Major Upgrade As Yahoo Refreshes Its Services

Yahoo announced upgrades in its web products that it hopes will help it to regain some lustre. The company wants to boost its user base because numbers have been either flat or slowly slipping, depending on which researcher is to be believed.

Go-to site for social connections

Despite its intentions, the venerable web-services provider, still one of the most relied-upon web sites in the world, didn’t show analysts and media all that much at its Product Runway event at its corporate headquarters. Mainly, the message was that the company is spending heavily to improve its platform and services.

Within the next few weeks, Yahoo’s home page will add update access to Twitter, Facebook, and Zynga (social gaming), so that users can file updates to any of those sites without having to log on.

“We want to be the first choice, to be home base, for connecting across networks,” explained Blake Irving, the company’s new product strategy chief.

A major investment will be in developing new data centres but other improvements will be made to the search capabilities, email provision and the general look and feel of the web site. Yahoo will begin by unveiling its latest state-of-the-art data centre in a location just outside Buffalo in New York State on September 20.

Yahoo also said it will power free Wi-Fi services in Starbucks coffee shops beginning this Autumn but has not made plans to do this outside the US. Naturally, users who log on to the free networks will be directed to Yahoo content tailored to their local market.

Demonstrations at the Yahoo headquarters event included Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Citizen Sports, the revamp of its email service and a demonstration of the additional speed in its search engine.

Irving said that Yahoo Search is now penetrating more web sites and generally displaying larger results listings. Under the covers, most of this improvement is due to the new Microsoft Bing search power plant. The company signed a 10-year pact with Microsoft in July 2009 in which they agreed to share technology and advertising revenue.

Yahoo is the third most popular search engine in the UK, according to Hitwise. It recently lost second place to Bing but even their combined market share is minute. Google dominates with 91.88 percent, Bing has 3.02 percent and Yahoo is close behind on 2.83 percent. It is a slightly different story in the US where Hitwise rates Yahoo as second to Google with about 17 percent of the share.

Yahoo Groups was revamped recently and is now live, although a few features are still not quite ready for prime time. It granularises the Facebook idea by enabling users to create local or special-interest groups of friends who can share updates, photos, videos, event listings, polls and several other features.

“On Facebook, if you have hundreds of friends, you have to be careful about posting something that might be offensive or just not relevant to somebody,” Greg Rosenberg, Yahoo’s director of user experience, told eWEEK. “With Yahoo Groups, you can start up a smaller group on a neighbourhood page that would be of interest only to those neighbours living in the neighbourhood.

“There are already millions of people [115 million in 10 million Yahoo Groups] using this and it’s ramping up,” he added.

Irving said that Yahoo would keep investing in applications for mobile devices like the iPad and the upcoming Android-powered tablets. The Yahoo tablet home page will include email, news, an alarm clock, links to Twitter and Facebook, and a weather forecast page.

The company said it had signed contracts with about 100 carriers and handset makers globally to pre-install Yahoo applications on mobile devices.