Yahoo Not Interested in Virtual Worlds

With all the talk about Google's project at ASU and Microsoft's one-year time line for a virtual worlds play, we got to wondering where Yahoo was in the rapidly expanding virtual worlds space. "My understanding from marketing is that we have other important priorities than Virtual Worlds at the moment, so there is no VW initiative or plans here at the moment," said Masami Hirata, Director, International Marketing, PR & Sales, Yahoo! Inc. 

Yahoo has an avatar-based program called Yahoo! Avatars with some basic virtual world-eqsue options that give users a background to chat in and the option to customize their looks. But, for the most part, the Avatar applications and programs seem to be built mostly as extensions of  Yahoo! Messenger or just standalone avatar-based chat apps.

Most recently, Yahoo released a Web-based app called Avatar Town. But the "shopping" options (actually the stores are free) are pretty limited, and there's not really a persistent environment. It's still in beta, but it looks like there's not going to be much more of a push towards a virtual world.

"We have no plans at this point in time to pursue a pure virtual world approach - Our main goal with Avatar Towns has been to offer our users a better and more visual way to dress up their avatar," said Xavier Legros, the manager of Yahoo! Avatars who developed the Avatar World chat plugin. "We have thousands of items available in Avatars and the town came up as a natural way to show a more visual and engaging way to dress up!"

Yahoo has obviously seen the benefit of providing personalized and persona-based service experiences, but it doesn't appear ready to go further. Even while the other Internet giants seem to be quietly--or with very loud rumors--ramping up to release their own virtual worlds, Yahoo is taking a different path.

Unfortunately, Yahoo corporate declined to comment on its strategy.

Comments

[Robert Brackenridge]

We certainly wouldn't want any of the information and content in VWs searchable now would we? Yet another market Yahoo! might be letting slip through their fingers...

[len]

The analysis needed is to find out how searchable are the worlds given the lack of unifying formats and/or APIs.

The timing might be one where not being the first penguin in the water is the right strategy. Note how the early search engine contenders used the more or less obvious approaches to web search only to be blown out of the water by eigen-vector indexing and reverse link ranking. Searching in virtual worlds is pretty easy to do where the assets have metadata (see X3D metadata tags). On the other hand, the more interesting concepts are similar to the eigen-vector approach extended to dynamic proximity values and gestural systems become terms. Fascinating topics.

So I suspect Yahoo is saying they aren't interested in becoming nightclub owners. I doubt they are adverse to being advertisers.