In coming years, Yahoo will focus on seeking and adopting new technologies, incorporating user contributions into its services and sites, and extending its reach beyond the PC.
That was the main message from senior executives who spoke during the Sunnyvale, California, company's meeting with financial analysts today.
"You're starting to look today at what we consider the next Yahoo," said chairman and CEO Terry Semel.
Among the company's "big bets" for the coming years is active employment of emerging technologies, such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), Semel said.
Likewise, Yahoo will embrace new trends such as social media, in which online users create and submit content such as videos and blog entries, and participate in categorizing content with tags and labels, he said.
Moreover, the company is intensely involved in delivering services via non-PC devices, such as mobile devices, Semel said.
Video Plans
In the area of video content, Yahoo is developing an "inline video player" that will allow the media group to offer video content and ads inside a page with a consistent look and feel. The media group, headed by Lloyd Braun, manages Yahoo's Web sites and services involving music, games, movies, TV, news, weather, sports, and health.
That group is also busy building what Braun called publishing tools to allow users, such as bloggers, to post content directly into the media group's Web sites.
Braun said that users of Yahoo Finance will soon see improved financial graphs on the site, which came under fire from critics who perceived it as falling behind when rival Google launched a similar site recently with more-advanced, more-dynamic graphs.
Search Plans
In the area of search, where many feel Yahoo is losing the battle to Google, Yahoo will dive head first into social search, inviting users to participate in the discovery, categorization, and sharing of indexed Web sites, said Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice president of search.
While search is currently focused on indexing and retrieving Web documents, the future of the market lies in tapping the knowledge and information that people possess but that isn't found on Web pages, Weiner said.
"As valuable and essential as Web search is to all of us today, we're on the threshold of another shift," he said. "There are billions of people on the planet that possess in theory trillions of knowledge artifacts. How do we start to get at that knowledge?"
The answer is in social bookmarking, such as Yahoo's Del.icio.us service, which lets users save, share, and annotate Web page links; in social media sites such as Yahoo's Flickr, where users can store, label, and share photos; and in search engines such as Yahoo Answers that encourage users to post and answer each other's questions, he said.
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