Goodbye, Yahoo! Tech

Note: see “Disclaimer” in the sidebar. This does not represent an official statement by Yahoo!, but merely my personal reflections and memories.

Yahoo! announced today that Yahoo! Tech will be closing on March 11, 2010. This has a very personal resonance for me, because I was the lead engineer for the construction of Yahoo! Tech.

Yahoo! Tech represented an important milestone, not only in my personal career, but also in the history of Yahoo! At the time it was launched (April, 2006), it was the first new property launched by the Yahoo! Media group in over five years. It was one of Yahoo!’s first forays into original content, and one of the first Yahoo! sites where video (the online show Hook Me Up) was a primary factor. It was one of the first, if not the first, sites at Yahoo! to rely primarily upon original content (bloggers) rather than aggregating content that was created elsewhere. And, it was considered very “cutting edge” in its design and frontend features—the rounded corners and bold colors (green and orange? seriously?) were very much in vogue at the time (an early review called it “an explosion in the web 2.0 factory”) and a wild change from the traditional Yahoo! designs. See the Wikipedia article for more details.

From a web technology standpoint, Yahoo! Tech was also groundbreaking. It was the first site at Yahoo! to be built entirely on a service-oriented architecture, meaning that all of the content for the site was accessed via web services (mostly REST-style HTTP requests) instead of older, more traditional methods. The front-end was rendered entirely using XSLT; another cutting-edge technology that had been little-used in Yahoo! before then (and little used afterwards, too, I might add).

During the development of Tech, we had some huge problems in building what was essentially an unknown architecture on a novel platform using brand-new tools and integrating content from multiple services (original content from bloggers, ratings and reviews from an internal platform, product data from Yahoo! Shopping, and so forth). Many of those services had never been intended to integrate with anything else, and were thus somewhat surprised to discover that things didn’t fit nicely together.

Pat Houston, the original general manager of Yahoo! Tech, was the visionary who convinced Yahoo!’s upper management to invest in the idea. It was a bit radical at the time, but definitely groundbreaking. The original slogan, “Tech Made Easy,” was based on extensive research showing that technology content targeted at Yahoo!’s widespread demographic audience (as opposed to the gadget-head techies and early adopters) would be valuable to users as well as interesting to advertisers.

The initial launch was hilarious—the bloggers (the public face of Yahoo! Tech) appeared on various TV shows such as Today and Good Morning, America. There was a tent in Central Park in New York City were passers-by were invited to try their skills against a trained chimpanzee—the contest was to put a memory card in a digital camera, take a picture, take the card out, put it in a printer, and print out the photograph. Most people could not do it as well as the chimp (which was, of course, the point—these things are never as easy as they seem).

The night that Tech went live, I lifted my glass of champagne and thanked everyone else in the room for helping me build my website. It did feel like mine—I was intimately familiar with nearly every line of code in it, and could probably reproduce much of it from scratch if I wanted to. Even though I moved onto other jobs and other sites, I still retain a fondness for “my baby.” So, hail and farewell, dear Tech! It was fun while it lasted.