On the final day of Foo Camp, I could only attend one session before heading back to SFO to catch my flight. The final sessions ended at lunch, but based on last year, less than half the crowd is still around by then. My flight left at 2pm which put me in RDU around 12am!

Opening up Yahoo - Toni Schneider

Toni is a serial entrepreneur that has started four companies, the most recent of which, Oddpost, was purchased by Yahoo. Oddpost built a web-based email client that must have been much better than the Yahoo Mail interface (I don't have any experience with it but I know Yahoo's current mail interface is pretty mediocre). Toni has since taken a position in Yahoo overseeing their effort to open up Yahoo as a platform. They're creating all sorts of APIs, such as the recently released Yahoo Maps API.

Toni showed off their latest web email client. They are about to announce a beta trial for it and will allow certain users to opt-in to the new interface. It looked very similar to the Outlook Web Access (OWA) client.

A Yahoo Research guy at the session shared an interesting story about how finicky users can be. They said that anytime Yahoo makes a change to buttons or colors, users complain vigorously. (I guess this can only be expected when you have 200 million users -- for Yahoo Mail.) Anyway, Yahoo used to have a yellow background on its web pages. They saw the light and finally changed it to white and oddly enough users freaked out. I'm not exactly sure what issue they had, but apparently they didn't like the "drastic" change. So Yahoo wrote a program to change the color progressively over a period of a month. They got very few complaints.