According to Wikipedia, Panama (a new online advertising platform created by Yahoo!) was an effort to close the "wide gap with Google in the race for search advertising dollars, a fast-growing and incredibly lucrative business that Google dominates." The platform provides advertisers with a dashboard on which they can manage their marketing campaigns and includes tools that can suggest how advertisters budget their money. It uses a quality index by which advertisers can see how the system will rank an ad and understand how effective their campaign is. This replaced the simplistic Overture algorithm that ranked text ads according to how much advertisers bid for keyword searches by users and this attempts to give higher ranking based on click-through rates as well as bids like Google. I paraphrase Wikipedia to ensure that I am not giving away company secrets.
The failure of Panama seems to be apparent when you hear that Yahoo! is now considering having Google do its search marketing.
If you’ve followed my blog, you’ll notice that I wrote up a freeware last year. Called Autohotkey, this freeware is used to program your numeric pad to do repetitive functions based on specific points graphed out on an x and y axis points on your monitor. So if you typed 0, you could double-click on something. That saves you two clicks. You would also have it click something on the right side of your screen and then automatically move to the left side of your screen to click something else.
I learned about Autohotkey as a result of the new software used for Panama—not one, but two. A supervisor recommended it and I programmed part of it myself. By that time, I had already filed a workers comp claim due to extensive mousing.
Later, a specific script would be provided to all listings editors. Freeware is not a Yahoo! company secret. I believe the provider can tell that it is being downloaded. I wondered how many people downloaded it during March of 2007 in Burbank. Perhaps that’s a secret, but I wonder how many other companies use this software.
The question becomes why should a large company, based on Internet and thus computer usage, require another program to make their custom-built software usable? Why weren’t standards of ergonomics and human interface considered? If Yahoo! couldn’t consider it for its own people, how much more aware is Yahoo! of its customers and their needs?
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