10e20 Blog

Community is what Yahoo appears to be best at. When Google surrendered its Answers product and announced its closure, Yahoo really scored in the community aspect.

Maybe Google can be the leader in search. But Yahoo deserves to be good at something.

Not long ago, Yahoo was under attack by such media giants as the New York Times for its lack of innovation and expedience with regards to a possible YouTube acquisition. The NY Times said that Yahoo “has suffered some embarrassing setbacks” and it was suggested that Yahoo sport some “bold moves to signal to [the world] its commitment to innovation.”

A week later, Yahoo employee Brad Garlinghouse responded in the famous “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” saying

I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

Yahoo has been embarrassed but then they prevailed. Google dropped Answers, showing Yahoo that their community was better than Google’s. And today, Yahoo has decided to focus on something: aggregate content. In its newly launched Wii portal, the best of Yahoo community is combined into eye candy.

The Wii portal combines a load of Yahoo’s most popular community elements: avatars, Flickr photos, links from MyWeb and del.icio.us, games, Yahoo Answers (hey, what’s a score without utilizing it to the max?!), stories from Yahoo Games, and of course, links to buy the console through Yahoo! shopping.

This “brand universe” that Yahoo is creating is targeted to 13-34 year olds, the company says. Yahoo expects to launch approximately 100 sites just like the Wii-dedicated portal.

In a world where user-generated content is becoming more highly regarded, Yahoo is putting its best foot forward with the integration of its essential and most popular elements. Hopefully, that will be enough to satisfy everyone, especially as people understand the value of user-generated content and the need for markets to talk to each other.