Yahoo!, VoIP and Blogging Usability
Saw this AP story last night about Yahoo! buying DialPad, and assumed the so-called blogsphere would be abuzz with regard to this particular acquisition, especially since I’ve been hearing rumours about Yahoo! and Skype for over a year now (ever since, in fact, Yahoo! was a client of mine at a different firm). Imagine my surprise that Technorati turns up a mellow 109 posts, only 20 of which have been posted in the last six hours (as of 11:30 EST). So, let’s make that 110/21.
The primary reason for this post is a blogging-related interest in the continuing acceleration - at least around the edges of various markets - of integration between internet access, wireless technology and communications behavior. Clearly, there are usability issues involved here - ones which, in the broadest possible sense, connect to blogging.
Specifically, I am referring to the element of broad consumer adoption that depends on the usability of a product or application. Usability doesn’t guarantee adoption by itself - price, marketing, distribution and functional need (to name the basics) all play major roles. Especially, perhaps, the need or lack thereof for the product. But there’s nothing that accelerates broad adoption so much as a product that’s brainlessly easy to use for the average person who might need it. If you get it into someone’s hands (which is a function of price, marketing, distribution and need) and it works as or better than expected, look out. If it doesn’t, that will hold adoption back. Might not kill it - but certainly it won’t achieve iPod like status.
VoIP is clearly getting there. DiaplPad says it has 14 million registered users - and the ever-saucy Skype claims 42 million in its press release boilerplate. Vonage, another spoiler in this space, doesn’t seem to obviously tout registered users, preferring number of calls made for some reason. And Verizon, slow moving giant that it is, offers something called VoiceWing, but also doesn’t provide an easily-accessible breakout of adoption in DialPad terms. However, the point remains that there are tens of millions of them - which means in part that the service is not only worth using, but also CAN be used. (NB: projections of households using VoIP are lower, at least according to this Investor’s Business Daily article, which cites 3 million in 2005.)
So, to get back on topic, I’m delighted that Yahoo! has entered this game - both with its IM product, with which you can currently make calls, and now with DialPad. Why? Because while their homepage is (unfairly) less celebrated than Google’s in terms of usability, these people know their interactive products. As pioneers in search as well as webmail and IM, they are much more familiar with the real challenges of “consumerization” of an internet product than - arguably - independent companies or even behemoths like the Baby Bells/ex-RBOCs. They don’t always produce the flashiest versions of applications - but they are often among the most usable for mainstream internet audiences.
So, I’m betting that when Yahoo! figures out what it wants to do with VoIP, it will accelerate the usability of the field. Which leads me back to blogs. We think that, perhaps, the frenzied early adoption and recent hype is disguising some major usability drawbacks - at least when it comes to actual blog creation as well as blog consumption. Certainly, now that the media is engaged and Technorati and Bloglines are tracking 10-12 million blogs, this “medium” is well out of the box. But CoFactors believes that for regular folks, the phenomenon might be more abstract than personally relevant. So far. Things are changing superfast in this space, as Technorati’s beta and Bob Wyman’s comment on one of our posts demonstrate.
Still, what we’re going to do over the next few weeks is organize some usability tests related to blogging just to see whether this perceived gap truly exists - and if so, where aspects of it accrete. So stay tuned to learn what we reveal when we finish our private-label tests.
JF
