Yahoo! Design

» see design.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On Thursday 14 February 2008 at 11:02 in the morning, the data-visualization blog infosthetics posted four sentences under the headline RIP: Yahoo! Design closed down. An anonymous source had told them the entire Yahoo! Design Innovation team, once coined yHaus, had been laid off as part of a closing-down of innovation teams at Yahoo. The post added, almost in passing, that their work had been completely removed from their original site.

Yahoo had announced the cuts two weeks earlier, on 30 January, alongside a bad quarter: about 1,000 jobs, described as a realignment, to be carried out in mid-February. The design lab was not named in any of that. It was a dozen people in a company of fourteen thousand, and the only reason the date is recoverable at all is that one blog about information graphics had been following their output and noticed the site had emptied.

Thirteen comments arrived under the post, most of them from people who had worked with the team. One wrote that they had the pleasure of working with these fellows and could say they were some of the most talented people they had known at Y. Another argued the group had been shut down because the leadership above it was being cut and the lab went with them. The blogger's own line was shorter: how does Yahoo want to raise its share price by firing creative, talented people.

~ the dossier ~

~ nine things ~

What yHaus actually made is recoverable, but only sideways. The Internet Archive's index of design.yahoo.com still lists the URLs the crawler saw linked, even though it never fetched any of them, and the project pages run from project.php?pid=1 to pid=9. Nine slots. Alongside them sit person.php pages numbered up to eleven, a blog at blog/index.php and a page called schools.html.

Nine is also exactly how many media files a commenter pasted into the farewell post in February 2008, listing the files before they went: burst, bookscape, growaplant, iheshe, answerscloud, trips, deliciousdna, flickr, traffic. Visualizations of search bursts, of a bookshelf, of Yahoo Answers as a word cloud, of Delicious bookmarking patterns, of traffic. One was a Flash toy about growing a plant. An index listing and a comment thread, from different years and different people, independently agree on the count.

Everything except the plant was a QuickTime movie. Someone in the earlier 2007 thread had already complained about this: large QuickTime movies only, eh, call us when you want to work in public. A member of the team replied that they were still getting started and would be posting the interactive versions soon. That was September 2007. They had about five months left.

~ disallow slash ~

Here is what the Internet Archive holds from the entire life of design.yahoo.com. One file, fetched over and over: robots.txt. It appears on 31 May 2007 and then again every few days all through that summer and autumn, dozens of times, the crawler coming back to ask whether anything had changed. Each copy is two lines.

User-agent: *. Disallow: /. A public showcase, built to be looked at, with a blanket instruction to every archiving robot on the internet not to keep a copy. So when Yahoo deleted the server in February 2008, that was the end of it. Not one page survived, and not one of the nine movies. The crawler had stood outside the door for eight months with permission to read exactly one file, and that file was the sign telling it to go away.

~ the redirect ~

The single capture of the homepage that does exist is dated 8 September 2008, seven months after the team was let go, and it is 523 bytes long. The title reads Taking you to Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, and the body is empty behind a meta refresh pointing at developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/.

That is the whole corporate arc in one file. A lab making speculative visualizations of what Yahoo's own data looked like gets replaced by a documentation site specifying how to build a breadcrumb trail. Both are called design. The redirect is still live today, eighteen years on, now bouncing to Yahoo's general developer homepage. The address outlasted both the group and the pattern library that replaced it.

~ nobody missed this one ~

There is no distance to measure here, geographic or otherwise, because the audience for design.yahoo.com was a few thousand people who read information-graphics blogs and the thing was gone before most of them had clicked through. That is the uncomfortable part. A corporate research group published behind a no-crawl rule, shipped its output as movie files, and had roughly nine observable months in which anyone could have looked. The people who would eventually care about early data visualization were not online looking for it yet, and by the time they were there was nothing left to find.

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