Suggestions sent to Yahoo re: 360 Profiles
Joseph Dunphy
currently in Beta, and maybe we'll see if they are as open to
listening to user suggestions as they suggest that they are. By the
way, here's my new profile.
http://360.yahoo.com/commonsense666atlast
It looks a lot nicer than the old style profiles, though being
grandfathered in with a .gif on my old style profile,
http://profiles.yahoo.com/commonsense666atlast
I have hesitated to use the option to have the old profile redirect to
the new one. How many people have moving animations on those profiles,
now that Yahoo won't let you upload .gifs to them any more? It's a
little bit of fun and I don't want to toss that away. What isn't as
much fun are a few functionality issues, which are what the
suggestions I just sent in were about. Simple things, really ...
1. Looking at my blogroll, I noticed that instead of being set against
the white background the text was set against, it was set against the
page background. This is a mistake, because it just about guarantees
that the links on the blogroll will be almost unreadable.
In order to make the profile page look nice, one has to have some kind
of tonal contrast - light against dark, dark against light. Light
against light is just going to look washed out. But we only get to
choose one set of link colors, which will be chosen to make the links
stand out well against the light background of the boxes the text is
in. What stands out well against a light background, does poorly
against a dark one.
2. You've been suggesting that we link to our Photo albums from our
360 profiles. Many of us have held off on doing so, and indeed from
even using that service to any great extent, because structurally that
service presents severe problems for a webmaster, which could easily
be solved by one simple change.
Allow the user to attach a homepage link to his Yahoo photo album. The
problem with using Yahoo!Photos right now, from a webmaster's point of
view, is that if one provides a link to one's Yahoo album, there's no
easy path back to one's site from the album. The visitor who's been
wandering around isn't going to keep back arrowing to get back to
where he was, he's just going to say "to h*** with this" and close the
window, providing the webmaster's site with no further traffic.
What would be ideal, though I don't know if you'd be willing to do it,
would be to allow the user to create links specific to the albums, and
links that globally covered his entire album, maybe sort of the way
Proboards handles headers and footers. That way, if one had a page
about Lousiana and a few boxes worth of pre-Katrina photos, for
example, one could post the photos in a Lousiana album, link from the
Louisiana page and have the visitor return to the Louisiana page when
he got done looking at the pictures. I think you might be positively
impressed with the improvements in both the volume and quality of
participation in that part of Yahoo, were you to offer that option.
Failing that, though, as simple a thing as a link at the top of the
photo album page linking back to the user's 360 profile would be a
great help.
3. One very clear difficulty with the blog on the 360 profile, as it
is currently set up, is the url, which is something so cumbersome and
random looking that the blog's own author is unlikely to ever remember
it. Yes, you've set up a short url option, which allows the user to
send his visitors to
but the moment the visitor goes to the blog (with its strange
alphanumeric soup url) and comes back, he'll be back at the profile
with a similarly indecipherable url. As you folks run a search engine
yourselves, I'm sure you know the implication of that - all of the
other search engines will take one look, see two different sites with
identical content, and penalize the user accordingly.
This creates further problems for the user should the feed not be
working right, as it isn't at the moment, because he can't send people
directly to his blog. He has to route them through his profile where,
failing to see new titles in the feed, they'll conclude that there are
no new entries to read and will just move on.
Why not just give the blog a shorturl option like the one for the
profile, something like
http://360.yahoo.com/username/blog
and set the system so that if one goes back to the 360 profile from
the attached Yahoo blog, that the url one will arrive at will be the
shorturl version of the profile url
Easier to remember, easier to give out.
Joseph Dunphy
For further commentary, or to return to the post on my blog linking
here or to your ring:
http://groups.google.com/group/joseph_dunphy/web/yahoo-360-redirection