In what I think must be MySQL’s first time in the Philippines, there will be a presence there next week. Well, its not the first time, but in terms of a community/developer event, I think it might be. The Sun Tech Days is happening from 17-19 June 2008, in the Shangri-La Makati.

Besides MySQL, expect great talks on NetBeans, GlassFish, OpenSolaris, and so much more. I’ll be the guy walking around in the MySQL shirt, so feel free to stop me and ask questions. Its exciting for me, as we’ve not really paid much attention to the Philippines, in terms of community growth (and the Philippines is in the APAC region!).

This isn’t a free event (its 1,000 PHP = ~USD23), and registration should still be available. If you’d like to meet up, and talk MySQL, shoot me an email at colinATmysqlDOTcom or reach me via mobile at +6-012-204-3201. If you’d like to help organise a MySQL Meetup in Manila, do ping me too.

By Elizabeth Yin, Google Developer Programs

Google Developer Days 2008, a set of one-day developer events, are back and will take place in locations around the world. We've designed these events for developers with strong coding backgrounds, so that we can discuss our APIs, developer tools and applications.

We'll host Google Developer Day in these locations:

• Yokohama, Japan (June 10)
• Beijing, China (June 12)
• Taipei, Taiwan (June 14)
• Sydney, Australia (June 18)
• Mexico City, Mexico (June 23)
• Sao Paulo, Brazil (June 27)
• London, UK (Sept 16)
• Paris, France (Sept 18)
• Munich, Germany (Sept 23)
• Madrid, Spain (Sept 25)
• Milan, Italy (Oct 21)
• Prague, Czech (Oct 23)
• Moscow, Russia (Oct 28)

If you're based in the US, we encourage you to come to Google I/O, on May 28-29 in San Francisco.

At Google Developer Day, our engineers will share their inside knowledge on our developer tools and APIs, including Android, OpenSocial, and AppEngine. In many locations we'll do deep dives into code and conduct hands-on codelabs.

We've posted detailed information for our early dates and will be adding more information for other locations soon. If you're a developer, we encourage you to sign-up for a Google Developer Day at a nearby location. Hope to see you there.

Update: Corrected the September 23rd event location from Hamburg, Germany to Munich, Germany.

When Yahoo's next-generation online advertising system was launched on 5 February this year, it was expected to be a panacea for Yahoo's ailing fortunes. Yahoo's Panama ad system is designed to take ad quality and other factors into consideration in determining how ads are ranked on search results pages. Panama includes a new search ranking algorithm, which takes bids, ad quality and other factors into consideration. Along with the algorithm changes, there is a new pricing mechanism and a lot of other functionality for advertisers (e.g. an API).

The key addition is 'ad quality', which Google has been doing for years with AdWords. So Panama was always going to be a game of catch up for Yahoo. With that in mind, and nearly 6 months after Panama's launch, how is it performing?

Yahoo Response

I asked Yahoo for some data and metrics on how Panama is performing - has it increased ad sales, is the 'ad quality' improving? Gaude Lydia Paez, Director of Corporate Communications, responded that they can't provide specific metrics around performance, given that it's tied to their financials. However she did tell me that "the global rollout of Panama is progressing extremely well, and we are seeing strong performance in our US O&O search operations."

While no metrics were given, Paez told me that in Japan they recently launched the new ranking model "and feedback from advertisers has been positive - clickthrough rates are up and the prices our clients pay for leads are down."

Since the launch in the U.S., Yahoo has also "introduced several enhancements to the model that have focused on filtering poor ads and surfacing higher quality ads to the user." Paez said that Yahoo has "introduced quality-based pricing, which allows us to charge advertisers less for a portion of the traffic they receive, depending on the overall quality of the source."

External Reports

While Yahoo itself is remaining relatively tight-lipped about Panama results, others have reported mixed results. Search Engine Roundtable wrote at the end of April that four different SEMs in a Search Engine Watch Forums thread noticed a drop in volume from Yahoo! Search Marketing since the Panama upgrade. One said that although "the interface is much better and the account maitenance is somewhat easier", in terms of performance "we are down quite a bit from where we were pre-Panama. ROI is similar, but volume is way down." Another SEM reported "an extreme decrease in volume."

On 20 June, John Battelle published a report from Reprise, a leading SEO/SEM firm that works with Battelle's company FM Publishing (R/WW is an FM Publishing client). Reprise concluded that on performance, Yahoo's CPCs went down and click through rates went up. It stated:

"While campaign conversion rates were improved on both Google and MSN, Yahoo's conversion dropped off 5%. In other words, while perceived ad relevance may have improved, the truly important metric in the campaign suffered somewhat. "

Source: Reprise

The whole report is available as a PDF on John Battelle's site, but to sum it up: the technology of Panama is promising, but it is not yet delivering on the promise. In Reprise's words:

"While the launch of Project Panama represents a significant step forward for the Yahoo Search Marketing platform, it does not yet address all of the requirements of the market. Though the system makes strides towards establishing industry standard campaign structure, terminology and API access, it often finds itself under-delivering on the actual execution of these new features."

However Reprise notes that Panama is "brand new" and "needs time to find its footing and refine its offering."

Finally, a browse through Search Engine Land's recent report on the online advertising industry shows that not much has changed in the past six months. SEL noted that "Google is by far the dominant engine, and that's been the case all year, despite Yahoo's Panama launch and Microsoft's increased focus on AdCenter."

Conclusion

I was hoping for a more conclusive 6-month report on Panama, but really the jury is still out. Yahoo itself is (unsurprisingly) reporting positive changes. Meanwhile the response from the market has been mixed, but cautiously optimistic. Most reports so far have noted Panama's promise, but that it is not yet delivering better results. The upshot is that after six months, Google is still the dominant player in online advertising and there is little sign of that changing any time soon.

If you are using Panama, what have your experiences been like so far?

With this post, we close our file on 100 Days For Yahoo. Let us know whether you like the idea of Read/WriteWeb Files - i.e. focusing on a specific topic over a week.

Most Web users probably use at least one Yahoo product on a regular basis. So as part of our 100 Days For Yahoo week, let's take a look at 10 that are among the leaders in their particular market segment, or are particularly innovative. These are subjective selections, because it's almost impossible to use objective criteria to judge such different web properties. So we encourage you to comment on what you think should be in the list, or what shouldn't. Also note that the following list is in no particular order.

1. Yahoo News is the number 1 Internet news site, according to comScore. It is a blend of automated and editorial, and also offers a number of personalization options. As Josh Catone explained in a recent R/WW post about news aggregation, Yahoo! takes news from the wires -- the Associated Press, Reuters, AFP, and PA SportsTicker, among others -- and aggregates them into a single stream. Editors keep duplicates to a minimum and decide which stories are the most important to be listed as top headlines. This mix of technology and editors creates a high quality news stream, albeit lacking the immediacy of blogs.

2. Answers allows users to search for things that don't yet have an answer. This is a key strategic product for Yahoo, because using 'people power' is one way Yahoo can take on Google in search. Social search is the catchphrase and it was something I discussed withYahoo's Bradley Horowitz and Caterina Fake a year ago at the Supernova conference. They told me how Yahoo Search is evolving into a more social construct. At that stage there were approximately 10 Million Y! Answers in the database, although I'm sure it's much more than that now.

And if you think Answers will never enable Yahoo Search to compete with Google, check out our recent story about how South Korean search company Naver.com is crushing Google in the South Korea market, largely due to Naver's "Knowledge iN" real-time question-and-answer platform - which gets an average of 44,000 questions a day. Long way to go before Yahoo gets that kind of uptake with Answers, but still it remains a key product for Yahoo.

See also R/WW's round-up of Q&A sites.

3. Flickr has been the web 2.0 poster child of photo sharing sites ever since it was released. When it was acquired in March 2005 by Yahoo, it continued to make incremental upgrades. Indeed at the 2007 Webby Awards (the Web's Oscars), Flickr picked up 3 awards (5 including two Peoples Choice ones), for Best Practices, Best Visual Design - Function, and Community.

Despite Flickr's impressive design and innovation, it has been somewhat overshadowed by Photobucket in terms of user numbers and traffic - thanks mainly to Photobucket piggy-backing off MySpace's success. However, as the below graph from Compete shows, Flickr has started to make big gains - and it's now almost caught up to Photobucket.

4. Pipes - Yahoo released an RSS Remixing service called Pipes in February 2007. At launch it was described as "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator". Basically it's a hosted service that enables you to create remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment.

R/WW Author Alex Iskold was very impressed with Pipes, saying that it's the first GUI builder for the biggest database in the world - the Web iself. Alex said that when compared to Visual Basic and Power Builder, Yahoo! Pipes comes out as more inventive and no less rigorous that its predecessors. It empowers developers to remix the building blocks of the web in a whole new way. And it does it with remarkable simplicity.

5. Yahoo Mail - in most stats Yahoo Mail is the number 1 web mail product. However when the new Ajax version of Yahoo! Mail was released as a beta in September last year, it was certainly late to market. Gmail had been wowing geeks since April 2004, so it was a long wait until Yahoo! Mail caught the Ajax bug too. Which was odd, because it was based on an Ajax pioneer which Yahoo acquired in July 2004 - called Oddpost. But as Yahoo's Ethan Diamond explained to me back in September, when you roll out Ajax to 250M or so mainstream users, you need to make sure everything scales.

Yahoo Mail has the functionality of a desktop email client (such as Outlook). Other features include an integrated calendar timeline (including mashups with Yahoo Maps), drag and drop e-mail organization, message preview, tabs for messages, plus an integrated RSS reader. Also an API was released in March 2007. While it's not my favorite web mail service (see R/WW's Web Email Market Overview to find out what is!), Yahoo's option is great for those who like the desktop email paradigm.

6. Messenger (with Avatars). Yahoo's Instant Messenging product is one of the market leaders, but more importantly it is a lot of fun to use thanks to its avatars. It also has voice and many plug-ins.

Many people use multiple IM clients (and use meta IM services like Meebo and Trillian to manage that). And IM innovation has been strong in the past few years - common features these days include interoperability, flexible identities, rich media chat, in-browser chat, location-based chat, and contextual chat. So whatever IM client you use, there is a lot you can do with them on the Web.

7. Yahoo Music is a colorful and feature-rich online music service. Just today they released playlists, a new samples player, and web subscription playback. Yahoo acquired Webjay, an innovative playlisting startup, back in January 2006. So it's great to see playlisting make an appearance now in Yahoo Music. The new playlist functionality was described by Lucas Gonze (founder of Webjay) as "a full-featured module which includes the ability to play tracks and to comment on playlists. You can browse playlists by creator and you can browse playlists which a person has commented on, so there is a content-focused social network."

8. del.icio.us - As Alex Iskold wrote in the R/WW Social Bookmarking Faceoff in September, it could be argued that the current social web era started with del.icio.us and the advent of social bookmarking. The simple concept of a tag has turned our interactions with the web upside down. The idea of being able to store your bookmarks online, share them with everyone and see what others have bookmarked - triggered the sequence of events that resulted in today's rich and social web ecosystem.

Yahoo acquired del.icio.us in December 2005 and, like Flickr, it has iterated in small steps since then. There was initially talk that del.icio.us would integrate with Yahoo's other bookmarking service, My Web 2.0. But that never happened. In the end, del.icio.us has stayed pretty much independent - which is exactly how its many fans like it.

9. Yahoo Mobile - Yahoo OneSearch launched in January this year and then became the default mobile Yahoo homepage in March. This made it a purely search-centric homepage for mobile phones, whereas the old site had both search and a kind of mini-portal. There is a lot of added functionality in oneSearch; it tries to provide context when searching for something on your mobile phone, recognizing that on a phone you need different types of info than on a PC.

According to the December 2006 stats from M:Metrics, Yahoo! Search is currently the #2 search service on mobile phones for the US market - behind Google. It is obviously a growth market and Yahoo is bringing a lot of web functionality to its mobile property.

10. My Yahoo - last, but certainly not least, is My Yahoo. In many ways a precursor to the current crop of 'personalized start pages', My Yahoo is now taking on many of their attributes. As we noted in our March 2007 coverage of My Yahoo!'s Web 2.0 Makeover, My Yahoo! has been the company's personalized offering to its consumers since 1996. It is seen as the company's "narrowcast" option for users, while the yahoo.com frontpage is seen as the broadcast model. However over time, the two homepages will converge. Indeed the beta My Yahoo has some of the new features Yahoo introduced last year with its Ajax makeover of yahoo.com. And the look and feel is very similar between the two.

Up until the re-design in March, My Yahoo was a relatively static personalized homepage - mostly devoid of the widgets and gadgets that populate the likes of Netvibes and Live.com. However that is beginning to change, albeit very slowly compared to its startup competition.

Bonus

Yahoo Shopping just missed the Top 10, but nevertheless is has a lot of potential. Yahoo has just started to scratch the surface, with experiments like Brand Universe and Yahoo Shoposphere. The latter has a concept called 'me-commerce' and uses "Pick Lists" to let users share their stuff on the Shoposphere and Yahoo! Shopping - using email and RSS feeds. Yahoo Shopping also has an API, which is being used by companies like ShoppingPath.com, a shopping comparison service.

But there's so much more Yahoo can do with Y! Shopping - they could look to RSS and widget shopping startups to see what is happening in this domain [disclosure: I am an advisor at one such startup].

Conclusion

There were some obvious Yahoo properties that we haven't listed - for instance there was no room for Upcoming, Y! Games, Y! Finance or Y! Personals. All of those (and many more) are great services.

What do you think of this list - does it capture the best Yahoo products? What other Yahoo properties do you use, or what do you think needs improvement before you'd consider using it?

Sun Tech Days in Buenos Aires