Social profiling
| Thursday, October 16th, 2008 | --Sean |
One of the key components of our overall social strategy has rolled out today: the new Yahoo! Profiles. Feel free to roll on over and set yours up, kick the tires, see how things work. There really isn't much to do yet aside from profile yourself and reconnect with some of your friends, but this is the grand opening of a central location for your Updates stream and those Contacts will certainly come in handy later when they're filtering your mail or popping up on your new Yahoo! homepage. But just baby steps for now.
Oh, though there is a pretty sweet inline photo cropper when you upload a new image. That's pretty neat.
October 22nd, 2008 at 11:08 pm
“There really isn’t much to do yet aside from profile yourself and reconnect with some of your friends, but this is the grand opening of a central location for your Updates stream and those Contacts will certainly come in handy later when they’re filtering your mail or popping up on your new Yahoo! homepage. But just baby steps for now.” So much wrong with this, where to start…
“There really isn’t much to do yet” Less than before really. Aliases are gone, torpedoing privacy for who knows how many. Our old data held in thrall by Yahoo, WAITING for us to read the right post somewhere in the comments and find out we have to do the legwork and fight Yahoo’s feeble customer care service to retrieve hours of composition. Good job elminating functionality, honking off users across 4 product lines, and generally spreading peanut butter everywhere. Removing function, replacing with baby steps…users sufferingin the meantime? What were you thinking?
“reconnect with contacts” because you fragged that up too, and now no one is connected, especially if it was to an alias. Win. NOT.
“Filtering my e-mail” (Oh great. you do such a great job suggesting questions for groups on Yahoo Groups’ Yahoo Answers module–NOT. The people it recommended I add to my connections? Never heard of them before!), Streaming updates? Stalkeriffic! Who asked for this? Not us…I don’t want a yahoo homepage with a hundred gajillion updates all over the place. I’m not here for that. I suppose it looks like market shares going by you, but we don’t need another ad infested jumbled up interface.
Onboarding is a key term you may want to study, because this, as evidenced by the over 1000+ negative comments about it, was a first impression you didn’t need for a cornerstone product.
Lordy. Who’s in charge over there?
October 23rd, 2008 at 12:13 am
You bring up a ton of good points, Floyd, and I certainly suggest that you make your displeasure known over at the Yahoo! Profiles blog or through the Profiles “Contact Us” forms Though I’m sure the team has already gotten an earful. :)
I absolutely agree with you about aliases, in the sense that, as long as we offer aliases, then they really should behave like separate Yahoo! IDs (and subsequently have their own profiles available). While I have absolutely no insight into the thought processes that went into redesigning Profiles, I think that the general idea that we want to head towards a world where a Profile represents a REAL identity, namely yours. In that respect, having a single profile per Yahoo! ID makes sense, but I would tend to think that online identities have value as well and you ought to respect a user who wants to have their Fantasy Sports buddies see one view of them while their family sees another. So I’m with you in that I hope our perspective on that evolves. See http://www.yprofileblog.com/blog/2008/10/17/managing-your-alias-and-profile/ for the current response.
And, also agreed, I can’t at all imagine why we didn’t migrate content directly from the old profiles to the new. Product launches are hard to manage and this was a rather ambitious one to begin with, but losing track of still-relevant user data is still a huge oversight. I’m sure that the Profiles team is sorry. EDIT: Actually, in doing a bit more reading, the reason that there’s no automatic import of data is due to the alias issue. So, if they go back to allowing separate profiles per alias, then they could possibly automatically import at that point. But, yeah, it hinges on the alias issue.
As a non-heavy user of Profiles, I wasn’t aware that we had explicit contacts within Profiles before the redesign, and I don’t believe that we severed connections across any existing properties. So I may not be understanding your complaint there — if you don’t want to add new connections, you don’t need to. They’ll simply become useful if you so desire to help keep track of people and help highlight which content is theoretically most important to you (if it comes from your contacts). That’s a big direction that we’re trying to go in, but if it’s not your cup of tea, you don’t need to use that part of the Profiles.
So, anyway, I’ll agree that the Profiles guys should sort out what to do about aliases and also make sure that the Profiles, from a data presentation perspective, can support and will import all of the information you guys had entered into the old Profiles. But I’m still strongly behind the concept of adding Contacts and Updates across the Profiles and across the Yahoo! network, as it adds a lot of value if you’re interested in the social web, and I’m not sure how their addition negatively affects you (assuming we fix those first two issues) if you choose not to participate in them.