Add to iTunesBradley Horowitz - VP of the Advanced Development Division Yahoo!
Introduction
Tonight I have a special episode of Read/WriteTalk. I sat down with Bradley Horowitz, VP of the Advanced Development Division Yahoo! We discussed to hacks that were launching after being conceived at their internal hack day on March 23rd. We also discussed the ‘hack ethic’ inside of Yahoo.
You can also see my accompanying post on Read/WriteWeb.
Links
Transcription
| Sean Ammirati: Bradley, thanks for joining me today. | |
| Bradley Horowitz: My pleasure. | |
| Sean Ammirati: Great. So if you could start by just giving us a little background on the Yahoo Hack Days, which I guess is where some of these products come from, and then we’ll jump right down into the products as well. | |
| Bradley Horowitz: Sure. Hack is really more than even Hack Days. It’s a program at Yahoo that includes a speaker series, an Internet site, a mailing list. And then I think the Hack Days are sort of the crown jewels. They’re a chance for engineers to basically build something that they’re passionate about, that could be totally outside the purview of their prescribed work. | |
| 01:01 | And in fact, some of the specific features we’ll talk about today came from people outside of the groups that they formally fit in within the Yahoo org chart. So it’s fun, all these kind of cross-pollination happens. And these Hack Days have just really taken on a life of their own. It’s very much wedded into the culture of Yahoo. |
| And even at this time, when the media has widely reported struggles and the internal challenges we have at Yahoo, the Hack spirit is very much alive. And I’m really happy to be sharing with you today a couple of innovations that I think are representative of the kind of things that we see coming out in Hack on a continual basis. | |
| Sean Ammirati: Great. So, you mentioned the different components. How often do you do the Hack Days just before you jump into those products? | |
| Bradley Horowitz: Yeah, we do Hack Days on a quarterly basis at headquarters in Sunnyvale. So once a quarter, we do those. But each of the different regions, the different offices around the world have adopted it and made it their own. | |
| 02:03 | And we also do these things called Open Hack Days, where we open up the doors of Yahoo and invite others to come onto our campus and build on top of our platforms. And we’ve done that most famously a year ago, in Sunnyvale. We had Beck come to Yahoo and we had some musical talent, and kicked off the Open Hack program about a year ago. And then, about three months ago, we had him again in London with the BBC. And that was also hugely successful. |
| And then we’ve got an Open Hack Day in Bangalore in early October. And so that will be our first one in Bangalore. So we’ve got both the internal ones which kind of run on a heartbeat once a quarter, and the open ones, which they’re averaging a couple a year. But my hope is that we can get those on a more regular cycle and continue to take them on tour, and have them in Asia and in Africa, and Australia, all around the world, wherever the talent may be. | |
| 03:03 | Sean Ammirati: That’s wonderful. How many people come to these open ones, or have been at the first couple you’ve done? |
| Bradley Horowitz: I think the Beck one, we had probably between 400 and 500 folks. And I think we had close to 300 Hacks submitted. I honestly can’t keep track. We’ve had so many Hack Days. But generally, we’re very very open. We really throw the doors open. We don’t have a lot of qualifications or requirements. If you’re there to build something, and you’re passionate about it, and it’s cool, then come on by. We don’t want to discourage people from coming and trying it. | |
| People come and do all kinds of creative things. The only requirement that we do have is that you use some Yahoo technology in your solution. And it can be mashed up with the competitors’ technology. That’s fine. So you could take Google Maps and Yahoo Local, and kind of bring them together and mash up. So long as there’s a Yahoo ingredient, that’s fine by us. | |
| 04:07 | And some people kind of flirt with the margins of that requirement. In London, there was somebody who literally built a small rocket, and launched the rocket at their Hack. And they were looking for a Yahoo technology, they printed out a couple of pages of our documentation, crumpled it up into a ball and put it in the nose cone of the rocket. And there you have it, there was their little bit of Yahoo in their solution. |
| Sean Ammirati: That’s wonderful. | |
| Bradley Horowitz: We’re pretty easy with that. | |
| Sean Ammirati: Okay, well let’s jump in and talk about these products. I know you’re on a tight schedule here, so.. | |
| Bradley Horowitz: Sure. Well, the first one I’d like to talk about is something we’re calling Map Mixer. And it came from a Hack that happened in our internal Q1 Hack Day. And it’s really a very clever concept. It basically allows you to take the power of Yahoo Maps, which has both street maps globally, as well as satellite imagery, and combine that with a much more personal, sometimes more of a colloquial map. | |
| 05:08 | And by that I mean if you go to Yahoo Maps today and you zoom up on a big institution like University of California, Berkeley, which is a couple of miles from my house], many acres of Berkeley. That all appears as a big green splotch on Yahoo Maps. It just says, “University of California, Berkeley”. |
| If I want to know what’s inside that green splotch, I go over to berkeley.edu, the Cal site, and I can navigate through their website and get the campus map. That campus map will tell me where the dorms are, where the buildings are, all the kinds of details I need to know to get around. | |
| What Map Mixer allows you to do is really combine the best of both of those worlds. So I can take any map, any image really, and upload it into Yahoo Maps and then align it and rotate it and register it so that it’s basically glued on Yahoo Maps. | |
| 06:05 | So I can pan around on Yahoo Maps, I’ll pan around in this overlay. And I can even control the translucency, so I can kind of make it semi-opaque, so I can see things under it, or I can make it fully opaque, and it will kind of be on top of the Yahoo Map. |
| And in that way, you can do all kinds of interesting things. And we’re really excited about launching this. Because we have, like many platforms, no idea what people are going to do. But some early examples of things that Yahoo’s did, one great application is kind of a time travel. You can take a map of Boston as it appears in the 1800s and overlay that on the current map of Boston, and then kind of make it translucent, and kind of see how the city has evolved over a couple hundred years. | |
| 06:55 | You could do things like park services. You can, today, kind of zoom up on in. But once you get off the roads, all of that area on Yahoo Maps just looks like big green coastline. But you can upload a park service map and kind of see where the picnic tables are, where the turnoffs are, where the restrooms are. I kind of would like that. |
| And I should also mention that these maps that you upload can be made personal, so that they can be of value to the person who actually did the work, but you can put them in and make it public. And that way, other people can discover them, comment on them and have one too. | |
| Sean Ammirati: Very interesting. | |
| Bradley Horowitz: That’s Map Mixer. | |
| Sean Ammirati: And that will be launched – both these products, just to be clear, they’re launching on Thursday? | |
| Bradley Horowitz: Yeah, Wednesday night, 9 PM, Pacific Time, they are both pushing out. And I should mention, also, that there’s a really cool feature in Map Mixer. The hard part about it is really registering a map. And there’s a technology that was created by the innovator, who made it possible for you to just stick a couple of pins in the map. | |
| 08:03 | Basically, what you do is, you find a point in one map, like the intersection of two roads, and you find the corresponding point in the Yahoo Map. So you click here and click there. And then you find another point, the intersection of two different roads, and click that in one, and the other. |
| And like a big sheet of rubber, the map is kind of stretched and rotated, and then applied to the Yahoo Map. So that tedious process of trying to kind of get them to conform is made a lot easier by this point matching technology. | |
| Sean Ammirati: Okay. Cool. So that is pretty remarkable. Just to talk quickly about… So this was developed in your first quarter Hack Day, you said? | |
| Bradley Horowitz: Yeah, it was a Q1 Hack Day. | |
| Sean Ammirati: So when was that? | |
| Bradley Horowitz: I have to get back with the exact date, but it was some time during Q1. So it was probably sort of the end of the quarter, based on my fabled memory. | |
| 09:00 | Sean Ammirati: Okay. So I was just trying to get a sense for what the process looked like from when that Hack Day occurred, until now. Can you shed a little light on that? |
| Bradley Horowitz: Yeah. The innovator, in this case, was not a part of the Maps team. He’s actually part of the Travel team. And so this was built by him, in collaboration with the Maps folks. And it took basically less than two quarters to go from the germ of an idea that he first had and showed off in the Hack Day, to a feature which is launching in beta tomorrow. | |
| And in some cases – I don’t have a lot of detail on this – in some cases, based on the priorities of that particular product group, this may have even been something that he kind of moonlighted in, kind of a personal project that he kept aloft. Or, depending on the priorities of the group, he may have been given the green light to kind of work a little time on this just for a while. So I don’t really have the detail on this case study here. | |
| 10:04 | But I’ll tell you that it wouldn’t have been but for the passion of someone who saw a cool idea, and then rallied support for it. There’s been a lot of internal use of this tool, and just a wonderful dialogue amongst Yahoo about ways to improve it and fine tune it, and kind of thought experiments about the ways that people will end up using it. |
| Sean Ammirati: Interesting. Just for his edification, what’s his name? | |
| Bradley Horowitz: His name is Nimit Maru, an engineer from Yahoo! Travel for MapMixer | |
| Sean Ammirati: Okay. All right, that’s cool. | |
| Bradley Horowitz: I think it’s Nimit Maru. I’m sorry, I don’t have his name. | |
| Sean Ammirati: No problem. | |
| Bradley Horowitz: I’ll follow it up before the end of the call. | |
| Sean Ammirati: Okay, great. And then there’s one other product that’s launching as well? | |
| Bradley Horowitz: Yeah. Another product I want to just talk about is something we’re calling Shop By Color. And Shop By Color is a feature that’s easy to explain, relatively easy compared to Map Mixer. | |
| 11:11 | Yahoo Shopping is a huge, comprehensive index of products on the web. And we’ve created, for years, the ability to do parameterized search. It’s like, I’m in there, and I can say, “Find me pants.” And then on the left rail you say, “Between this price and that price, that are for males, that are made of cotton,” etc. And so I can very quickly kind of scroll down through that product catalog and get to exactly what I want. |
| Now, what we haven’t been able to do is expose color. And if you had ever done any shopping at any retail outlets, you’ll know that color is something that these outlets are using to kind of add more brands. So I’ll go to the Gap, and I’ll by a gray shirt and they’ll call it “slate”. And I’ll go to J.Crew, and I’ll buy the same shirt, and they’ll call it “charcoal”. | |
| 12:03 | So they’re coming up with all kinds of things, like concorde gray and fresh lilac and things like that. You have no idea what these colors actually mean.They’re just kind of fancy brand things. |
| What Shop By Color is going to allow you to do is actually have a color palette on that left rail. And if I’m looking for shoes, or clothes or like products of a certain color, I can just simply click that color, and find pants that are not only costing between $50 and $75, but ones that are green or gray or black, or whatever it is I’m looking for. | |
| And so there’s a lot of magic to kind of making that work at the scale we’re talking about. We’ve got over 10 million objects indexed. And I think it’ll go a very long way towards providing a better experience for buying, especially adapting, I think, where color is such an important aspect of what it is you’re looking for. | |
| 13:05 | Sean Ammirati: Interesting. |
| Bradley Horowitz: And I do have the names of the developers who built this. I’m going to butcher them, but I’ll do my best: Hayro Kolukisaoglu and Sundeep Tirumalareddy. And they’re members of the Yahoo Shopping team. And it’s just a fantastic feature. And I also want to mention that one of the innovations that they bring is really, the selection of that color palette. | |
| And my understanding is that they did this not only through analysis of the 10 million objects that we have, so you kind of want to be sort of specific to kind of find the most salient colors that are represented in that corpus, but also some user experience testing to make sure that the actual experience of using those colors made sense to users. And that was kind of expressive enough to get everything they might want to get to. | |
| 14:02 | Sean Ammirati: Interesting. And it was just two guys, for two quarters, that put this together, then, in this case? |
| Bradley Horowitz: Again, I don’t have details into actually how the feature unrolled. But this will also push out tomorrow night, at 9 PM. So Wednesday, 9 PM this feature will go live on Yahoo Shopping. | |
| Sean Ammirati: Okay. Interesting. So both these sound quite cool. I wanted to step back up for a moment. I know time is a short period today. But I have just one more question for you that hit me, as you were going through these, which is: on these external Hack Days, I’m curious, what are the Yahoo products that are – or Yahoo properties, or web services, whatever – that are most popular for people to be integrating with? Do you have any information on that? | |
| Bradley Horowitz: Well, I think I can put you in touch with the Yahoo Developer network folks, who have a lot of information on that. And they’ll be able to say specifically, kind of in rank order, what are our more popular APIs. | |
| 14:59 | But what I think is wonderful is that we do have such a smorgasbord of infrastructure that we bring to the world. And I think Maps are high on that list. But Yahoo Search, Yahoo Answers, I think, Flickr has become kind of a developers’ paradise. So almost every product we put to market now has associated API with it. So Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Mail now have an API. |
| So just about everything we put to market becomes just another arrow in the quiver for some creative innovator to come and kind of build, or to work from. So it’s hard to say, exactly, which are the most popular. I think Flickr certainly pops to mind, because you can do such great eye candy with Flickr. And we see a lot of people, especially in the Open Hack Days kind of mashing up lyric service with Flickr, so they kind of visualize a song, and things like that. Lots of people using Flickr. | |
| 16:09 | A lot of people also using Map Search. Those are popular, powerful services that are really hard for people to recreate. So we find a lot of people leveraging the work that we’ve done. |
| Sean Ammirati: Interesting. And so, one other point. Actually last week, I interviewed Biz Stone from Twitter on Read/WriteTalk. And he had mentioned that ten times the amount of traffic that they get through their website comes in through their APIs. | |
| With this emphasis on these Yahoo Hack Days both internally and externally, and having people leveraging your APIs, do you guys monitor that web percentage? I’m sure it’s nowhere near.. Yahoo has a lot of very popular websites. But what percentage of some of these popular web services’ traffic come through their APIs? | |
| 16:59 | Bradley Horowitz: Yeah, that’s a good question. We certainly monitor that. I don’t have any top of mind statistics to give you. I think things like Pipes, which is a really innovative service that allows people create kind of dynamic mash-ups through IDE but then run the pipes to a simple RSS feed, so I can kind of subscribe to a pipe and run it. |
| And in fact, that’s an API call right there. So the authoring tool and the editor creates a pipe for use. But then every run of the pipe, if you will, is just a programmatic exercise of an engine. That probably has similar ratios to Twitter, if not more so. I’m sure it varies greatly on a product by product basis. | |
| Sean Ammirati: Right. What are your expectations around these two products that will be launching tomorrow night? | |
| Bradley Horowitz: I think one of the great things about Yahoo, and the great things about this program is that our expectation is that we put them out there and we learn. | |
| 17:59 | We might learn that users love it, and we’ll continue to double down and invest resources and kind of make it increasingly great. Or we might find it doesn’t resonate with users and that the resource is best put elsewhere. So kind of putting them out there in beta, and being good listeners, and watching what happens next especially with something like Maps which is contingent upon the uptake in the community. |
| You know, the feature doesn’t really work unless people are going to invest energy to actually use it, then it becomes a thriving ecosystem. So a lot of the expectations around this is to kind of keep our ear to the ground, do what we can to facilitate that community and be good listeners. | |
| And I wanted to mention, I looked it up over on my.. Here. The developer of Map Mixer technology is Nimit Maru. I just want to make sure he gets credit for that great work. | |
| Sean Ammirati: Wonderful, thank you. Anything else you wanted to make sure we covered today, Bradley? | |
| 19:04 | Bradley Horowitz: That’s it today. And I think this was exactly what we hope to share with you and your audience. And we hope people will try it out. Again, we’re here to be good listeners, so please let us know what you think. |
| Sean Ammirati: That’s wonderful. We will have these up as soon as it’s ready for public consumption. So thanks for your time. | |
| Bradley Horowitz: Thanks for your time. | |
| Sean Ammirati: All right, guys. Thank you. |
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