In the web world the, according to Alexa, the big three in traffic are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft's MSN portal. A lot of this volume comes from search as the same three are the most popular search engines although the order in search is Google, Yahoo and MSN.
These three sites are the kings of the Internet at the moment. They all have tons of money to spend on R&D and market research. And they need to spend it so that they can hop on the next big thing quickly enough to at least maintain their position. I believe that mobile data, especially the mobile web is going to be one of those next big things so I thought it would be interesting to see what the big three have been up to in mobile.
Yahoo has had a mobile presence since 1999. At first the service was aimed at PDA's. But by early 2000 Yahoo had a WAP site which not only had news, sports and finance sections, weather, White and Yellow Pages search, driving directions, and also allowed users access to their mail accounts, calendar, address book, Yahoo messenger and Yahoo auctions. 
Yahoo already had the ability to sync your Yahoo calendar and address book with Outlook, Notes, ACT or Palm Desktop. This meant that with WAP your phone could give you access to your business appointments and contacts. Simultaneously with the WAP portal launch, Yahoo released Mobile Alerts, a rules based engine that would send a text message to your phone when an email arrived, a meeting was starting soon or a stock price passed a trigger amount. This combination of integrated was very advanced stuff for it's time. 1999 and 2000 were the heady days of early WAP enthusiasm. However, user acceptance of WAP failed to meet expectations as the high data costs, slow response and limited content of early WAP did not live up to the initial hype. Nonetheless, Yahoo continued to maintain and support their WAP services but did not make any major enhancements for four years.
That all changed in 2004, Yahoo, apparently sensing that mobile was about to take off began releasing new mobile projects one after another. 
Yahoo Photos, which enabled users to view, print and share camera phone photos uploaded by MMS or email came out in June, 2004. Late in 2004, Yahoo released a completely redesigned mobile portal. The new site was WAP2, although the original WAP1 version is still available and works as well as ever. The new portal features all the content of the WAP1 version enhanced with small photos accompanying some of the news stories plus two new features Yahoo Mobile Search and a RSS reader.
Mobile search is hot right and Yahoo obviously wants to be a player. Yahoo's version of search for mobile has three components, Local, Images and Web. Local search is a little strange. It's as if it were based on the Business White Pages and returns listings that contain the search string in their name. Thus a search for "restaurants" will only find those establishments with "restaurant(s)" in their names. This means that it's really only practical to search by an establishment's name. Once you have found what you are looking for, Yahoo displays your destination on an appropriately small (128 x 128px) map and provides driving directions to it. Image search retrieves thumbnail images from Yahoo's huge database of the images it finds spidering the web. 
Web search only seems to appear when the browser is on a large screen device like a Treo. It is just Yahoo's desktop Web Search with only the result listings reformatted for the small screen. Selecting a search hit takes you right to the site with no transcoding - which is probably why that option doesn't appear on the Yahoo menu when you connect with a mainstream phone like the ROKR or Nokia 6101.
I mentioned Yahoo's mobile RSS reader last week in my piece comparing mobile RSS, in summary it was an also ran in this category. It makes the feeds you have subscribed to on your desktop at my.yahoo.comm available on your mobile, sort of. All Yahoo shows you on the mobile is a long scrolling list of the titles and descriptions of the items in a feed. It takes a lot of scrolling to see all the items and there is no way to go to the full item content.
In July, 2005 Yahoo launched an SMS search. You text it a search string and it sends back the results in another SMS.
Finally, Yahoo has a public beta of Yahoo Mobile Shopping which I reviewed in September. It's still in beta and doesn't seem to have changed since my review. Device support is still spotty and it's currently only useful as a price comparison tool. There is no way to visit the seller’s site or get more information, not even a phone number.
Seven new Yahoo mobile releases in the last 18 months clearly indicate Yahoo's commitment to a mobile future. I'm not particularly impressed with the quality of Yahoo's Local and RSS Reader mobile features. But I'm sure Yahoo has better mobile goodies in the development pipeline. In the past year they have hired both Russell Beattie and Christian Lindholm who have got to be two of most
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posted by Dennis Bournique
November 30, 2005 @ 9:23 pm
7 View Comments
