Yoono Community

Feb 18

Looking Ahead – Yoono in 2009

First off, let me introduce myself. My name is Todd Pringle and I joined Yoono in December of 2008. My background is in product marketing/product management and I was brought onboard to help Yoono do three things:

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Make the product GREAT.
Continue to grow our user base.
Help build the Yoono business.

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I’m really excited about tackling all three of these challenges. As someone who considers himself a “product guy”, helping to turn a really good Yoono product into a great product is particularly exciting to me. Great products aren’t easy to create. They take skill, discipline, hard work, a willingness to listen to users, and a great team. I believe Yoono has these attributes in its DNA and in 2009 we are going to be better than ever on all these dimensions.

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So where are we headed with the product in 2009? Before we answer that question it’s probably useful to talk a bit about what I’ve been up to in the time I’ve been at Yoono. We’ve been reading every bit of feedback we can find from users – in the Mozilla add ons directory, in the IE add ons directory, in direct email to Yoono, in the Twittersphere, the Blogosphere and more. We’ve run focus groups. I’ve talked to our founders and everyone in the company. I’ve personally been getting friends to use the product. And of course I’ve been using the product myself every day, all day. What have I learned about our product? Well quite a bit but a few things in particular stand out: .

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Our product can benefit significantly from a “less is more” approach that focuses on our core value propositions.
We have some great opportunities to improve ease of use with some low effort changes.
Some of our best features can be made more discoverable to users.
We can simplify the process of getting started using Yoono to benefit new users.
We have a large group of folks who clearly LOVE the product.

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Given this, a large part of our 2009 product roadmap will be dedicated to simplification and focus. We’re going to take the features that users love the most and we’re going to make them great. The things that users aren’t as excited about or don’t fall into our core focus will likely go away or be greatly de-emphasized. Some users will undoubtedly miss some of the things that will go away, however rest assured that we will make these choices carefully, with both new and existing users in mind, and all with the intent of making the things you care about most work flawlessly. It’s also worth mentioning that we’ll continue to improve the basics – performance, stability, and reliable connectivity to your services. So which areas are we going to be focused on? .

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Social Aggregation

A fancy way of saying our Friends feature which allows you to centralize all your social networks and IM services. We’re going to make Yoono the easiest, most powerful way to stay connected to your friends wherever you are on the web. .

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Discovery

Our discovery functionality that allows you to get personalized recommendations for related websites, products, videos, and more is going to get a MAJOR facelift in 2009 and I think you’re going to be blown away by it. I’m using it right now and it is super cool. .

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Sharing

We’re going to make it dead simple to share anything you want with your friends on your social networks. Wherever you are on the web, whatever you want to share – links, images, videos – you’ll have one consistent and simple way to share across all your social networks. It’s the bridge between Social Aggregation and Discovery.

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How are we going to do all this? Well that’s a subject for another post. Stay tuned. .

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Todd