Friday, June 23, 2006

Spotlight Talk: Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo!

Some thoughts on innovation from Bradley Horowitz, head of the Technology Development Group of & Marketplace (text is not verbatim):

Yahoo! Search vision is FUSE: Find, Use, Share and Expand. It’s different from the competition, because people are part of our vision. It’s better search through people.

There’s a natural order breakdown of the online community. You have active creators, the small percentage that will start a Yahoo! Group. There are people who will proactively participate in that group. Then there is the 90% of people who will always lurk.

When you think about community based products, this pyramid preserves the integrity of content through natural gate keeping. The people who have the privilege of making Hollywood movies have reputation, budget, etc. that enables them to do what they do.

At Yahoo we’re breaking down the barriers between people who create, people who remix, and people who download.

If you look at what’s available on Flickr, you can see a list of the most interesting photos on the site. You can create an algorithm that finds the most popular images and looks at the relationships between he people who made them popular, and the result is a truly outstanding selection of images with emotional resonance.

Yahoo search has evolved from human editorial through mass automation to topological analysis (thanks to Google). But there are other authorities of trust to consider. Social search uses the past advances, refactoring in human participation. We invite the world to participate in My Web, Yahoo Answers and other services.

At Yahoo research, we’re the “roadies”: We build the stage, work the soundboard, etc. One project is “Hack Yahoo!” We have to hack the protocols and procedures to release pent-up creativity. We have a speaker series, weekly hack lunches, and hack day – mash up or shut up.

We take the spirit of hack and, through the Yahoo Developer Network, we expose what we’ve created in the last decade. We know we don’t have all the good ideas and innovation. We want people to create viable businesses on our platform. It’s creating an ecosystem.

Innovation takes the courage to be wrong and make mistakes.

Posted by Cathy Chatfield-Taylor on 06/23 at 02:53 PM
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