Twitter officially launched @Anywhere at the Chirp conference.  The program is basically a contextual integration of Twitter within publisher sites.  Chloe Sladden, Dir of Media Partnerships at Twitter, described it as a way to shift a page view into a relationship.  Users can immediately follow people or learn more about the person seamlessly from a destination site (when that person is mentioned).

Dick Costolo, the COO, gave some background on why this makes sense for Twitter.

He mentioned Twitter.com has 180mm unique visitors.  Yet a lot more people say “yes I’m a Twitter user” than are registered users. So people seeing are consuming tweets and getting value from them across the web on places like HuffPo etc.  Using this syndication of Tweets to capture more registered users is the driving objective for Twitter.

For users, @Anywhere is about removing any friction in the process of consumption and following.  With a few lines of JavaScript, publishers can bring Twitter into their own experiences.  The program has few components including:

1. Sign-in and Sign-up: connecting to Twitter from the publisher site (like OAuth)

2. Hover Cards: Twitter profile for people contextually related to pages; ability to follow

3. Tweet Box: to Tweet from the destination site

Yahoo, The NYTimes and MSNBC all presented various implementations of the program. 

@Anywhere could be more useful to publishers if the Hover Cards could be customized and curated to promote the overall presence of our sites on Twitter.  For example, if an editor from Yahoo News has a hover card, that would be a good place to also list our other Twitter accounts like @YahooNews or our topical accounts like Haiti Earthquake.  It would also be great to surface a particularly useful or popular tweet of the day from one of these accounts.  There are several extensions like this which would grow engagement.  From a publisher standpoint, @Anywhere will connect channels for distribution of your content.   That’s good.

That said, there are so many entities in a typical content page (people, places, businesses and brands mentioned in articles), so a publisher will not want to overdue it.  Having too many contextual integrations within a page could be a distraction and impact engagement metrics.  Overall, this is a great step forward to bring real-time streams into core content experiences.  We’ll see a blending of the two and @Anywhere may be at the center of all of that.  Aside from being a really cool name, this initiative is one step that furthers Twitter’s chances of mainstream adoption. Read more »

• We Just Tested Twitter's @anywhere
• Twitter's @Anywhere platform is now live
• If you want to follow @Anywhere
• Twitter Makes Itself More Useful

Filed under: Events, Web Apps, Yahoo!, Twitter | 1 Comment »

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Yahoo held a subtle yet classy birthday celebration for employees this afternoon at HQ in Sunnyvale.  We got to hear Carol, Jerry and David share their thoughts in a really fun and spirited way.  Oh, and there, was plenty of cake too.

Over the years, Y has contributed a lot to the web including innovations in product, culture and the workplace.

Way back when the company started, the largest web sites and networks (AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve) had like 4mm members and that was big.  Yahoo’s audience has grown to over 500mm since then.

Just recently, a BBC survey revealed that 4 out of 5 people in across the globe consider the web to a fundamental human right.  Things have come a long way.

Here are some my favorite things that I think Y has had a big hand in making pioneering around the workplace and Internet culture:

-  A Hint of Crazy: puts our unique touch and flavor around our market-facing activities whether those be launches, PR campaigns or the look-and-feel of the products.  Web products need to bring a touch of fun to whatever they do.

-  Individualism: web companies aren’t very command and control; individuals can have a voice and it’s important to be open in the culture and sharing of ideas.

-  Energy:  walking around the campus of a web company has often been compared to the lively environment of the college campus. When things are going really well, this energy can lead to exhuberence.

It’s no secret that web companies are pretty crazy places for some of these reasons.  Many people wonder how rules and organization can be put around such fast-paced, ever-churning, murky visibility environments.  Let’s just say it’s much easier to define how conventions will be broken (i.e., innovation) and chaos will be generated for others than to put rules around how you’ll react to it.   All web companies need to ask themselves - how much chaos are we delivering (good chaos) vs. responding too (bad chaos).

Read more »

• Internet Access is a Fundamental Right

Filed under: Web Apps, Innovation, Yahoo! | 1 Comment »

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Kelsey Group puts on the Interactive Local Media conference every December.  While I’ve spoken at these events for Yahoo! in prior years, this time around I was happy to sit back and attend a few sessions.

It’s clear that local, mobile and social are coming together in very interesting ways.

Some takeaways from some of the panels and side conversations at the event:

• Facebook has over 900K fan pages for local merchants according to Backyard, a Facebook app provider that is set to launch.  While there are over 15mm local merchants domestically, many of these Fan Pages are concentrated in categories like restaurants and nightlife - so that coverage is actually pretty decent.  These pages are potentially disruptive to traditional “directory style” merchant profile pages.

• Kelsey Group estimates 9% of local businesses have a Twitter account.  It will be interesting to see what differences emerge for businesses as they build followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook.  One potential differentiation - Twitter for truly real-time updates (something happening now - like open late today, perishable inventory, big crowd watching the game here now). Meanwhile, Facebook might be more on the community building side of things - what do my friends think and recommend, who’s planning to go there when, etc.   Building a direct marketing channel to customers is different than playing in a community-based sandbox that happens to be about your business.  Facebook already allows admins for Pages to cross-post to Twitter. Read more »
  
  Related Links
  
  • Yahoo and Facebook Connect
  • ILM '09 Overview
  • SMB's Embracing Twitter

  Filed under: Events, Web Apps, Yahoo!, Local | No Comments »

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It was great to attend the Kelsey Marketplaces Conference in L.A. earlier in March, where I presented for Yahoo! on a panel about Local Verticals.  Kelsey is the definitive conference for all things Local.  It’s a tremendous place to soak in sector knowledge and get networking done.

In the words of the conference organizers:  “Much of the opportunity in local marketplaces lies with the verticals that extend and energize traditional media.”  They’re referring to categories such as entertainment, news, auto, real estate, etc. where local content is important.

My take has long been that we need to put the “L” into the local market opportunity.  Think “L” versus the lower-case “l” that defines this category today.  User needs in the local market extend beyond the traditional scope of business listing and point-of-interest information (e.g., looking-up restaurant information and reviews).

Y! Local (the business I manage) is intended for this core use case and it’s a sizable in and of itself (one of Y!’s largest properties, BTW).  But it’s only part of the wider local opportunity.  We need to think about the horizontal opportunity and the cross-programming model behind it.  No portal has a done a good job of that yet.

In terms of serving vertical needs within the current scope of Y! Local, we make some attempt of that today.  But we don’t think the answer is to add more web sites to our product portfolio to enable this.  My primary message is that users don’t need more destination sites to visit.  The more convenient alternative is to add vertical content to existing services based on user intent.  Alot of what we do in Y! Local is focused on local search so to the extent we can understand what the user is searching for, we can add vertical content on a category by category basis.

Examples can include:

• Adding menu information when we know it’s a restaurant query
• Adding service records and reports when we know the search is for a plumber or contractor
• Adding reservation or booking information when we know it’s a search for a doctor / dentist, etc.

This takes a good understanding of explicit and implicit user intent, something Y! has unique capabilities to address given our search capabilities.

The presentation I gave is below.

Read more »

• Conference Overview
• Conference Blog
• Some press coverage

Filed under: Events, Search Technology, Yahoo! | No Comments »

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