Free Rise

John Battelle asks: “Is Yahoo dead?” and answers “I don’t think so.”

His reasoning is that Yahoo (sorry, I’m not going to include the exclamation point) can be a gigantic-scale platform for developers.

Indeed, Yahoo is very big — bigger than most people realize. When I worked there two years ago, I would often shock Bay Area technorati types with basic facts about Yahoo’s position. Number one in email. Number one in news. Number one in sports. Number one overall page on the web (since eclipsed by Google.com).

Long forgotten by Sili Valley types who watched Google build an information empire and Facebook a social media kingdom, Yahoo remained and still remains a force across the world.

(Full disclosure: My wife still works there, editing their women’s site Yahoo Shine, which is itself immensely successful in reaching its core audience of young women. I also still have some very good friends who work at Yahoo.)

When I worked there, Yahoo was decidedly a company adrift. Bad news — China dissidents, the collapse of the Microsoft merger, high-profile attrition, leaked discontent — seemed to overwhelm senior management, who themselves weren’t rah-rah types conditioned to keep the rank-and-file engaged.

But in spite of the consistent ugliness, Yahoo has soldiered on and even improved some of its best assets. The new, bolder Flickr is a huge improvement for the broadband age. The home page, stocked with great editorial and optimized to the user, still makes it nearly impossible not to click on something. My Yahoo is still the default home page for millions. Yahoo News and Sports are still the very best editorially-driven experiences in those categories. Yahoo has powerful market share in many emerging and established global markets. And Yahoo’s loyal user base across mail and IM remains its greatest asset. All those properties (except Flickr) are chock full of ad units, keeping everything comfortably monetized. So there’s a lot of goodness coming out of Sunnyvale.

Is Yahoo going to be a powerful developer platform in 2015? Maybe. Maybe not. While Yahoo’s scale, neutrality, and brand trust are undeniable, the expectations of Yahoo’s user base is still significantly different in character from those of Apple or Google or RIM. And hiring the right people to do this kind of thing — building out and managing a development platform — is crazy-hard in 2010. Double-digit unemployment doesn’t apply to web and mobile technologies; just check out the job listings at any big tech company for the evidence.

It may not even matter. Yahoo never developed a serious RSS reader. Did that matter? There’s still no evidence that people will want to run custom apps on a web page, Farmville be damned. (Facebook’s value is the social graph, not the web canvas.)

Either way, Yahoo is still huge. It can be bigger. It can be better. And Sili Valley is foolish to forget it.

It’s a lousy time to be in the world of television. Until the broadband video boom of the mid-2000s, TV was the primary entertainment, information, and infotainment medium in the world. Now? It seems a bit like a low-function technological relic, like a cassette player.

Live TV depends on two revenue streams to support itself: commercials and subscriber fees. The former is threatened by time-shifting (Tivo and DVRs), the latter by DVDs. And both are being eaten by web video. Granted, the networks earn revenue off authorized web streams and DVDs, but at returns that define cannibalization.

Imagine you’re the head of programming for a network. How would you compete? If you’re NBC, you plan for a leaner future and perform the equivalent of downsizing, replacing your 10pm drama hour with a cheap talk show. You’re in fourth place, after all, and a whole generation of young adults came of age in a time when “broadcast” meant nothing more than “the low-number channels on cable.” You gotta do what you gotta do to get more eyeballs on your channel, no matter whose eyeballs they may be.

But if you’re running a nichey cable network, your goals are different. Take FX, which runs edgy, young-adult-oriented dramas and comedies. Much of their audience has probably moved most of their video viewing to their laptops, and many of the remaining TV viewers (such as yours truly) watch their programs on DVR and skip commercials.

How does FX fight this? They tease. And they compete.

This is a quick snapshot of a promo FX ran last night during the season premiere of its dark sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It promotes a “COVERT SCREENING” of something that’s unavailable on web video outlets. Later promos teased about sexual and violent content, and also promised “you only get to see it once.”

Since I was watching Sunny on DVR, I only caught the first 30 seconds. It’s some kind of anime show. Tivo called it “To Be Announced,” and you know what? It only showed once.

So FX created an event that only people who watched Sunny live could enjoy. It’s all Gabbo-style hype, but it’s an also a direct admission that television is desperately trying to bring people back into their living rooms, by any tactics necessary. Good luck with that.

In his latest Comedy Central special, Patton Oswalt ponders going back 10 years in time to tell his past self about the wonders of 2009. I’m paraphrasing here:

“What’s that you’re listening to? Oh yeah, our old Walkman. What’s in it?”

“Oh you know, a mix tape with our 25 favorite songs.”

“That was a great tape. I’ll tell you what. Pull out that tape. Break it in half. That’s how big your Walkman is going to be in 2009.”

“Wow. How many songs can that hold?”

“Every song you’ve ever heard, or ever will hear, or will ever be written.”

“What’s that cost? Like a million dollars?”

“No, no, no. They’ll be everywhere. You’ll get them in gift bags and try to re-gift them to your nephew, and even he will be like, ‘Thanks a lot, [expletive].’”

This is more or less how I feel about EA’s TeamBuilder application for NCAA Football 10. I don’t know if I could even describe it to my past-version without him having a full mental breakdown.

When I was a kid, I was a huge football nerd. (OK, I’ve steadfastly failed to mature on this front.) My nerdy pastime was creating fake teams, complete with rosters, stats, uniforms, histories, and mascots. You may ask, “For what purpose, Eric?” And then I would pity you for not have a childhood passion of your own.

Anyway, fast forward 20 years. EA Sports has released NCAA Football 10, which is the first version of the game I’ve bought in years. You’ve always been able to create teams in the game (as well as in the Madden NFL series), but with the TeamBuilder web app, you can now create whole teams from scratch, including uploading custom logos for the helmets.

And I’m majorly geeking out.

While the product itself bears some of the flaws you’d expect for a 1.0 release, TeamBuilder works on many levels for the gamer:

• It creates an emotional attachment to the game. You can put your little Division III art school in the Rose Bowl. You can re-create a historical team (’85 Hurricanes!) you cheered for and play them against the current edition. You can even make yourself (or an idealized, 19-year-old version of yourself) the QB if you want.
• It integrates what the web does best (data manipulation and communication) with what the console does best (game play).
• It socializes the experience. You can make your teams available for anyone to download onto their console, and you can download others’ creations seamlessly. If some other NCAA fan has already done the work for you, you can play with his team, and even tweak it to make it your own.

NCAA 10 is also loaded with other shiny things, including deep integration with ESPN and a mode that ties the game to the real-world NCAA football season. This integration isn’t a gimmick; it’s a key value of the game. And my inner 12-year-old couldn’t be more excited about it.