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April 01, 2005

Announcing Yahoo! Slacker

Today we're thrilled to be announcing an upcoming product that's near and dear to the heart of high school and college students around the world: Yahoo! Slacker.

What is it?

Yahoo! Slacker will be the culmination of several efforts to provide a set of integrated services for... well, slackers. Yahoo! Slacker will include the following:

  • Book Slacker is a full-text searchable index composed of the popular Cliffs Notes and Dummies Books
  • IM Slacker is a "parental response" IMVironment that auto-responds to your IMs from your parents with "Sorry, I'm studying..." while you chat with friends.
  • Local Slacker will find the nearest pizza and provide one-click ordering.
  • Music Slacker automatically scans Yahoo! Music and queues up any song that played on the previous night's episode of The O.C.
  • Spelling Slacker will use our Misspelling API and our vast experience in speling as a Microsoft Word plug-in to ensure you have enough of those squiggly red lines in your homework assignments.

How?

Well, scanners are cheap these days. Really cheap. When you combine a few $60 scanners with some willing Ph.D interns, we expect the entire book scanning project to take no more than 4 weeks and $6,000.

Everything else is being built on our existing infrastructure by a few engineers during their "slacking time." At Yahoo!, engineers sometimes spend parts of their weekends and holidays slacking off. Now, those engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of that slacking time working on the Yahoo! Slacker project.

When?

Yahoo! Slacker will be available at slacker.yahoo.com in time for the 2005 school year.

Unless we don't finish it in time...

Jose Marlock
Yahoo! Slacker

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Comments

Hey, you made a typo in the link to slacker.yahoo.com. There should not be a forward-slash at the end of the URI. That is, it should just be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_fool%27s_day ;)

Posted by: Elliot Lee | March 31, 2005 11:59 PM

I never could spell. Especially URLs.

Posted by: Jose Marlock | April 1, 2005 12:02 AM

hehe nice one....

Posted by: Deep Ganatra | April 1, 2005 12:18 AM

Good one :)

Posted by: Guillaume | April 1, 2005 12:32 AM

oh i want to be a slacker! May i get it for real please...

Posted by: anitahuang | April 1, 2005 03:57 AM

Awww, Jose! Why you tease me?! I so needed this! And I work at Y!

You have got to build this. Now.

I need Y! Slacker@Work. Change the ParentIMV to BossBlockerIMV. ("Yes, boss! I'll get right on it.")

And a Status Report Slacker. Auto-generate what I did this week. (No lowlights - everything was done, and more!)

I'll be in at ... around 10. Or 11.

Ping you when I get in with more ideas. Or not.

Posted by: ct | April 1, 2005 08:04 AM

Ah man I knew it was only a dream!!!

Posted by: Brian | April 1, 2005 01:12 PM

this is your reply to Google? that's retard!

Posted by: dali | April 1, 2005 03:29 PM

I think someone was being a slacker on the typo...

Say what you want, but Yahoo is moving ahead, unlike elgooG.

Posted by: Anonymous | April 1, 2005 03:53 PM

Some of those actually seem like a good idea. Book slacker, local slacker and music slacker all sound great.

Posted by: garyr_h | April 2, 2005 12:07 AM

Pupna is the search engine puppy that retrieves EXACTLY what you are searching for (and absolutely nothing else!) www.pupna.com

"A true breakthrough in Fetch Engine technology... Google and Yahoo have nothing even remotely comparable!" - Technology Review Magazine (April 1, 2005 print edition)

Posted by: Pupna | April 3, 2005 10:31 PM

I will try :)

Posted by: Jauhari | April 8, 2005 09:22 AM