by Gary Welz
Innovators Part IV: Your Personal Network (YPN)
On September 3, 1996, Your Personal Net (YPN), a "full-service front-end to the Net," introduced a significant new upgrade that includes NetClock, the most comprehensive listing of real-time events on the Net. NetClock is a virtual TV Guide for NetHeads and features 500 to 600 events daily, including celebrity chats, audio broadcasts, concerts, meetings, discussion groups, and more that users can search by day, time, topic, and Internet or online service."Our job is to tell people what's on in cyberspace--why the Internet is useful to them, how it will save people time, and money, and let them have fun too!," said Michael Wolff, president of Wolff New Media, creator of the NetBooks and of YPN. "Service and entertainment is our mission."
Wolff New Media seems to be fulfilling this mission quite well, proving in the process that there is a market for timely Net meta-information--information about the rapidly expanding volume of content available online. This is meta-information with a difference, not just pages of URLs with some syntactic similarity to a search term, but rather an annotated listing of sites and events dealing with the topics you seek information about.
The Directory
The YPN Directory covers more than 600 topics with 70,000 Web site reviews. Consisting of almost 10 million words, it is the largest database of its kind on the Web. It differs from search engines like Yahoo and Excite and other navigational products in its ease of use, friendly interface, and journalistic presentation of the Net's services and entertainment value."We're journalists, not software programmers," said Wolff, a well-known writer of books and magazine articles. "We founded this company and created YPN to take the Internet back from the geeks. Try querying a search engine about Paris. Alta Vista, for instance, returns 200,000 matches. YPN, on the other hand, returns a table of contents that organizes this information the way you want it--restaurants, museums, history, hotels."
Editorial Features
In addition to NetClock and the Directory, YPN is a daily magazine offering editorial features designed to make the Internet useful, including:
- Secret Shopper: a feature in which YPN editors buy products online from steaks to CDs and compare performance and fulfillment by online stores
- YPN Soap: a regular report from YPN staffers pursuing personal romances online
- Newsguide: a guide designed to help users follow breaking stories online
- Cash Cache: a section devoted to providing financial advice
- Heat: a ratings and review guide of online pick-up places
Personalization Features
A primary objective of the YPN site is to offer personalized information tailored to each individual user on topics ranging from personal finance to sex. The current personalization features include weekly e-mail with reviews of sites on topics that the user has selected, personal profiles that allow users to communicate with one another, and customized bookmarks.Through the personal profile, the service will generate a unique URL that a user can share with friends--a personal home page with biographical info, links to sites the user has chosen, and even a photo of the user.
They are currently developing proprietary technology similar to the popular music and movie "suggestion site" Firefly that will allow users to receive information only about the new YPN features, products, and services that they are interested in.
About Wolff New Media
Wolff New Media LLC, the company behind YPN, is a group of 45 to 50 people including 30 writer/editors. Their research staff scopes out sites and passes the URLs onto writers who prepare a short review for the database.The company got started in January 1994 with the publication of Michael Wolff's original NetGuide, the first guidebook to the Internet and online services that is now in its 10th printing. Since then the company has published more than a dozen other netbooks including NetStudy, NetJobs, and NetTrek. Other titles are in preparation.
One of the major problems for the publisher putting out books about the Internet is that a book becomes outdated almost as soon as its completed. Wolff gets around this problem by having a deal with the printer (Quebecor) and distributer (Random House) that gets the books printed and in bookstores just two weeks from the date the writer finishes the final revisions. YPN also offers online updates of all the books so they never really go out of date. Wolff reports that NetGuide sold over a quarter million copies and that the others sell between 25,000 and 100,000 copies.
More than a publication or a single book, the enterprise of Wolff New Media is to provide a different kind of interface for accessing information on the Internet, one that it regards as intended for the Net's next 100 million users, not just the 10 million or so there are today.
