San Jose, Calif. – Professor Marc Davis has dedicated years of his life to studying how the Internet is changing people from passive Web surfers to active content creators who post their own text, video and audio online.
Davis, a media professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has been given the keys to perhaps the biggest real-world lab in the world – Yahoo’s vast network of websites and the hundreds of millions of people who use them.
As head of Yahoo’s new social media research lab in Berkeley, Davis has been tasked with helping Yahoo chart a course through the evolving world of “social media” – from blogs and social networking services to interactive mobile devices.
The lab is the latest move by Yahoo to try to position itself as the leader in social media. The phrase now permeates the Sunnyvale, Calif., company’s culture, and it is becoming one of the cornerstones of its business model.
Yahoo is aiming to build a technological playground where people can create and share their own content, from audio “podcasts” and blogs to message groups and photo albums.
The concept is reshaping Yahoo’s view on Internet searching.
Traditionally, search companies have striven to build the biggest index holding the largest number of Web pages, the idea being that Web searchers want access to the most information possible. But Yahoo’s focus has expanded to a “social search” concept. It allows people to search the subset of websites that friends and acquaintances have found interesting and annotated with their thoughts and comments.
“The opinions of my friends can be an important model for discovery,” said Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo’s director of technology development. “We want to create a platform so that the knowledge in people’s heads flows onto the Web for the benefit of others.”
Yahoo is moving quickly. In just a year it has assembled several pieces of a complex social media puzzle. Most prominent was its March acquisition of Flickr, a photo-sharing site started by a husband-and-wife team in Canada.
Flickr layered on key features that set it apart from the Ofotos and Shutterflys of the world.
“Our natural instinct was to put things online that were public,” said Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake. “Eighty percent of the photos on Flickr are public. This is a big change from other photo-sharing sites.”
Tagging is another important piece of the Flickr puzzle. People can add keywords that describe the photos’ content, making them instantly searchable and groupable.
The concepts that form the core of Flickr – tagging, sharing and community – are spreading through Yahoo’s many departments.
Yahoo’s attempts to “Flickr- ize” its search engine have also given birth to a service called My Web 2.0, which lets people bookmark and tag Web pages that interest them.
Although My Web 2.0 is useful as a personal stash of bookmarks, Yahoo’s hope is that people will use it to share their online discoveries with friends, colleagues and the world. When searching for restaurants or shopping spots, friends can search each other’s collected storehouses of information.
Yahoo recently acquired Upcoming.org, a Southern California website whose events calendar is assembled entirely by the public.
