Yahoo to make service more ‘Pinoy-centric’

MANILA, Philippines - Global Internet giant Yahoo is planning to make its products more specific to Filipinos as it takes advantage of developing countries with the slowdown in more mature markets. Scott Dietzen, Yahoo senior vice-president for global communication products, said the company wants to be more "Pinoy-centric" for the socially connected Philippine market. He noted that 83% of Filipinos browse social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace. Contrast this with 50% in Australia and 43% in the US. He said the company wants to gear its product towards social networking. "We want to use the Internet for so much more," he said, adding that the company plans to "take existing services and make them more social." "The closer we can get to users’ desires," the happier advertisers will be, he pointed out. He said Yahoo wants to take advantage of the 10 billion potential connections between people using Yahoo services, with about 263 million of 800 million people online surfing the Web using Yahoo products. Meanwhile, John Kremer, vice-president for Yahoo Mail, said the company’s new thrust of connecting people in smarter ways is part of its plan to attract more users. "This is a large country where Internet use is growing at a fast pace of 20% [yearly], where very little advertising is done online, which creates opportunities as well... These are exactly the sort of markets that present really compelling growth opportunities for Yahoo," he added. He said the company would come out with a smarter inbox and use a stricter anti-SPAM filter. Users will soon be allowed to send files as big as one gigabyte. Sabrina Ellis, Yahoo vice-president of Yahoo Messenger, said the popular Web application used for Internet chatting would also become more visual and interactive. Ms. Ellis said Yahoo will have features designed for the Philippine market, such as local news and Filipino sound clips in chat. — Paolo Luis G. Montecillo, BusinessWorld