Here’s a small tid-bit for Yahoo! search users. Yahoo! Canada has more Quicklink categories than the US version. I’d love to see the US version catching up to its Canadian counterpart.

Yahoo! US and Yahoo! Canada navigation bars

I personally, would love to see Flickr, Health and News added to the navigation in Yahoo! (US version).

Back in October I outlined our plans for a social shopping community, which we are working on behind the scenes. Last week we made a small babystep forward in the social shopping realm, which I wanted to bring your attention to. We’ve started to include products reviews from merchant sites on HealthPricer and although I realize product reviews is not a new feature, aggregating reviews from merchant sites is.

As a starting point we have received permission from three merchants, amazon.com, drugstore.com and ACLens.com to migrate the reviews posted on their sites onto HealthPricer. Our visitors can now vote on those reviews to add credibility to what reviewers are saying about specific products.

Section of product reviews aggregated from ACLens.com on HealthPricer

At this point we have 90,000 reviews for over 16,000 products. That means we have close to 1 million URLs on HealthPricer. There’s lots of room for growth – the current reviews cover less than 10% of the product offers on HealthPricer. More review features will come, with the obvious next step being the addition of users writing reviews on HealthPricer.com.

Pew Internet and American Life Project has released another study that puts a feather in the cap for online health. According to its April 2008, Focalyst study, Pew states that more than 1/3 of US consumers born before 1946 use the Internet and of that group more an half of those aged 62-71 are online.

Not surprisingly, one of the main ways they use the Internet is to stay in touch with family, but the other, more surprising, factor that share the top spot with family is the use of search engines, both scoring 59% for online activities. Hot on the heals of travel planning and reservations (at 41%), comes health-related information (at 39%). This speaks volumes about how seniors are actively taking charge of their own health – using sources on the Internet to learn more about health conditions, symptoms and remedies.

Leading Online Activities of US Senior Internet Users

Making this group so compelling is its attractive demographic. Those over 62 online are generally better educated and had higher incomes than seniors that are not online.

Demographic Profile of US Seniors

I would love to see a study on how and what sources these users (and other demographic groups) look for health-related information online. Do people still predominantly use Google to search for health terms? Or are consumers slowly finding their way to domain experts, such as everydayHealth.com, Healthline.com, RightHealth.com and QualityHealth.com, to name a few?

The final in my Web 2.0 series, the panel discussion titled “Adobe – RIA Applications and the Web”.

Meet the panellists:

Claude Courbois, The Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc.
Carnet Williams, Sprout
William White, Yahoo!
Robert Blatt, AOL

Here’s what the session covered:

Come see, hear and talk about what some of the most innovative companies are doing with Adobe’s RIA technologies. The session will consist of demonstrations and discussion on how these new technologies will drive the web forward. Duane Nickull, Adobe Senior Evangelist, hosted the event.

I gave this session **** of 5. Lots of great examples.

Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, Apr 22 - 25, 2008
Here are my notes:

Carnet Williams (Sprout)

- Showed a development platform using Flash to create interactive widgets
- It has multiple components: Count Down, Slide Show, RSS Feed for dynamic content
- Can utilize web services through a SDK i.e. use polldaddy, twittr
- Then you can publish it, also can go directly into ad networks
- See Sproutbuilder
- Complete Flex application

Claude Curbois (Nasdaq)

- Put huge amount of market data up on amazon s3
- Using RIA (Air and Flex), all the Processing of rendering is done on clients computer
- Nasdaq OMX: Allows to map market data down to the milli-second
- Also check data.nasdaq.com for beta
- Plan to map news to the graph
- Took 2 people 4 months to develop

William White (Yahoo)

- With a small team of 5 they focus on flash widgets for facebook, myspace, desktop and OpenSocial and Y!OS
- Finds that flex allows them to get stuff out of the lab very quickly
- Built metrics into applications (i.e. what buttons people click on)
- Examples:
o Flash app called Easylistener (next.yahoo.net/archives/32/easylistener )
o Facebook – MusicBlog. Gives you the top 1000 music blogs
 Built an air application for remixing blog entries
o OpenSocial App ‘Yahoo! Web Playlist’
 Built in Flex
- Find it on next.yahoo.com

Robert Love (AOL)

- Bluestring is about sharing memories
- Air application
- Can easily create entire shows overlayed with music
- Can share it and control it
- Can import from photobucket, picasa, webshots
- Can also be used for docs
- Bluestring monetized through (surprise!) advertising

And that concludes my series on Web 2.0. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my notes.

One more for the Web 2.0 Expo series. This time it’s Dave Wolf, VP of Cynergy Systems, who is speaking on the topic: Sticky Eyeballs: How User Experience Wins Market Share. Here’s a link to the Web 2.0 page outlining the purpose of the session and a bio of Dave Wolf.

Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, CA, Apr 22-25, 2008

I gave this session **** of 5. It was good, I was hoping to see more examples.

Here are my notes:

Why are sticky eyeballs important?

- They stay longer, therefore, buy more (pretty fundamental and obvious)
- Passionate users create a social epidemic
- So it is about creating passionate users - make it a fun, rich experience
- People are emotional, they are complicated and we need to keep focusing on the user
- The iPhone is a great example of how a great UE is winning market share

Some mistakes

- Making bad assumptions
- Building single experiences for a variety of people (CFO versus Receiver)
- Understand what their needs are
- Understand where they are (mobile, offline, always on the network)
- Thinking that developers can build it, but you need a designer

Other insight

- Putting together a designer with a developer is like putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier in one room. It just doesn’t work
- It’s about data information visualization
Work Components and Outcome of a successful UI Development Process:
- Understand Objectives
- Capture User Flow - User Flow Diagram and User Stories
- Design UI - Wireframes, Design Mocks, Detailed Stories
- Implementation - Iterative delivery with Backend Design and Development and Integration

Some Examples:

- tinyBEN (Cynergy, part of a MS design competition)
- www.museworx.com
- Brightshool ExtraNet

- Design Elements could include inline pop-ups for interaction instead of an html drop down

Next in the Web 2.0 series is my notes on Adobe - RIA Applications and the Web, a session I gave **** of 5.