Technology As Innovator

Tai Tran's Lab: Technology As Innovator

LinkHay launched a new interface and here’s a quick sum-up:

Features I like best

1. Personal feed [linkhay.com/u/<username>/feeds]. Values it brings:
   • Historical data. This helps when I need to reorganize information or refer to a statistical figure
   • Effort tracking
2. Friend feed [linkhay.com/friend/<username>/feeds]. Values it brings:
   • Central place to follow conversations
3. More spaces for content by shifting the menu up

Other ambitious features

Profile [linkhay.com/u/<username>] and Friend feed [linkhay.com/friend/<username>/on-net] show LinkHay’s ambition of growing the product to a real vertical social network by offering the two key elements which attract user engagement in a web service.

Values

Overall, the new interface brings two major values to its users:

• Increased explorability of information by pushing more visibility for the feeds
• Encouraging expressions of personal preference for seeing the web by offering the profile

1. New Yahoo! Profile launched.

2. I started surfing the web rather late in 2001. Yahoo! Profile has always been there in the same address profiles.yahoo.com - that means it should have always been there in the last decade without people’s notice

3. Compared to the old profile, new profile only adds Feeds, Guestbook and reorganizes the profile.

4. Yahoo! Profile is NOT a social-networking site.

5. Yahoo! Profile is another step in their Open Strategy, but how useful is it to users? Users do NOT think like roll-then-scale-then-integrate-then-sell strategists do. Don’t challenge their patience.

Conclusions

• Don’t bother comparing Yahoo! Profile with 360 or 360plus or the late Mash, they’re not the same.
• Don’t bother dragging Facebook or Blogger here, it’d only make a not-funny-at-all joke.
• Yahoo!’s hints are but hints, promises are but promises, buzzes are but buzzes. No hit created.