Yahoo Analyst Day Highlights Further Push into Social Media, Video

[mandy]

Yahoo's presentation during its 2006 Analyst Day emphasized an increased push into social media and video.

Yahoo Inc. hopes to differentiate itself from rivals by emphasizing social media, in which users share everything from photos to bookmarks to expertise about different topics.

The strategy, outlined by executives at the Sunnyvale Web portal's annual analyst day Wednesday, was aimed at casting the company's future as bright in face of stiff competition from search juggernaut Google Inc...

Jordan Rohan, an analyst for RBC Capital Markets, said that Yahoo's foray into social media is especially appealing to younger users who have little apprehension about sharing with strangers online. And given Yahoo's head start and large user base, he said, "There's a decent chance Yahoo could do it better than Google."...

full article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...ITK391.DTL&type=business

The new user-driven Yahoo search has been getting a lot of media attention. The company's latest attempt at wresting the crown off of search king Google's head involves intermixing the Yahoo Answers service with regular search results, in the hope that this will lead to more relevant search results, happier users, and more searches...

Other items of interest include changes to the ad ranking system, taking previous search habits of the individual user into account when determining which ads to serve up first. And the venerable Yahoo Finance site will get updated graphs akin to the spiffy Flash-based ones Google Finance introduced a couple of months ago. With nary an update to functionalty or look-and-feel in years, that change is long overdue. And finally, Yahoo is trying to get off your PC and into your cell phone and other devices, like everybody else these days. We could have guessed that one if they hadn't told us, right?...

full article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060518-6866.html