Go Yahoo! Go

Have you seen Yahoo! Go 2.0? If not, go get it. Go is Yahoo's interpretation of how the mobile web experience should look like, and from all I've seen up until now - they got it right.

Yahoo! Go is a client application that allows you to basically do everything. Starting with search of course, browsing the web, accessing your Yahoo! mail account, accessing your Flickr account, finding directions and maps, checking the weather, news from around the world (via RSS) and more.

Being an all-in-one solution often means compromise in the various components withing the solution, but Yahoo! succeeded in giving a best of breed solution to each and every one of the enclosed components (With the understandable exception that you can only access their own proprietary services such as Yahoo! Mail and Flickr).

Generally, the interface is very user friendly and also "easy on the eyes" (You can see it yourselves in their slightly annoying demo video). Switching between the different applications is done via a carousel at the bottom of the screen. The applications themselves feature the same navigation and text entering interfaces, so once you learned the basics in one app, you are good to go in the others. Yahoo! have even placed an Intro tour that guides you through the interface in the first time.

About the various apps themselves, let's start with the search engine which is custom tailored for the mobile, and knows to bring the most relevant items, whether these are sites, pictures, reviews etc. For example if you search for a celebrity you will immediately get her pictures on the top... If you search for a movie, you'll get links for buying tickets and so on. Giving the relevant items on a mobile device, is even harder than on the web, since you want to give the user the top 80%-90% of the relevant results in the first page, which is difficult enough even on the web, but more difficult when you have the screen of a handset...

When you find what you want - you can browse the site with Yahoo! Go. It doesn't send you to the handset's mobile browser (which often doesn't cut it), instead Go features its own browser that also formats even regular web pages to your mobile, similar to what other mobile browsers such as Opera Mobile do (And this can be a big threat for Opera).

And of course you get ads on the top of the page if Yahoo! wants to, and these are ads from their network, regardless of what site you are browsing... In fact, as mobile advertising is getting more and more mainstream, the strategic value of having a "real estate" on the mobile phone is getting to be extremely important for search engines.

Back to the product: The Maps service is simply amazing, you can ask for directions, get them verbally and see them on the Map (And if you have a GPS, you can see where you are on the map). The weather service also works great, and you can easily add any location that you are interested in. Same goes for RSS news - add your own sources, track specific people or companies etc. You also have sports, finance and entertainment sections that are already configured with content sources.

Flickr access is very easy, and browsing through your pictures or others pictures is very intuitive and surprisingly fast. You need to enter your Yahoo! ID once, and then it automatically recognizes you both on Flickr and in Yahoo! Mail (Which also works great, but Google/Gmail provided such a service a long time ago).

In addition it seems that Yahoo! have dedicated a lot of thought to reducing data traffic, which is considered rightfully as a barrier for acceptance of mobile applications by users. You can check at any time how much data you transferred, and at the end of the session, you see the amount of data transferred. My "test drive" (on Nokia N73) included checking mail, entering my Flickr account and browsing through thumbnails of my pictures, asking for directions in NY and seeing them on the map (plus zooming in, moving the map a bit etc.), searching and browsing a few sites and more - and all of that consumed only about 0.5MB (At least that what Go reported...)

Now, what's the catch? Well the most significant issue now is that their device support matrix is still rather small - a lot of the phones appear on the site as supported but marked with a "coming soon" label. In any case, the support is improving. A few months ago, right after 3GSM 2007, where I originally saw Go, I tried to download it to my SonyEricsson K800i but it wasn't supported. Today it is.

Another small issue is the size of the application: 613KB for the Nokia N73 version... Nowadays it's not much of a problem, since devices have dozens of MB available for apps, but still it can take a lot of time to install over the air, especially if you don't have 3G. In addition, it makes me wonder how the implementation would look on older phones that they claim to be "coming soon".

And of course there's the issue of the content itself. On the web I usually tend to use Google's services, whether it's Gmail, Picasa or Blogger (used to write this blog). The question is whether having a great mobile solution such as Yahoo! Go will change my (and others) usage patterns when it comes to the web.

And while we are talking about Google, let's see what they have to offer: Google mobile services include their Gmail client and a Google Maps client. all the rest of the services are WAP based. Now you may ask what's wrong about WAP? Well, just read on a bit more (you've come so far...)

The Google Maps client interface is not an eye candy, but it has some nice features Yahoo! doesn't have. As for Gmail, I should say a few good words here: Gmail client was truly innovative for its time, both in terms of interface and usability. I am using it for over a year now if I remember correctly, and as a person who doesn't like carrying around my laptop (or using a heavy PDA) it changed my email availability altogether.

Google had a WAP version for Gmail even earlier, and I used that too, but as WAP services often are it was soooo sloooow so I avoided using it too much. So today when people are asking me what's wrong about WAP, I am telling them that the point in time when I started using mail on my mobile as a real alternative was when Gmail client came out (And usually they remember that it was the same for them...)

As I mentioned, aside from the mail and maps, Google offers the other services as well, but in WAP mode, and the experience is very far away than the experience you get with Yahoo! Go. Yahoo! is definitely on the lead here.

So, Yahoo! - you get a big thumbs up from me (I know you were waiting anxiously for this approval...) and Google - start running and fast - the mobile space is one place you don't want to lose to Yahoo!...

P.S. - I know everyone is blogging about the iPhone these days, so I'll make my contribution as well: Yahoo! Go supports the iPhone, and this shows how strong iPhone is from the get go. (And not another word unless Apple wants to send me one so I can review it properly...)