team here). And seeing different cultures firsthand is so much better than reading or being told about them.

I’ll post a little later about some of my key learnings about South East Asian markets…

But personalization isn’t all that I’ve worked on at Yahoo. Many people still call me the “My Guy” since I’ve worked on My Yahoo! on and off over the years, and once in a while you’ll find someone who still refers to me as the “Yahoo Search guy” referring to the years that I ran our search business. Yahoo has allowed me to try different jobs over the years, keeping my experience here fresh, and honestly, that’s a big part of why I’m still here.

And, well, it’s time for a change again. I’ve just started a new job: leading Yahoo’s Advanced Products Group. In the new job, I’ll become part of Bradley Horowitz’s Product Strategy Group and sit along side people like Caterina Fake, Chad Dickerson at YDN, Ellen Salisbury at Y! Berkeley Research Labs and lots of other great people. And, I’m lucky to be joining a team of amazing people. APG is the group that launched Yahoo! Podcasts and that is working on some really, really cool stuff (that I can’t tell you about).

I’m really excited about the new job and I can’t wait to tell you about all the great work that this team is doing. And, I’m sure it’ll take a while before people stop calling me the “My Guy” or the “RSS guy”, and I’m ok with that. I’m really proud of the work I did on My Yahoo, Personalization and RSS, now its time to be proud of a whole new set of stuff.

There are a ton of features that this page adds, they intended to build the page around the user, around their daily routine, and make it a place to see what’s going on out there.

It’s easy to miss some of the more subtle things, so I thought I’d point out some of my favorite changes:

• Personalized Links – on the left side of the page you’ll find links to the most popular Y! properties. Two key personalization features that the team is playing with: 1) the properties you visit the most are big and bold so you can find them easily (I’d love it if they just put them at the top) and 2) you’ll be able to customize which properties appear there. don’t like Yahoo ____, then remove it and replace it with another yahoo link
• Get updates at a glance – Over on the right is something we call the “personal assistant”. Here you’ll see the number of new messages you have, the number of friends online, the current weather and a local traffic map. The nice thing is that its pretty compact, but if you mouseover, you can see detail (like the subjects of all your new emails)
• Your local stuff – in that personal assistant module, you’ll see that its customized to your own location. We’ll use location information that you’ve told us before (maybe on Y! Local) to automatically personalize this for you. (and you will be able to easily change it too)
• Customized Page – click the Page Options link to change page colors or to change between the new 100% width version and the old narrower design. So, if you really liked it that way, you can have it that way.
• Y! Pulse – this is a fun area. Look all the way at the bottom right of the page and you’ll see a cool new module that surfaces the voice of the yahoo community. As I’m writing this, I see it has a feature on the “top spas” across the country as voted by Y! local users, it has a travel reviews module for popular vacation destinations and even “interesting flickr photos”. Cool stuff, and you can easily imagine an “add to my yahoo” button on these modules so you could take your favorites to your own page.

The page is just an early beta, and I know they are still refining a lot of ideas, but I’m really excited that we’re integrating community/social media and personalization into the core of the page. We’ve been seeing this all cross into the mainstream and I see this as yet another step along the way.

If you are there tonight, please come up and say hi.

Two friends at Yahoo! are both hitting their 10 year anniversary working here. It’s hard to believe that someone could be working at an internet company that long. But then I instantly think about myself. I’m close to my 7 1/2 years mark here at Yahoo! I did the math the other day and realized that only 150 people are left that have been here longer than me – out of a company of almost 11,000 people. wow!

When I bumped into one of those friends last week, we chatted a lot about how you successfully can manage an organization of this size. How do you set up a structure that supports doing all the things we want to do in a high quality way. How do you make sure that folks are all marching the same direction and that there aren’t 3 teams working on the same thing (My Web, Delicious and Y! Bookmarks for example). How do you make sure that we’re using our resources efficiently and focusing on the things that really matter. But how do you organize in a way that doesn’t get in the way of progress?

One of the things that I like most about Yahoo is that we are always asking ourselves this question. At every stage you have growing pains. When Y! added employee #101 it was asked. When they added employee #1001 it was asked, and now we’ve seen employee #10001 and we’re asking.

Trivia Note: Martin Fisher was employee #100 – I don’t know who was employee #101 or #1001 or #10001. If that’s you, let me know.

I say it alot to people who know me, but since I’ve been working here at Yahoo, I feel like I’ve worked for many different companies. The challenges have changed, but more interestingly, the culture, the size, and the way to succeed has changed immensely. Reminds me of that old saying “what got you here [to this level of success] isn’t necessarily what’ll get you to the next level”.

I’m not sure if Yahoo will ever see employee #100,001, but I’m looking forward to seeing how we grow, what new areas that get tackled, where we stumble, where we fail, where we win, where we really kick ass. And more importantly, I keep learning something new every day…

What this means is that if you sign up for Yahoo! Web Hosting, you can now get WordPress in a one-click signup. No need to download a zip file and FTPing it or anything. Also, Yahoo! will make sure you are running the latest WordPress and will automatically upgrade you to the latest rev (you can turn this off if you don’t like the idea). So now you can concentrate on blogging instead of loading software.

I was amongst the first alpha testers and this blog is powered by WordPress on Y! Hosting. This whole blog wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the integration announced today. It really was easy and its nice being able to focus on the things I care about: the content and the design, not where files should live and do I have the latest version.

The Hosting team also did a similar deal with Moveable Type last week, so if you prefer that, its just as easy. (although I personally prefer the simplicity and extensibility of WordPress).

Great job Matt (WP), Guy (Y!) and both teams!

I walked through the work my team has been doing around RSS, gave a demo of the new Yahoo! Mail beta, and talked a little bit about where this might all be going in the future.

In my blog comments, Rafael Sidi asked me to post my slides online and I thought that those of you who couldn’t attend would like to check them out.

A few things to note:

• Slide #2 – “That’s who I am who are you?” – was a note to myself to ask the audience if they were publishers, marketers, tech industry folks or bloggers. The room was, surpisingly, pretty equally split amongst those types with the largest group being people who didn’t want to raise their hands.
• 2005 Moving RSS beyond the start page – Even I was wowed when I put all of our RSS related launches onto one slide. So many launches! More than one RSS launch each month of 2005.
• Overall, I filled in a lot of points with talking, so it’ll be hard to completely tell what I was saying, I don’t know if someone recorded it, but if you know tell me and I’ll post it here.
• Important URLs mentioned: http://whatsnew.mail.yahoo.com/ , http://alerts.yahoo.com/ , http://podcasts.yahoo.com/, http://publisher.yahoo.com/ , http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide

Download it here:

Fast forward to today, there are millions of people using RSS, companies are joining the RSS fray everyday and these conferences are usually packed with people.   Its gratifying to see this kind of growth and consumers are clearly benefiting from all the innovation that’s happening.

I’ll be giving a keynote on Wednesday.  As with any conference like this, I want to make sure I’m addressing the audience – be it publishers or industry types – so I’ll be paying close attention to the people in attendance tomorrow and the questions they raise.   Currently, I’m planning to walk through how we’ve gotten from those early days to where we are today, some successful examples of using RSS and where I think this might all be heading.

If you are attending, please be sure to drop by and say hello. 

If you have never used Yahoo! Alerts, its a service that allow you to get real-time updates sent to your mobile phone, email or Yahoo! Messenger with triggers you specify like: Stock prices go above/below a limit, your favorite sports team wins/loses a game, the snow at your favorite Ski resort is perfect, etc…

So it made a lot of sense to want this feature: “send me an alert whenever this RSS feed updates”.    And that’s what we launched yesterday.   It works with ANY RSS/Atom/RDF feed so that means you can get notified of pretty much whatever you want.

So there are lot of cool ways to use Feed Alerts, but I’ll share with you how I’ve been using the service (I’ve been testing it for about a month now):

• Blogs that update infrequently – I don’t like to clutter up My Yahoo! with feeds that don’t update too often, so I subscribe to an email alert for those feeds.   If that feed only updates once every few weeks, I’ll get it by email when it does.  
• Stuff I need to know right away – like a Craigslist search for something I’ve been hunting around for a while or today’s sale on Woot!.
• My own blog’s comment feed – ok so maybe I’m a little too new at this, but I love to know when I have comments, send it right to my phone please!

How will you use it?  Let me know in the comments. 

Also, since it was popular on the mail post, here are some screen shots, be sure to go check it out at http://alerts.yahoo.com/ …

Yahoo! Alerts Home Page
(see the Feed/Blog BETA option)

 The Signup Screen
(you can enter the feed URL, or pick from your MyY! choices, also note you can pick the delivery options like “as it happens” and email, messenger, mobile)

Yahoo! Messenger Alert

(for a Yahoo! News RSS feed)

Alert via Email
(this one is a daily digest of all updates from RotoWire’s RSS feed

So anyway, take a look. After a few days using it, I think you’ll find yourself moving some feeds out of your aggregator and into alerts.

Also, stay tuned, we’re working on an integration of the Add to My Yahoo button and alerts, so you can get your users to signup for alerts right from your site.