Earlier today, we invited a group of folks to Yahoo for a preview of Yahoo! 360. Danah Boyd wrote a bit about the event this evening.
Today, Yahoo invited a handful of “influencers” to have early access to their new product 360 degrees. Apparently, i’m one of them so i got to sit around a table at Yahoo, learn about the product and speak my mind. I have to say that i’m impressed that Yahoo folks wanted to hear all of our crankiness head-on rather than waiting for it to appear in our random ramblings online. Even better: they didn’t make us sign any NDAs so we can blog all we want. I lurve that.
And Flickr lovr and investr Esther Dyson photoblogged the event–or at least Randy Farmer and me.
There was a lot of good discussion–some of them heated. But the funny thing is how often Flickr came up. I lost count of how many times people began their points by making a Flickr comparison:
- “The thing I like about Flickr is…”
- “Well, what works really well on Flickr is…”
- “The cool thing about how Flick does this is…”
Toward the end of the day, someone even said “I hate to use Flickr as an example again, but…”
So, yeah. We get it. Flickr got a lot of this stuff right. 🙂
Anyway, I just found that amusing.
The event was especially interesting because I was probably the only Yahoo in the room who hadn’t been inolved in the development of Yahoo! 360. So I could easily see things from both sides for a change.
Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.
Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.
