Darryl.net

Ok, so I haven’t posted here in some time. Here’s what we’ve been working on that’s kept me so busy these last few months: http://web.im/ - or, officially, http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/ (or, Yahoo! Messenger for the Web).

“It’s like travel size toiletries with everything that you love about the Yahoo messenger application in a lighter size.” Ok, so that’s a fun quote - but it is actually designed not to have everything - only what you need while you are away from your prized personal PC.

In fact, one interesting thing I [re]learned is that people only really need about 1/10th of what is normally shipped with any given product. The first thing we did when we started was to decide what it would not have. It would not allow you to set your image, change your stealth settings, pull up your web cam, share photos, transfer files, load plug-ins, change themes, etc. etc. You have an installable client that can do that. It would solve one user case: I cannot or do not want to install the client (perhaps I’m on the road, or at work, or in a cafe). By keeping scope limited, we were able to build it from the ground up in just a few months (thanks, in part, to our crack team - and, in the other part, to Adobe’s cool new tools).

Find out more about Yahoo! Messenger for the Web, and make sure to watch the embarassing video that I narrated. Here’s some of the early press: TechCrunch, Reuters, CNET, and this glowing blogger.

Last week, we launched Yahoo! Photos v3 to the U.S. You can read the official press release, or check out the usual suspects. This is the culmination of over a year’s worth of effort - an entire re-write of the site from the ground up. Because we were able to start from scratch, you will notice many new features and “web 2.0″ concepts not found on other sites of this scale.

One of the most difficult questions that any product manager faces is ‘when do you launch the site?’ The old Photos site was launched in 2002 and was showing its age. While still the most visited photos site on the web*, it lacked some of the newer features of the competition. While we managed to add many new features, we could have added many more. Do you launch when all the feedback coming in from the beta is favorable? Or do you add the common enhancement reqeusts? Do you push to exterminate all the minor bugs, or do you live in eternal beta - always asking forgiveness from your customers for your experimentation?

Perhaps one of the tools that helped us most is user research - where we sit novice users in a lab and walk them through common tasks. Ealier versions of the site had some usability problems. For example, when users realized they could drag photos around, they started dragging them everywhere - even out of the browser. We started to notice common patterns, like dragging to an album on the left hand side navigation. Bit by bit, we fixed these common complaints until we no longer heard of them. Soon, the feedback changed to a more general ‘this is really cool.’ At that point, we made a branch, made it stable, and launched.

As a product manager, you are too close to the product to be able to make this call in a vacuum. Start walking your friends and relatives through the site. Do they get it? Do they like it? If not, keep going. If so, give it a bit more so the influencers digg it, then give it to the world.
* Many people point out that according to some sources, PhotoBucket receives more page views. However, you should understand how this site works: the user hosts their picture at PhotoBucket and posts it to MySpace. In the end, PhotoBucket receives credit for people viewing hosted pictures on MySpace, even if the visitor to MySpace never notices where that picture lives. These are ‘empty page views’ and distort the reach of the site as seen by the press. It works though - so if you’re a startup, do it.