Richard Giles

It’s standing room only again, although, this time I think it’s because we’ve moved to a new bunch of conference rooms. Given that O’Reilly’s conference only lasts for 3/4 of today, I’m guessing they were shifted to make room for a new conference. Unfortunately, that means we’re all cramped, and the WiFi, if it was lousy yesterday, now sucks grandly.

Powezik is mostly talking about the history of Yahoo! Bit of a shame, given that any ETecher would know it intimately. However, he quickly made it to a point; that Yahoo! now sees the Internet as a social platform (hence the recent acquisitions). Again, not really new information.

He’s now talking ALOT about Flickr: why they bought them, what’s happened since, and some of the features (like the old turkey clustering story, i.e. – there is more than one type of turkey, like the country or the food).

Now were back to search–”In general today, search is about connecting people to a web page.” He shows a really neat feature, that I’ve not seen before–maybe because I don’t use Yahoo! much–that will show you if your contacts have saved a web page that appears in your search results. I’ll have to use Yahoo! a bit more to see if it works for me (though I doubt I know enough people that will search for things that are similar to mine).

Hack Yahoo!, run by Chad Dickerson, is an internal initiative to “Mash-up, or shut-up.” They also run a Hack Day, which provides ideas or features and products. He plans to have a community hackathon.

He also demoed a prototype that takes you Flickr contacts, and displays you, and them, on a map on a mobile phone. They even have private ones, that have maps of internal buildings and can show people within them. Great for conferences, like ETech, so you can track friends and colleagues. It’s not a public product, but he wants someone to build it and deploy (I assume he means someone external to Yahoo!).