Randy Weber

The Kelsey Group Blogs discusses a Citysearch Mashup that combines Citysearch data with Google Maps. It looks nice, but there’s no content. Try a search for pizza in north Dallas. There’s nothing there. Google Maps, Yahoo, and the IYP sites have more/better content. But the UI is nice.

My friend Ian runs Urban Mapping. It’s a great little company that provides neighborhood and public transit data to be overlaid on top of maps and to better refine local search queries. We used his data while I was at SuperPages.com. Ian just completed a deal to provide Yahoo with neighborhood data. I think that’s great. It will definitely improve the results you get back on local searches in urban areas.

The deal was announced on Search Engine Watch.

Yes, Yahoo lost out on search and PPC advertising to Google, but they’re beating everyone else. I’ve always been told that there’s room in the market for 2 dominant players. Yahoo is number 2.

But more to the point, there’s more going on at Yahoo than just search and PPC advertising. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has written a great piece on where Yahoo stands as a whole.

Kick-Ass Properties: Yahoo has fantastic properties. Time magazine this week awarded Yahoo two of the 10 picks for its “10 Essential Sites” special feature. Yahoo Finance and Flickr both got nods. No other company got recognized more than once (for the record, the others were Wikipedia, Craigslist, ESPN, Yelp, Facebook, Digg, Google, and TMZ. And yeah, I know, some of those hardly seem essential. And hey Time, next time give me one frakking page listing everyone. Geez!).

Let me add to Time’s picks a few more properties that do well for Yahoo. Delicious. Yahoo Answers. Yahoo Mail. Yahoo News. Oh, Yahoo Search. All of these are either the leaders or strong players in their categories.

There’s more, so click over to the article to see what else Yahoo has going for it.

Techcrunch digs into a new feature launched by Yahoo Personals. The feature allows users to customize the way search queries are returned to them. It’s about time. I love this feature. I wish more players would do this. While it could go much further, it’s a step in the right direction. It will make my time on YP much more efficient.

Another point made in the article involves physical attraction and is a dig on eHarmony. For the record - looks matter and eHarmony sucks.

Certainly this stuff helps some people find a match. But basic human nature seems to be more visual when it comes to attraction. People don’t necessarily want to fill out an excrutiatingly long personality profile to help them sort through potential matches, then to find out there’s no physical attraction.

Kudos to Yahoo. If we get those users off of eHarmony and onto Yahoo and Match, the matchmaking world will be a much better place.

PVR Wire wrote an interesting post on Who will buy TiVo? Google, Yahoo or Microsoft?

Let me start this with the fact that I LOVE TiVo. However, the lack of a viable HD product has led me to use the PVR in the set-top box from Time Warner. I hate it, but I have no choice. None-the-less, I still have my TiVo which I use as a music server to get my tunes from my PC to my entertainment system. It’s slicker than anything else out there, trust me, I’ve tried them.

Now, on with my point. I want TiVo to survive. I think it has major opportunities that it has not been able to capitalize on:

1. The set-top box that integrates audio, video, PCs, and the Internet in the living room.
2. It could change the way that audio and video is monetized by content owners and distributors.
3. It could change they way that audio and video is distributed by content owners - pay-per-view, video on demand, stored content that can be moved to various devices, etc.

I want this device BAD. PVR Wire has their arguments on who is most likely to buy TiVo - they believe it will be Yahoo or Google. I want it to be Yahoo or Apple. Yahoo seems to be able to integrate a variety of Internet content and could really use TiVo rather than screwing around with their own vaporware product. Apple would be great because they’d be able to avoid screwing up TiVo’s incredible UI (they might even be able to improve it) and they have done very well with integrating various types of content on various devices.

Whether it’s Yahoo or Apple, please let it happen.

Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures wrote a piece about Business Development 2.0 which he pretty much defines as biz dev via APIs. It sounds good, but isn’t a viable long-term solution.

Using the strategy put forth by the author, a start-up would be building a business around content and traffic from third parties and monetizing everything via Google AdWords or some other advertising network. Examples cited by the author include:

* YouTube makes it flash video player available via embed code on MySpace and their traffic takes off.
* TripAdvisor search engine optimizes its service and becomes one of the most popular travel services.
* Technorati hits delicious’ api for its tags and builds the web’s most succesful tag search service.
* Indeed crawls the Internet for jobs and builds a popular job service overnight.
* Kayak crawls the Internet for flights, hotes, and cars, and builds a popular travel service overnight.
* Qoop takes Flickr’s API and builds a Flickr printing service without ever engaging with Flickr’s team.
* Netvibes takes a few RSS feeds and builds a start page that looks as complete as MyYahoo overnight.

Nice for a business that has a handful of employees and no expenses, but it isn’t sustainable. Here’s the problem:

1.     No barriers to entry. Anyone can copy your business. Think about the example of the start page. Netvibes is competing with every major portal, as well as start-ups like Pageflakes, webwag, and protopage, with more popping up every day.
2.     No barriers to exit. Users can easily leave your business for the next big thing. Remember Friendster?
3.     Nothing of value is owned. You don’t own the content, nor do you own the advertisers. The eyeballs are yours, but without the content the eyeballs will go away. Without the advertisers, the money will go away.
4.     No control over your own destiny. Being completely dependent on “partners” (I use this term loosely) that have no contractual obligations to each other is dangerous. Content, traffic, or advertising “partners” could cut you off at anytime for any reason, like being acquired by a competitor, entering into an exclusive partnership with a competitor, suddenly viewing you as a competitor, or simply getting mad about something you’re doing with their content. Recent examples include YouTube entering into competition with Facebook, MySpace threatening YouTube, and Craigslist getting pissed at Oodle. If you’ve ever read Google or Yahoo’s terms of service for their advertising distribution programs, you know that they can pretty much change how their program works or cut you off at any time.

Biz Dev Classic may be slower, but it affords much more protection and stability for your business.

Disclaimer - I work for Verizon SuperPages.com, so I compete with Yahoo! Local. These notes are my comments and not that of my employer. 

Small Business Commando put together a teleconference today with Paul Levine of Yahoo! Local and Matt Booth of The Kelsey Group. The tagline for the conference was “Insider Secrets to Blow the Doors Off Your Competition using Local Online Marketing.” While the conference didn’t live up to the tagline, it was none-the-less very informative.

Matt started off saying that print yellow pages isn’t likely to go away anytime soon and that many of the major players are active in the local space online, in particular Verizon. He said that local search is growing at a faster rate than traditional IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) searches.

Paul says that they found most local searches to be commercial in nature. Yahoo’s local strategy follows along these lines:

1. User Participation (as evidenced by their use of user reviews and the connection with Yahoo! 360)
2. Integration with Mapping (believe that mapping can be an interface to local search)
3. Encouraging Merchants to Participate (as evidenced by ability for merchants to add/update online listings for free)

Of special interest, though it’s already pretty obvious, is Paul’s statement that Yahoo plans to include social networking and user participation across all Yahoo products.

Mobile is a big part of the future of local, though the technology is not there yet. In particular, Paul said that mobile devices need more bandwidth, more memory, and carriers to provide more information about users’ locations. In the next few months Yahoo will allow merchants to participate in the mobile environment.

Paul went into detail on Yahoo’s local products - local listings (free), enhanced listings, and featured listings. The upcoming sponsored search platform will include the ability to geotarget.

Yahoo works with Dex, YellowPages.com, Leads.com, and Lawyers.com to take their local products to market in addition to direct sales from Yahoo’s web site.

Interesting stuff.

Here’s a summary from The Kelsey Group.

Susan Mernit (Yahoo! Personals) responded to an overview of new online dating sites by Mike Arrington. She is asserting that personals sites will operate side-by-side with social networking sites. I’m a big believer in online personals, but I don’t agree with her. Heavy social networking users are not the same folks that are heavy personals users. Social networkers, who tend to be younger, are getting by without personals. As these folks age into what Susan refers to as a “lifestage event,” it remains to be seen whether or not these users will find the need to use personals sites. This is complicated even further by the likelihood that social networking sites will improve their dating functionality over time. The personals sites need to find a way to work with the social networking sites to get to these younger users. It will likely mean new revenue models and having to share a bigger piece of the pie.