SFist Tech Labs: With a Name Like Yahoo, It Has to Be Delicious
SFisters Jackson and Matt already posted about Yahoo's purchase of del.icio.us and Google's new transit trip planner. While we don't like to openly criticize other contributors on the site, we in the labs couldn't help but notice that they were a little light on the tenuous connections, vague observations, and jumping to unfounded conclusions. We hope to correct that here.
The del.icio.us announcement got a great big steaming pile of comments and website/blog coverage, much of it positive, but much of it taking part in a pre-emptive backlash dogpile against Yahoo and Joshua Schachter for selling out to The Man. Most of it echoes (and references) the backlash that occurred when Yahoo acquired Flickr.
Of course, it's always a good idea to take what you read in Internet message boards with a great big salt lick, and a list of mostly anonymous comments on a blog isn't necessarily an accurate survey of public opinion. But community-based services like Flickr and del.icio.us are at least as dependent on the opinions of the users as they are on technological innovation. As Yahoo and Google (and Microsoft, and as-yet-unannounced contenders for King Of The Internets) move towards services that rely on community building and user-created content, they're going to have to be as conscious of branding and public perception as they are of database speed and site statistics and market share.
20% More Brand Loyalty, after the jump
At the moment, we can't help but notice the similarities between the Yahoo/Google rivalry and another long-standing tech rivalry: Microsoft vs Apple. Yahoo is building a reputation for itself as the Big Business Goliath, stomping around the Web, acquiring mom & pop websites and forever tainting them with the stink of dot-com money and, worst of all, advertising. Google, meanwhile, is milking its reputation as the champions of innovation and giving the people what they want — as Matt put it, "Ahhhhhh Google. You do things right."
Even though, we feel obligated to point out, Google's not entirely based on 20-percent-time innovations; it's done its share of acquisitions, Blogspot and Picasa being the most notable. And it's only firmly established itself in search and mapping software; many of its highlights, including Gmail, are still officially in beta. And if you want to talk advertising, Google made AdWords ubiquitous.
And yet, Google comes out of every controversy and acquisition with its reputation intact. A lot of that is because it really does just get it right most of the time. Even though its ads are all over the place, they're generally unobtrusive — just as Steve Jobs is championed for going against Big Music to give the listeners what they want, Google introduced a system that satisfies advertisers while staying out of the way of website users. And Google takes the time to make interfaces that are as simple as possible while still being fully functional. Designing a simple interface is a much more difficult task than making a cluttered one.
But the company will have to admit that a lot of the loyalty of the Cult of Google comes from the fact that it's just not Yahoo. Just as many of Apple's devotees will spend 20% of their time talking about Apple innovation, and the other 80% talking about how much Microsoft sucks. The analogy's not a perfect one, because Google is too big to be considered an "underdog." (Apple is seeing its own brand of backlash now that the iPod has dominated the digital music player market).
There are still some signs that Yahoo "gets" it. Flickr and del.icio.us are both based on tags, so they work well with each other and should fit in nicely with its Yahoo 360 blogging/aggregation service, what may be the most promising thing ever to come out of the company. (And we hope that this means we'll never have to look at a Yahoo Photos page again).
Still, the public perception remains that Google is innovative, while Yahoo is just commercial. Compare Google's "10 Things" corporate philosophy page with Yahoo's version, complete with a frowny-face next to "Discrimination," and it's hard ignore the disparity there. Forced Corporate Whimsy is a sure way to lose cool points with the interweb community, and Yahoo's insistence that it's still an iconoclast seems as forced as the smile on the yellow guy's face above. Yahoo's going to have to do some work to spin its corporate image to emphasize innovation and integration if it wants to build a real community of users.
Maybe instead of targeting Google, Yahoo should try a little bit of the underdog approach and emphasize how it's not AOL.
Image from Yahoo's "What We Value" page