ON "WHAT TO BUY NEXT" FOR YAHOO! AFTER DEL.ICIO.US

WHERE TO NEXT?

Yesterday's Yahoo! acquisition of Del.icio.us, highlights the gradual shifting of the discussion to WHAT Yahoo! should potentially buy next.

Additionally, the Wall Street Journal's Jeremy Wagstaff has an interesting list of Web 2.0 companies that Yahoo! (and presumably it's competitors) could look at next.

Another way to look at the question though, is WHERE to focus next.

From my perspective, one of the biggest next challenges for mainstream consumers of Internet content is FINDING and DISCOVERING increasingly immense amounts of content (text, audio, video) that is going to be microchunked and hurled at them from every possible direction, available ON every conceivable device. 

Much of this content is information driven and much of it is entertainment. 

For the former, there are then subsequent CONVERSATIONS AND DISCUSSIONS to be tracked, with few convenient ways to make it easy to do so.  And for the latter, there's no convenient REMOTE CONTROL.

And as Tom Evslin eloquently describes it ("Daddy, what's a Channel?"), the comfortable and familiar world of "Channels" is fast losing it's meaning in this new world.  As he puts is:

"Channels are a relic of over the air broadcasting. They’re an archaic mechanism for keeping different data streams apart, very wasteful of bandwidth.

Channels are only emulated on digital cable and satellite because channels are what we consumers are used to and because the network business model is built around channels. Channels don’t exist at all on the Internet except when emulated in some client software like that from Real Networks."

So what we need are dramatic improvements on how users NAVIGATE through informational and entertainment content.  We need a new form of CHANNEL SELECTOR for the entertainment content, and a CONVERSATION SELECTOR for the information content.

Today's implementation of RSS feeds and tags are barely a start here in helping consumers find and discover content that's of interest and relevance, especially when we're talking about serendipitous content...stuff you like ONLY AFTER you see it, but you wouldn't have been able to describe it BEFORE seeing it.  Thus no personalized filter is going to capture that content for the user.

And the big portals like Yahoo! and Google are still at the stage of adding ways for their tens of millions of users to access RSS feeds.  Google's announcement yesterday of GMail Clips is a case in point, where they're still trying to figure out how best to design the USER INTERFACE for this constant flow of updated information.

A more important step forward, in my view, are the emerging class of what I'd call "NAVIGATION AND PRESENTATION" services I discussed in a previous post like Memeorandum, Digg, and others, that automatically crawl, index, and PRESENT content along themes and areas of interest.  These nascent services point to the next step TOWARDS the ultimate solution to this content DISCOVERY and PRESENTATION problem.

And like Del.icio.us and other tagging services, they also need to SCALE very fast in terms of infrastructure to truly go mainstream.  Which is where the GYMAAAE players come...which is why this is an interesting place to look next.

Comments

[mark slater]

could not agree more with this post - i have commented on this repeatedly. KISS. The tool that 'aggregates' (not sure if this is the right word) all of my professional and personal services - in a form factor that is device agnostic, totally intuitive, and not intrusive wins. On the business side it might be project tools, email, calendaring, feeds, blogging, casts, enablement tools (online excel), notifications (travel, etc) and soon, on the personal side, pictures, social networks, interest driven feeds, tv programs, music, and on.

I have a preferred tool for each category here, but am still searching for a way to 'aggregate' all of this. Its not my.yahoo - and i am early in looking at the whole host of desktop 2.0 apps out there.

The measure for me is when my father can figure it out without my help - we are a long way from this right now. But the company that gets there, wins BIIG