Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog:
... The “Starting Point” idea, as Ms. Decker explained it, implies two breaks from Yahoo’s past. First, instead of spreading the peanut butter of its efforts across hundreds of sites, it will devote the bulk of its resources to the handful of sections that get the most traffic: the home page, search, news, e-mail and a few others.Second, the measure of success becomes how often users visit, not how long they stay. That encourages the company’s product designers to be more liberal in linking to other sites and opening Yahoo’s interface to a variety of outside applications and partnerships. You can see some of that in Yahoo Buzz, its Digg-like news site, which often provides links to other sites on Yahoo’s home page.
“When we think of ourselves as a starting point, rather than a destination, all of us become more focused on simplifying users’ lives,” she said.
This openness, of course, is a response to the power of Google; not just search, but Google News and iGoogle, all of which are a model of starting points with little effort to link to Google properties.
Ms. Decker articulated Yahoo’s approach to weaving social features throughout its site. ...
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