I will be living blogging Yahoo’s product call, so please check back here for frequent updates.

2:00pm: Title of the introductory slide is “Connecting You To What Matters Most”.

2:04pm: Still waiting to begin, not sure what the delay is.

2:06pm: The conference room manager said she is still trying to find the presenter, if you know where he is, press a certain key combination. I have never seen this happen with such a big conference bridge.

2:09pm: Kryssa Guntrum, the presenter is typing in the chat room, just waiting for him to get on the phone portion.

2:10pm: They are starting now…. They have “significant enhancements” to their most popular products, said Elisa Steele, CMO.

2:12pm: Yahoo’s vision is to be the center of people’s lives. Core to this is to be:

(1) Personally relevant

(2) Human relevance by connecting people

(3) Technology and science

(4) Having fun by making things fun and easier to use

2:14pm: Execution of this vision, i.e. to be the center of people’s lives. Nothing better shows this than Yahoo’s new home page, which brings what you want to the front. This is more than customization and personalized, it is about users taking control and Yahoo allowing users to bring the best of the web to you. You can choose ESPN or Yahoo Sports, or Twitter or whatever is relevant to you.

2:15pm: The user experience must be predictable.

2:16pm: Bryan Lamkin, SVP, Applications to talk about Yahoo’s Applications Update is now up.

2:17pm: Bryan Lamkin at Yahoo for four months now, he has been at Adobe for 14 years, working on Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. And what he did there can help Yahoo at a larger scale.

2:19pm: Yahoo is a great starting point for the web. Defining an integrated experience is important. They have a great set of technology. Bryan’s job is to deliver this great experience. His goal is to make sure you choose Yahoo’s properties within the Yahoo portal. Such as enhancements in Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search and Yahoo Mobile products.

2:20pm: What do people need on the web? (1) Easy way to check in on the people and info that matters to them. One central place for this. (2) Simple tools to navigate to the sites they need most. (3) A view into what is happening in the rest of the world.

2:21pm: Yahoo wants to bridge that world together as the world gets more complicated.

2:25pm: 4 components to designing these core applications include: (1) Rich media (i.e. video, Flickr, etc) (2) Smart services (i.e. mail and messenger, a workflow system for your Yahoo mail to be shown later) (3) Convergence across different communication protocols, different applications and Yahoo is expected to break down those walls. (4) Anytime, anywhere. You need access no matter where you are (i.e. mobile apps).

2:26pm: Yahoo Mail demo by John Kremer, VP of Yahoo Mail

2:30pm: Yahoo mail is not only about email only, it is about social communications:

Notice the middle panel where you can read mail from the people that matter to you the most. “Recent unread emails from contacts.” Also notice the “Confirm to Get Updates” on the bottom right.

2:34pm: You can add folders of images to a sent email and then edit those photos in the mail (delete, rotate, etc) and you have up to 25MB of space per email:

2:37pm: Integrated MyPhotos application allows you to share photos and photos you share automatically get connected to your friends:

2:40pm: Yahoo is adding an evite application, which isn’t available today, but will be eventually. It auto-fills from the Yahoo address book:

Also, you can easily add this to your calendar:

2:42pm: Yahoo also releasing a mobile version of Yahoo Mail…

Features: 1 click access to read, compose, etc. Read access to word, excel, etc, and one click sync.

2:44pm: Dave Merriwether, Sr. Director of Yahoo Messenger is now up for a demo. New beta releasing today, globally.

2:45pm: One feature change is ability to change the language without redownloading a new app (16 languages):

2:46pm: You have search assist built right in:

2:47pm: Change weather to a location and the local news changes also:

2:49pm: More social details including overlays and a “Y! Updates” tab in messenger:

2:50pm: Rich media with video chat and also sharing photos in the window:

2:52pm: Larry Cornett, VP of Search Products and Design is now up to talk about Search.

2:53pm: New Yahoo search design, makes it easier to find and explore things that matter most to you.

2:54pm: Why are they making this change?

Aligned with new look and feel of yahoo home page. Gives more personally relevant experience to your search. Plus quicker access to search features available within Yahoo Search (old features, more in front). Search Monkey has been structuring the web, and they are bringing those back into the search experience.

2:55pm: The new Yahoo Search framework:

The most change is on the left column…

2:57pm: The left column explained:

Search Apps, such as McCafee, for safe search features. Also, to display SearchPad. Site Filters, Filter results by sites people love for that query (such as, Wikipedia, Twitter, Flickr, eHow and other very popular sites) Data filters, using Search Monkey to pull out the structured (”objects”) data Assistance, like search assist that you see at the top of the page, but this is more personalized search suggestions.

3:00pm: Demo time, here are screens:

I can see this myself, here is a sharper screen capture:

3:04pm: We will take away “searching for people” from Google’s domain:

3:07pm: Now he is showing off related concepts to show power of personalized search suggestions:

First searches for car related terms, i.e. toyota, honda, then jaguar.

Then I go into animal searches:

Note related concepts at bottom left.

3:09pm: Calculator and magic 8 ball app:

3:10pm: Yahoo Search integration with search assist in other Yahoo properties:

3:12pm: Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Yahoo Labs and Search Strategy is now up to talk about matching content to people.

They need to pull out the right piece of content for each user, depending on the person requesting it. Once they figure out the right content for the right person, how do they display that content the best way for the user.

3:15pm: Science and Technology through machine learning via content optimization. The algorithms look at what people are reading, clicking on, when the content expires and so on. The idea is to figure out what content to show on the home page and drives higher click through rate.

3:17pm: Social Science through measuring audience engagement metrics, i.e. pageviews and clicks. But looking forward, Yahoo needs to go beyond those metrics. A pageview on search is very different than a pageview on mail. So what are the right metrics to gauge these for advertisers?

3:19pm: Economics in pricing theory and option theory, through ad optimization. There are challenges of scale with these marketplaces.

3:21pm: Search through web of objects, as opposed to “web of pages.” It is no longer about how many pages you can index, but how many objects you can understand on the web.

That is the scientific investment on Yahoo’s side.

3:23pm: Q&A Time. It is very hard to hear the questions, will listen and add anything I can hear that is important to search.

Someone asked about how Microsoft’s deal impacts the search side. Yahoo answered that Yahoo will innovate on the front end, not on the backend gathering of web pages, but on how the information is displayed to users and personalized based on the data Yahoo has.

Does the Microsoft deal distract from Yahoo’s Search strategy? Um, how do you think Yahoo will answer this. :)

This is funny, the same Q comes up time and time again, if Microsoft is doing search, why are you doing this? Yahoo keeps saying, they control the front end of those results. Not sure if the media understand that, and if they cannot, will searchers understand that?

ETA for launch: Later this year, but current under test mode.

Postscript: See Yahoo’s New Search Clothes — But Will It Help? (Probably Not) for a longer look at the Yahoo search changes.

The web’s first (and some might still argue only) “killer app,” email, was invented roughly 35 years ago. And everyone seems to have ideas on how to bring it into the 21st Century. Google Wave is aiming to be an email replacement of sorts: a real-time, social communication and collaboration platform.

Yahoo, for its part, is pursuing a “smarter inbox” strategy, which has a social media dimension. As part of executing on that strategy it has acquired Xoopit, which developed photo-sharing for Yahoo Mail and GMail (although that will likely come to an end). The estimated value of the deal was $20 million. According to the Yodel Anecdotal blog:

With the integration of Xoopit’s platform technology and capabilities, the task of sending photos via email will be as easy as it should be and sharing photo albums with friends and family members will also be a cinch. You’ll be able to share your pictures among a group of friends or family like never before – combining pictures from numerous sources into a single album for a private group to view. And soon your inbox will become an organized photo index as well . . . Why is this such a big deal? Yahoo! Mail is actually home to one of the largest online photo repositories in the world.

Here’s how Xoopit described itself at the company’s launch in early 2008:

[Xoopit] bring[s] the power of the social web to email by combining the benefits of social networks and media management within email environments. Xoopit finds the pictures, videos, and files buried in webmail’s gigabytes of free storage and allows users to share, comment, and post them to their contacts on other social networks and blogs.

According to Hitwise, Yahoo Mail contributes more than 30 percent of Yahoo’s overall traffic and is a bigger property than the homepage:

Gigaom writes that although Yahoo is number two at search, they are still number one at so many other things. That is exactly what Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s CEO, wants to communicate with the world, that Yahoo is not just a search company and does great things also outside of search.

Gigaom reached out to comScore to see what exactly Yahoo is number one at and that includes:

• News
• Finance
• Sports
• Mail
• Entertainment
• Games (near tie)

Yahoo Answers is not mentioned here, but I believe they dominate that category, as well.

We don’t often discuss Yahoo’s other properties, but it is important to note that although Yahoo is a distant second to Google in search, Yahoo does dominate the web in so many other ways.

If you’ve ever wanted to send money via Paypal without leaving your email In box, or if you wanted to publish a blog post without leaving your My Yahoo page, today’s announcement from Yahoo is sure to put a smile on your face. Yahoo is adding a number of third-party apps and widgets to several of its properties, including the popular Yahoo Mail and My Yahoo services.

For Yahoo Mail users in the U.S., new apps include PayPal for sending and receiving money, Picnik for photo editing from your In box, MyPhotos for photo organization and sharing, and ZumoDrive, a file sharing service. These mail apps are only available for a limited number of users of the new Yahoo mail. You can get the new apps here.

New apps available to My Yahoo users include WordPress, Mint.com for financial management, and What’s Cookin for recipes and meal ideas. These are available in the My Yahoo content gallery.

Yahoo has also announced new widgets for its Yahoo Connected TV service and for Zimbra, its email and collaboration tool.

Yahoo has announced several enhancements to their continued open strategy. Some of the updates revolve around Yahoo products including Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo, the Yahoo Toolbar and Yahoo Updates.

Here are the breakdowns:

• Yahoo! Mail – The Yahoo! Mail smarter inbox experience is the company’s largest-scale implementation of its Y!OS initiative. The new experience surfaces messages, information and activity from people users care about most, and the integration of relevant third party applications allows users to be more productive, all from within their inbox.
• My Yahoo! – Beginning today, My Yahoo! users can add applications built by developers using the Yahoo! Application Platform to their personal start pages. Beginning with a limited selection of featured applications, the My Yahoo! content gallery will expand over time to include a wide variety of useful, interactive applications that can be used on My Yahoo! and in the future, other Yahoo! properties.
• Yahoo! Toolbar – Available for a sneak preview beginning later this week at toolbar.yahoo.com, the new Yahoo! Toolbar provides constant access to essential online tasks and up-to-the-minute news from the people that matter most.
• Yahoo! Updates – Starting today, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Toolbar, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! TV, and Yahoo! Travel will join a number of other Yahoo! properties that already integrate or share relevant activity Updates. Yahoo! Updates enable Yahoo! users to have visibility into the online activities of their connections across the Yahoo! network.

More details at Techmeme, Yodel Anecdotal, Yahoo Developer Network, Yahoo Mail Blog and My Yahoo Blog.

Yahoo! Calendar, one of the company’s early “Web 1.0″ properties, is getting a major facelift for the first time in 10 years. Yahoo announced details of the new Yahoo! Calendar beta today, which uses technology from their 2007 purchase of Zimbra. In addition to improving integration with Yahoo! Mail, the new calendar will be more compatible with other online calendar services (such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft) to let you share events with friends. It will also offer email, instant message, or SMS reminders of important events, and user-friendly functions like drag-and-drop rescheduling of events. As TechCrunch points out, most of these features only give Yahoo! Calendar to the same feature set as other online calendar services.

John Kremer, VP of Yahoo Mail, says future plans include integration with other Yahoo properties such as Flickr and Upcoming.org, as well as auto-synching with Microsoft Outlook and Apple’s iPhone. Yahoo has published a video demonstration of the new calendar service.

Yahoo is accepting sign-ups for the beta version of their new calendar at http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com/.

There’s more coverage on Techmeme.

A much discussed blog posting this morning comes from Saul Hansell at the New York Times, who spoke to both Google and Yahoo about their plans to turn their email products into social networks, in a manner of speaking: “Inbox 2.0.” The plans discussed in the post suggest some clever and creative thinking about how both companies can leverage their existing products and integrate them with other properties. But people at both companies also seem to be in a kind of frenzy, which may turn out to be unjustified in the long run, over how to compete with Facebook.

Here’s what Hansell says about Google’s plans:

When I talked recently with Joe Kraus, who runs Google’s OpenSocial project, he said: “We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social.” And when I pressed him about the relationship between the social aspects of iGoogle and Gmail versus Orkut or some other social network, he said, “It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand.”

We’re left to “read the tea leaves” a bit there and figure out how some of these properties might be tied in together. iGoogle has been gradually becoming more “social,” as has Google as a whole, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see profiles tied into iGoogle and iGoogle tied to mail and so on. Orkut, which has been growing, suffers from what might be called “the Froogle problem.”

Despite its clever name, many people never fully recognized that Froogle was Google Shopping. So Google eventually changed the name of Froogle to Google Product Search. Such a functional name change might be in order for Orkut too, especially as part of the larger effort that Hansell’s post suggests.

Here’s what Hansell says about Yahoo’s plans:

Yahoo is testing a method that can automatically determine the strength of your relationship to someone by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her….

Yahoo Mail will also be extended to display other information about your friends as well. This can be a link to a profile page, and also what Yahoo calls “vitality” –- updated information much like the news feed on Facebook. There could also be simple features that are common on social networks, like displaying a list of friends whose birthdays are coming up….

There will be some sort of profile system attached to Inbox 2.0, [Garlinghouse] said. For people who use a lot of Yahoo services, this profile could be quite rich even at the beginning, as it can draw on activity on Yahoo Music, Yahoo Shopping and so on….

It seems like there is too much complexity here, leading to potential confusion. Yahoo Mail is a huge asset for the company (and so is/was MyYahoo), but there may be too much of a good thing in this vision. Of course, it’s mostly informed speculation in Hansell’s post.

There is probably a growing need for a kind of “dashboard” or “control center” where people get feeds and content, organize favorites, present their resume or profile, and communicate with each other. There’s no single entity or site that does all these things.

Personal startpages/newsreaders/widget containers include Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle, and MyYahoo. Yahoo’s Delicious and MyWeb, among others, are good social bookmarking sites that help organize content for future consumption (and sharing). And sites like LinkedIn or Facebook offer profiles and personal pages.

There may well be a way for Google or Yahoo to bring these elements together in an elegant way — a kind of personal portal or uber-startpage — but if not done correctly or well, it could wreck a relatively good thing, at least in the case of Yahoo Mail.

It’s like that old joke: What’s a camel? A horse designed by committee. There’s more discussion at Techmeme.

Yahoo has taken the “beta” label off its new Yahoo Mail service. Here’s an overview from the Yodel Anecdotal blog. Arguably the most interesting aspect of the new features is the capability of sending text messages to mobile phones from Yahoo Mail.

As the Yodel Anecdotal blog points out, this enables a new form of intergenerational communication: parents sending text messages to their kids’ mobile phones from their traditional Yahoo email accounts: We already have great integrated instant messaging features in Yahoo! Mail, so adding text messaging was a natural next step. It’s an increasingly popular way to keep in touch, especially among younger users. In fact, 69% of US mobile phone users between the ages of 18-39 use text messaging (Harris Interactive, June 2006), and half of Americans age 18-25 say they sent or received a text message over the phone in the past day (Pew Research Center, January 2007).

While that’s an amusing anecdote/use case, it illustrates the larger principle of Web-mobile integration that will become standard — and increasingly strategic for companies like Yahoo. This SMS integration and the other upgrades being rolled out also help maintain Yahoo Mail’s dominant position on the desktop. (Yahoo Mail is a big source of display ad inventory for the company).

Techmeme offers lots of coverage and discussion.

For the first time, Yahoo has beaten Google in the annual University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The survey measures U.S. consumer satisfaction across a broad range of business and product categories including “e-business,” which covers search. The survey asks a statistically representative sample of consumers to rate their experiences with portals and search engines according to a number of criteria, which produces an overall satisfaction score on a 100 point scale. The search/portal category has been rated since 2000. Until this year, Google has always lead the ASCI since the first year the index included it, in 2002.

Among the top engines, Ask saw the largest gains in satisfaction (5.6%) while Yahoo emerged as the overall winner, beating Google by a single point. But Yahoo and Google were trending in opposite directions, with Yahoo gaining and Google losing a roughly equivalent percentage (see below). AOL saw the biggest decline in satisfaction (-9.5%) of any of the big portals/engines.

It’s not entirely clear, based on the timing of the study, whether the jump in satisfaction for Ask is entirely attributable to the “Ask3D” redesign, but that’s the likely explanation according to Larry Freed, President and CEO of ForeSee Results, which sponsors and interprets the ACSI e-business report.

Source: ACSI (2007)

The satisfaction data clearly don’t correlate with search market share. I asked Freed in this context why people should care and pay attention to the ACSI. Freed was confident that “search market share reflects past behavior. But the ACSI is predictive of future consumer behavior.” He said that historically it has been a very accurate gauge of future consumer behavior in other industries. He added that Google’s decline was a second dip in a row after a smaller decline last year.

Consumers in the survey are not asked to tell researchers why they’re rating a selected product or service the way they are, so they must interpret and draw inferences regarding why one engine may have received a satisfaction gain and another a loss. Freed believes that consumers were rating Yahoo overall and giving high marks to the home page redesign and the new mail beta client, among other positives. He argues that consumers want to see change and improvement and that Google has not kept pace with those expectations. In a piece of written analysis, Freed argues:

In fact, not much has changed for the average Google user in the last few years. The innovation and technology that Google originally brought to search was a giant leap ahead of the competition. However, Google is now taking only small steps that are undetected or ignored by the mass population of search users.

I challenged Freed that there were numerous changes at Google (e.g., in Maps, Universal Search) but he countered that consumers were either not aware of these changes or they were too incremental to gain much notice.

Regarding AOL’s decline, Freed attributed it largely to transition issues and the fact that AOL has been dogged by customer service problems surrounding cancellation of its dial-up ISP services. Freed adds (from his written analysis):

AOL is still having a hard time differentiating itself from the industry leaders. Its search function clearly loses to Google’s. Its portal is inferior to Yahoo’s. It competes with MSN in terms of offering fresh content and music, but MSN seems to be doing it better, at least bigger with concerts like Live Earth.

MSN/Live Search was basically flat year-over-year, with “nothing to truly set MSN apart from the rest of the field,” according to Freed.

There is the question of whether consumers were truly rating “apples to apples” in the case of the portals vs. Google and Ask. But if Freed is correct and these scores are predictive of future consumer loyalty and behavior, then we should see some shifting in search market share in the next 12-18 months. Regardless, it suggests Ask and Yahoo are on the right track and Google should see these data as an early warning sign and make some adjustments to avoid further declines — and potential market share losses — in the future.

Today, Yahoo has begun rolling out unlimited email capacity worldwide.

On March 28th, we reported they were offering unlimited email storage in the US. Now this is going worldwide.

Not everyone will have unlimited capacity today but over the next coming months, they will, a Yahoo spokesperson told me.