Categories: Articles

Yahoo Go Redefines Mobile Browsing – Where Is The Buzz?

If you’re not lucky enough to have an iPhone, odds are you’ve been struggling with your mobile browsing experience. I know that most people are shocked when I show them the interface and usability on applications like the Facebook mobile platform – especially considering that I am using a Blackberry 8800. You would think that the mobile Web experience would have come a long way since my days at Airborne Entertainment over a half-decade ago where I ran Marketing for Andy Nulman. It hasn’t. With the exception of how far the iPhone has taken mobile browsing, the divide between it and the others is now visible and staggering… until now.

While Yahoo!‘s mobile channel, Yahoo! Go is, by no means, comparable to the iPhone experience, it is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else. I started playing with Yahoo Go this weekend and have been sucked in to the many layers of customization and integration it has. While Yahoo! Go is still in beta, after a couple of minutes of customizing my feeds and checking out flickr on my mobile device, I began having the same feeling I got when hyperlinks were first introduced into a Web browser back in the day. It completely changed my mobile experience (like hyperlinks did for my Web experience) and made me wonder how we ever managed to find anything before.

The simple navigation and introduction of the Carosel seems to integrate a vast array of mobile widgets making the experience second-to-none. From GPS maps to RSS feeds to flickr pictures to the ability to search by just starting to type at any point. I’ve already started hearing rumours that the Yahoo! mobile search product, oneSearch, is quickly becoming a category killer in the Mobile Search space as Google seems to be putting its effort (at the present moment) elsewhere.

Yahoo! Go is an amazing experience and I was shocked by how few people – specifically Marketers (and those in Digital Marketing) – are talking about it. Has Yahoo! Go been overshadowed by the eight-hundred pound Gorilla that is the iPhone, or is it the fact that that even though the iPhone is new, everyone knows what the Mobile Web interface looks like and anything that is not like the iPhone is, simply, sub-par?

After only a few days of fiddling with Yahoo! Go, my Marketing brain thinks that Yahoo! needs to do a better job of getting the word out there. With what limited exposure I’ve had with Yahoo! Go, I feel that, like the iPhone, the experience of it is a game-changer and Yahoo! has an immediate opportunity to gain a serious foothold in the Mobile browser space. It’s clear that search, widgets and a better usability experience are the only (albeit major) components missing to blowing that market wide open, and Yahoo! has just made some serious headway with Yahoo! Go.

Check it out for yourself here: Yahoo! Go.

(full disclosure: while I did appear in an advertisement for Yahoo! Canada this week, this is not where I heard about Yahoo! Go. It was, actually, my Brother who asked me if I had played with it).

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.