Journal: News & Comment

Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! at Gnomedex

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What's annoying about social networks and tools online? What can we do to fix it?

• Good, Dave and Steve are warmed up now and ready for this discussion.
• Here to represent Yahoo! about social software and social media.
• "Bloggers love to bitch about things."
• What are the problems with social software, what can we do to fix it?
• Think about the need, make them less complicated, connect them so they're not all data islands.
• Eric Rice: We talk about users, we don't talk about people.
• Forget the terminology: it's really "I watched this, I downloaded that, I did this."
• Do user testing, you'll be amazed.
• We really don't know what normal people do when they sit in front of their computers.
• Challenge yourselves to think beyond the screen and create innovative, usual ways of interacting with applications.
• Three dimensions: the geographic dimension (don't forget Europe, Asia, Africa, South America), the time dimension (Office may be dying, but it's still here now), the scale dimension (build platform-like products that people can build niches on top of).
• Technologies that change the world must deal with all of those dimensions.
• You can easily proclaim something dead, but what will replace it?
• Chris's dad uses a computer about 4 hours a day, mostly in Excel and Word, little time online.
• Kaliya: we need to make the legal regime match what the technology enables, to protect people online the way they are protected at home.
• The real reason Scoble left is he got too old.
• But older people are a key demographic for online services.
• Marc: we need a clear roadmap from Yahoo!
• There are problems to resolve the old-school and new-school systems within Yahoo!
• You bought all these companies, so what are you going to do?
• Hard for people in this room to solve problems we don't know exist.
• What are Gnomedexers going to do to reach the masses, rather than belly-butting egos?
• Buzz: you can focus on the MySpace crowd who'll buy ringtones, or you can focus on the people with the money.
• We're focusing on tools and engineering instead of context.
• Understand what people need to do in their lives.
• Step away from the computer once in awhile.

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