George Chen DOT COM

Now that I am on the “outside” for 8+ months, I feel like I should say a few things on how “I” feel Yahoo! should be fixed. These are just my 2 cents, not meant to aim at any group, any BU, or anyone for that matter, but someone should take note.
Social network. Forget this new Mash thing. Isn’t it just like the 360?

Yahoo! probably has one of oldest “social network” on the internet and that’s called the Yahoo! Messenger. It’s active. It’s live. It’s sticky, and great for flirts. I doubt any “page based” social network can be as sticky as Y! Messenger.
You want Twitter like function? That’s called “status” in Y! Messenger since the late 90s’. Not to mention, passing around funny / interesting links and URL in Y! Messenger virally has been done for so long all with Y! IM’s status message.
My point being, the Messenger platform is great for social networking – you don’t need to add any friends in there (duh) which all new social networks have to. Why don’t Y! build something around that?

Yahoo! Mail. Can I get the “Flickr treatment” on the Yahoo! Mail? I want something clean, white, but with plenty of native-app AJAX like features – but not a slow down browser experience. Dare I say, bring back the OddPost like UI. I know, that looks like Outlook express, but we all want something very light weight for email.
Hosting, Domains, and e-commerce products. There’s plenty of $$$$ to be made there. Y! should consider spinning off the operation into a separate independent company to compete with Go Daddy for domain and hosting, and or other higher end e-commerce solutions. Plenty of smart folks in the group, but they are constrained by the consumer focused nature of the mother ship.

Buy Gawker or Weblogs Inc. like content /blog network. I am sick of looking at Y!’s home page main content area to only find interesting content (mostly videos) I’ve already saw on other content network a few days ago. Y! needs to own those content and be the first to provide those on the home page.

Fix search (especially image search might be too tactical, but it bugs me). With SafeSearch turned on (note: both Yahoo! and Google use the same term “SafeSearch”. Interesting.) searching for the term “Dream Girls” and there’s a much higher chance you will find “riskay” images on Yahoo! compare to Google. I know I really should use the term “Dreamgirls”, but even with the space, I am getting more appropriate and likely matching images on Google. Tiny details, but let’s start to fix little things from there.