My relationship with Yahoo has been a rocky one. I want it to succeed. I really do. But time and time again the company has managed to shoot itself in the foot. And given the bloated bureaucracy, I’m amazed Yahoo can even see it’s feet.
It’s simple really, Yahoo forgot what’s important: the user. While I worked there, I was constantly disappointed with the rhetoric at All Hands meetings: advertisers were seemingly top of the chain, followed by publishers, the lastly, the user. The guise was to bring them all together on an equal playing field. But they really aren’t, as the user gets the short end of the stick. Paid Inclusion (paying to bump a page’s relevance) is proof of that.
Oh sure, every month they release some fancy new “web 2.0″ interface tweak that maybe a handful of users care about, but it does not change the underlying issue of search. In ignoring the user, they also forgot they have two very powerful game changers that are wasting away to irrelevance: Flickr and, most importantly, del.icio.us. Before twitter, and most social bookmarking services, there was del.icio.us, and if it was correctly applied, could be reliable human powered search. In my own experiences, I search delicious before Google if I’m browsing general topics, since I know the most reputable sites will be represented (by frequency of bookmarks).
So I’ll end with my simple proposal: Drop Paid Inclusion. Integrate delicious results to Yahoo Search.
Say what you will about Google, there’s one thing they put first above anything else, and it’s their users (and their data, but that’s another story).
The business of being an online aggregator of information is a competitive one; sites such as FriendFeed, Facebook, and Mint are all vying for your attention making it hard to choose one. Usually one site will have one service, but not another. Maybe it’ll have a good mobile app but few partner services. Or, maybe it’s just something no one ever uses.
Pageonce blows all of them away. I was just shocked at the sheer amount of online accounts that I was able to include in their service, all in one, so let me just list what I added:
- Financial Institutions (BofA, [my student loan holder], Fidelity Investments, [my credit union])
- Utilities (AT&T, AT&T Wireless, Liberty Mutual, PG&E Skype)
- Shopping (Amazon, ebay, Netflix)
- Travel (Virgin America, United, Avis, Alaska Air, Marriott, Amtrak)
- Email (Google, Google Apps, Yahoo, Hotmail)
- Social (Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, Last.fm, digg, del.icio.us, evite, Flickr, LinkedIn, Meetup, Yelp, Youtube)
As the service grows, I imagine it will include just about everything under the sun. Personally, they hit about 90% of the services I use, and 100% of the ones I use frequently (I was pleasantly surprised to find my credit union and student loan holder).
For the most part it’s purely informational; you can’t do much to interact with said feeds, but that’s the major appeal of this as well. If you wanted to interact, you would do so on desired site (which is more secure, anyway).
The real clincher for me was having all this account information not just in one website on my desktop, but on my iPhone. Pageonce launched version 3.0 of their premium application (there’s a free one as well) which brings all of this information to the palm of your hand. There is a Blackberry app available as well.
Granted it’s a little on the slow side; it is after all, pinging all of your online accounts at once. And, as this may be a deal breaker for many, but trusting all of your online account information to one site can be a leap of faith. As it is, the site is well secured, well encrypted, and is covered by all the large online security companies. They do mention in their privacy agreement that they won’t use your data for marketing purposes and that you own it entirely, something Facebook has struggled agreeing to.
Definitely a service to keep an eye out for.