This is Faceball

Posted August 13th, 2007 at 3:07 pm by John and Dunstan, Faceball Founders

 6 Comments / Filed in: Cool Stuff, Those Crazy Yahoos, Video

If there’s one thing Yahoo! employees strive for, it’s excellence in the area of innovation. We know this because we recently read the inspiring “Yahoo! We Value…” list, and it’s right there in purple and white: 1. Excellence; 2. Innovation. In fact, those two items beat Customer Fixation down to number 3, and that has the word “fixation” in it. So maybe we’d go so far as to say “obsessively striving for excellence in the area of innovation.”

Having gone to the trouble of writing the “Yahoo! We Value…” list, we’re sure upper management is heartened to see two of Yahoo!’s finest taking their ideas to heart. While some employees waste away their days refining dull search algorithms or trying to save the planet, we (John Allspaw and Dunstan Orchard) instead focused on something a little more real, a little more innovative, and a lot more excellent.

Behold the wonder that is Faceball:

More behind-the-scenes action here.

John Allspaw & Dunstan Orchard
Faceball Founders

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6 Comments Add your own

Floyd | August 13th, 2007 at 5:16 pm

At the risk of being called a “Monday morning quarterback”, I found ALL of the non-valued items below to be applicable to Yahoo as of late.

Bureaucracy-Tried to use the Help files recently? On any service? Tried to navigate around Yahoo like you were a new user, and find, well, anything? Or manage a Geocities site?

Broken links-See above. I can’t tell you how lost I get trying to Nav Yahoo’s help files. They all run together, and you end up being unable to go back to where you started. You seriously need to clean this up. Mostly in the Ymail and YGroups areas.

Too big for your britches-See above, plus the recent addition of ads to the paying Yahoo DSL customers. Then add the fact that all your services are so spread out, and some are outright invisible, you can’t find anything truly useful? Even this page was hidden from easily detection.

Closed doors-The spurious suggestion that Yahoo users should resort to using Yahoo Answers instead of getting help from Yahoo directly. The concealing of yahoo services simply by not having them surfaced, and visible to casual browsers. The lack of feedback boards for ALL your services.

Good enough-Incomplete updates of pages related to services that get changed. The state of affairs with the hidden services. The Help files.

Arrogance-Ads issue, and closed doors regarding help requests generate this perception. So did Terry. Forcing or trying to sneak software to users, pushing YA and YToolbar on users at every turn does that too. Not letting people delete their profiles from Y services they don’t like is also a way to look like you have a big head, or could care less about the user in an age of information/identity theft. Many users have no idea where their data can be found. Help pages also qualify here, when “help” is translated as “Yahoo for Dummies”, instead of “10 year user is having troubles”. Advanced Help section required, distiguished from basic use questions.

20/20 hindsight-Hopefully a noticable drop in revenue after the ads issue had people dropping DSL service via AT&T/Yahoo. Perhaps not, I can only hope though, that you learn from this. You can probably get bigger ad bucks from agencies than from users, so perhaps this was a calculated stick in the eye.

A stick in the eye-Ads in YMail felt like this. I left yahoo mail because of this.

Fads-Can you say OMG? *Shudder* Good luck with that.

Missing the boat-Technologically, I would say. Design on several products has me wondering what you were thinking. Most notably the “fully featured” version of Yahoo Groups, and the ad locations on YMail beta.

Behind the curve-Can you say Gmail? 360 is also an oddball, in that it has it’s own inbox, when it should simply be an extension of Yahoo Mail, since they share a profile.

Bugs-Most new products roll out to clients with bugs. Some bugs are long-standing ones.

Head in the sand-Playing Faceball, and producing videos about it, instead of focusing on shortcomings and making meaningful change.

One size fits all-Rolling out changes to ALL users as a default instead of allowing user-customization options.

Playing catchup-Be Yahoo. Don’t try to be Google.

90% Spam-Welcome to Yahoo mail. I get spam on accounts I haven’t even used. My main address is up to 60+ spams a DAY. Most hit my bulk folder, but a few still get through. That’s still 90% of my e-mail traffic, even if I never see it. Improvement needed. Abandoned Yahoo Groups with nothing BUT spammers. Spam filters on Groups that catch actual user messages and let spams through.

I’m very happy you find and take the time to play office games and produce videos about them, but with so many of your ‘non valued’ things that I encounter daily, it sure would be nice if you blogged about your hard work and how specifically you are listening to users and acting on their feedback. So far, only Yahoo Groups (the beta team) has shown REAL
progress and action on that front. Check them out, they are really hitting the ball nicely. I hear YMail may be turning that corner too. I can only hope. Someday, I may appreciate your efforts at developing faceball. Just not today.

Good luck.

MattC | August 14th, 2007 at 6:52 am

Thoroughly enjoyed this video and now I have to get some Faceball started around here!!

Sebastian | August 14th, 2007 at 8:10 am

Awesome, thanks for a good laugh … can’t wait for the reaction when you send balls to the ‘plex ;)

mojotek | August 14th, 2007 at 1:24 pm

Absolutely brilliant… The Flickr clusters are hilarious. Allen Martin from CBS will now go down as another internet cliche.

Loran | September 4th, 2007 at 7:49 pm

Johnny Allspaw. I’m surfing the web, minding my own business and I thought– hey, I wonder what John is up to. So I surf Flickr and find the faceball interview! HA! May your fun NEVER stop! I miss you. You old housemate from the Haight.

David | November 8th, 2007 at 9:42 am

Around February of 2007 we here at McAfee started playing Faceball too. We play a little differently though. I think we’ll make a video and post it for your enjoyment. Maybe we can join the two leagues! Of course, if the lawyers at Major League Faceball find out we might be sending a cease and desist letter. :-)

Good stuff! Office diversions are essential to creativity!