Photos get up close and personal

Posted June 27th, 2007 at 11:31 pm by Susan Mernit, Yahoo! Personals

 4 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News, Video

I haven’t admitted before that one of the reasons I came to work at Yahoo! Personals last year is because I’m an online dater. But it’s true. I am and, as the developers like to say, I eat my own dog food.

So I’m thrilled, both as the product lead for these efforts and as an online dater, by Yahoo! Personals’ release of a set of great new photos features. The photos upgrade that’s now live on our service offers daters — those searching for a date and those creating a profile — great ease of use. The features support users’ discovery and self-expression while being fun and kind of entertaining.

The product marketing story is that Yahoo! Personals users can now add up to 10 photos to their profiles (up from 5 previously), upload photos from multiple file formats (it’s been only JPEG since our initial launch in 2003), and add captions of unlimited length. In addition, all our captions are completely searchable, enabling photo captioning to feed right into search and keyword search as a discovery tool.

These features are incredibly important to dating — our research shows that a photo increases daters’ success by more than 8x. With these new features, Yahoo! Personals offers customers more photo capabilities than any other player in our space. And all captions and photos are reviewed by customer care agents before they go live — in keeping with the safety and security commitment on-line daters expect and demand.

What the online daters who use the service can’t see is that the new features sit on a platform upgrade that’s been in the works for more than a year. We couldn’t have scaled to the ability to accept up to 100,000 new profiles per week (and with 10 times the photos, plus the new elements of captions, that’s a lot of scale) without a new Oracle back end for search, new servers, and a blazing efficient datamap. With this new infrastructure powering search, photos, and the query requests, we can create a new front end experience that takes advantage of Ajax, JSON and PHP to create a Web 2.0-informed environment.

From an online dater’s perspective (that dog food thing again), the new photos features gives me a chance to annotate and label the pictures I put up (as in “that cute child in the photo isn’t mine—he’s my nephew”) and to use our newly enhanced keyword search to find people who label their photos with things that interest me — like comments about that trip to Burning Man or a wine tasting weekend in Paso Robles. I know my dating friends are going to like these features — and we’re going to have a much more vibrant, interesting service because of them.

Of course, one of the things that has me most jazzed is that this is just one in a series of feature releases we have planned for 2007. My team and I are looking forward to releasing all the expressive, fun-to-use features and services we’ve planned for the rest of the year — and making sure our profile and search features have the authenticity, resonance, and ease-of-use online daters crave.

We’ve pulled together a 90-second home-grown video (oh-so-very chic!) to give you a quick glimpse into the lives of real people using the site and a better understanding of how this all works.

Susan Mernit
Senior Director, Product, Yahoo! Personals

Photo from josh_goodman

Post a Comment Bookmark This Digg This

4 Comments Add your own

Crystal | June 29th, 2007 at 12:14 pm

Thanks for letting me post more photos! The new stuff in the video looks awesome, I’m definitely going to go check it out right now.

P.S. How can I meet Ben, he’s cute ;)

Roy | June 29th, 2007 at 1:10 pm

Hi Yahoo Staff!
I have been looking for a link to send you feedback for the longest time and it seems that this may be the only way to reach you.
I have been a yahooligan for 7 years now and want to applaud your fabulous service. You have never let me down. Millions of email entrusted to you have safely made it to me unscathed. I have also tried your wonderful 360 service and am able to connect with my daughter and grandchildren in their latest escapades and adventures. Thank you.
Now I want to voice a deep concern. In the area of your news (which I view nearly every day) I have noticed a very disturbing slant toward liberalism. Specifically the articles about sexual orientation, environmentalism, and gun control. All these things harm and divide our society and harm your customers in America. Please, Please, you folks are way too talented to report such distasteful pablum and propaganda when there is real news that is uplifting and helpful to the social structure of our country. Simply “going with the flow” of the big media news sources isn’t one of Yahoo staff goals or likes is it? Be the leader in the news that you are in the other services that you offer. Thanks again. Bookdad1

gag | June 30th, 2007 at 12:58 pm

Nice video. I liked the Photo Gallery View. It was also nice to see my information against what i want from my ideal mate.

The below is just a thought, i like the present site, its cool….

Could i click on 2-3 profile and then select a scenario.
First we have 2-3 scenario to start with like Party, Beach, Home. Now we have avatars right, so we select 5 each for the above three scenario and while the user creates his profile, their is a pop-up box next to the field asking about the user personality and the user could write some text and then select a avatar.
Then when a user selects 3 profiles and then selects Party,
In that scene we could see three different avatars and if they have text, that would show as a bubble. If the user has not selected or has not filled up any information then they don’t appear in the scenario. So instead of reading all that text, i could look at the avatar and the way it is displayed in the scenario and get an idea about the user.

Latter their could be other users in the scenario too (premium users) way in the background, their could be more scenario’s (college, restaurant, office) , profile holders could dress up for the scenario too.

maurice | July 8th, 2007 at 11:54 am

You introduced several bugs.

1) Keywords searches organized by activity show up with profiles in random order.

2) Previously, one could use roots of words like librar to find library and librarian in keyword searches. This no longer works.

3) On keyword searches where there are multiple pages of matches in gallery view and photos unchecked, often only the first page can be viewed, the rest forget the keyword and show every match. This was actually a bug in the previously release of the software, but in that case, it also erased the keyword entry and never worked.

4) Emailing customer service is nearly impossible because the submit button often complains incorrectly that the form is incomplete.