Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz

Definitely! I just got completely blown out by Oamos. The search experience is fantastic. Images, videos, transitions and music are wonderfully inspiring. Ping from Artur Ortega.

This is mostly to recruiters and speculators alike. No, I have not been laid off. No, I don’t know anything about the Microsoft bid. And no, I am not moving.

So that’s clear: I love Yahoo!, and we have kick ass engineers producing kick ass technology. We rock, man! We are so cool!

I set myself to write last night a simple PHP OpenID consumer for Yahoo’s! However, I have encountered the Oops message that most folks have also faced:

Ooops…
Hey there! You have stopped by a bit sooner than we had expected. This feature is still being tested, so please check back later.

Anyhow, I think it’s really cool, both for users and for application providers, for a whole number of reasons:

• OpenID V2 has the notion of Directed Identity, which from a user’s perspective simply means not having to know that you are using OpenID (like it should be). In other words, it just works. A simple HTTP POST to yahoo.com and you are all set!
• There is no need anymore to go through hurdles of storing user information and mapping users, like you almost always had to do with OpenID. With OpenID V2 the consumer can query profile information from the OpenID provider. The user has the control to select from a number of profiles stored on the provider, and even pick what attributes in a given profile get shared with each consumer. The user is in control!

Really, this is really exciting, and makes me very proud of being a Yahoo! I’ll pick this test back once we go live by end of this month.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog published last week a study showing that online exposure to product and retailer information, as well as ads, changes consumers behavior. Yahoo! calls that Research Online, Buy Offline, or ROBO (btw, ROBO means theft in Spanish).

I can easily identify myself as one of those consumers in the study. It’s much easier to use the internet to find out exactly what one is looking for. Sometimes, I want (need?) to buy something, but I am unclear about what is available in the market that would suit my needs. For example, I want to install a multi-room sound system. However, as I do research on the internet, I happen to find many different types of solutions to this problem: wired, wireless, bluetooth controlled, streaming, centrally amplified, room-amplified, etc. So I end up doing my market taxonomy, then market research, then learning about the vendors and their products, and finally finding the retailers in my area where I can take a look at the actual products. I will then go visit the retailer and possibly buy offline. That’s what Yahoo! calls ROBO.

Well, actually, a few times, I don’t do ROBO. I research online, and buy offline. But then I go online to find the best deal based on price and retailer’s consumer feedback, using, for example, Kelkoo. I then buy online, and once the product arrives, I return it offline. I call it ROBOBORO.

Now, seriously, what is really interesting about the study are the implications the findings have for retailers. Back in the late 90’s folks talked about personalized online/offline merchants: your profile would be known to the merchant from your online browsing behaviour, and the offline presence of the merchant could use that information for better targetting products for sale to you. Admitedly, during the 90’s the internet was not particularly strong on privacy yet, neither was technology to make this personalized marketing possible, but think of the following scenario based on how technology has evolved since then.

Suppose you are browsing the web using your bluetooth enabled mobile phone, looking for a new portable music player. You do your research online, find what you want, but your wife tells you it’s time to go shopping and swing by the mall with the kids. So off you go. Once you enter the mall, your phone communicates with the bluetooth mall facilities. Those merchants in the mall with which you have a online trust relationship, access your relevant browsing history, and match against it. You then receive, on your phone, an offer like “Hello Bruno, we have the iPod nano on sale for only $79.99, all ready packed and ready for you to take home”. You swing by the store, swipe your credit card, and happily walk out of the mall with a new toy. Interestingly, the reverse also holds as a benefit for the publishers. The search engine knows who you are, and it could use some of your profile attributes for the retailers to bid on, besides the search terms. Let’s say you just bought the iPod at said merchant. That merchant is interested in selling you accessories for your new iPod, so whenever you are now searching for music related terms, you should be targeted with iPod accessories, instead of generic music store, or download ads.

Welcome to the future of one-to-one marketing.

I have been very much silent on my blog for the last 6 weeks. The reason has been me changing jobs to become Yahoo’s Chief Architect of International Engineering. The first weeks at work have been absolutely thrilling and I am highly delighted to be working in such an amazingly skilled and enthusiastic team. I really look forward at the challenge ahead. Unfortunately being able to take on this challenge requires absolute dedication, and my ability to blog will be somehow more limited than in the past.
So if you are a usual reader, please bear with me for a little longer: posts will be coming back in no time.

Yahoo!’s new search platform, project Panama, is already showing a win over the last month. A study by comScore shows significant increases in Yahoo’s click through rates, and ad effectiveness when compared to normal links. But to me what is more important, is that Yahoo! is showing due transparency to publishers. Google’s lack of visibility is an abuse to 99% of publishers who have absolutely no idea of what goes on with click-through revenue sharing. And Google it’s not only a black box: it’s an abuse (don’t be evil!??). Yahoo! is certainly hitting Google right where it hurts with YPN.

I have been using Yahoo! IM since 1999, but unable to log onto it over the last couple of years because of my employer’s URL filtering system and firewall settings. It seems like my account has been deactivated by Yahoo! Customer Service:

My trouble is that I have lost all my contacts! Anybody, how do I get these back?

I had a quick go at Yahoo!’s new pipes product. Yahoo! pipes is an aggregator product (not intended for end-consumers) to visually program/constract feed aggregators from any sources. It looks complex as a consumer concept, and it is, but it’s actually really easy to use as a programming tool. It took me less than 5 minutes to create a feed aggregator for stock news.

It would be really interesting now if the aggregated feed results (”pipe output”) could be mashed up into other sources, like Yahoo! Maps, etc. using GeoRSS, KML or alike. That would then become a true consumer product!

Update: It seems like Yahoo! pipes got clogged. The site was brought down a few hours ago due to excessive demand. It received more attention that originally envisaged! Well, that’s a good thing. I hope it comes back soon.

Update: The service is back up.

Skype asked me yesterday to upgrade last night to the final 3.0 (I use Skype for video conferencing because of its ability to go through firewalls by tunneling on port 80). So having run the beta for over 3 months now, I thought it would be a good idea. During the install I was prompted to whether I wanted the Google toolbar installed, at which point I stopped the install and uninstalled Skype (I hate when install programs creep with toolbars, and all other sort of rubbish plugins that I did not ask for).

But what is Ebay’s strategy by shipping a competitor’s product? Google merchant was born to compete directly with Paypal, which I am sure Ebay’s executives did not receive too well. However, not far later in summer Ebay signed a large multi-year advertisement deal with Google. Buried in that press release, an announcement that Google Talk creeps into Skype. And now Skype ships with Google Toolbar.

Google has definitely won a lot: extend its messenger network, sell advertising, and get the toolbar distributed. But Ebay?

Well, Ebay’s strategy is probably to focus on their core auction business, and use the other products as channels to bring in further revenue to the auctions (they see Skype as a tool to increase their market share in the auction business). Skype direct revenue from SkypeOut and SkypeIn is peanuts in comparison with Ebay’s auction business. And in that context, any sort of interoperability, which would include Google Talk, is welcome.

All great as a concept, but why pick Google?

Ebay would have been better picking an advertising channel from a non competitor, such as Yahoo! With Yahoo! they would have obtained the advertisement network, the toolbar, the Yahoo! IM (a true IM player, unlike Skype). All I know is that I won’t be buying any EBAY stock any time soon.