Everybody seems to have a million ideas about how Marissa Mayer could revamp Yahoo and make it a cool company again. These range from the simple suggestions like making Flickr cool again to the more eccentric plans like reviving GeoCities as a social blogging site. Now, a week since the news broke, Mayer taking the helm of the 17 year-old company is still the biggest story in tech news. And why shouldn’t it be? Mayer’s the all-star early Google employee that’s in a position to completely reinvent one of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. Regardless of what that looks like, Mayer’s movements at Yahoo will amount to a tectonic shift in both the tech and media industries. Oh, and did we mention she’s pregnant?But what can Mayer actually do to shake things up at Yahoo? The answer to this question can be broken down into two simple categories: fix existing products and build new ones. The fixing Flickr idea is probably the biggest issue in the former category, and was popular enough to spawn its own meme. Last week, a new site called DearMarissaMayer.com appeared on the web showing nothing but a very simple request: “Dear Marissa Mayer: Please make Flickr awesome again, <3 the Internet.”Flickr fired back with a cheeky message of its own: “Dear Internet, Thanks! Come help us make Flickr awesome” followed by a link to the site’s jobs page, but realistically, it will be a struggle to fire Flickr back up. The site suffers from terrible engagement and a general lack of enthusiasm that requires a major site revamp, a bunch of new staffers, and a vigorous effort to fire up its users. On the flip side, it’s still the top photo site on the web and one of Yahoo’s most popular products.Yahoo’s never suffered from a lack of traffic. The site maintains the biggest news, finance and sports portals on the Internet, and then, of course, there’s the goliath that is the Yahoo home page. This is where Yahoo’s biggest opportunity lies, says BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti. In a Facebook comment, Peretti wrote that the homepage is a “curse” that’s keeping the company from making exciting new products, the second piece of the fixing Yahoo puzzle. “Marissa Mayer should exclude homepage traffic from all metrics used to evaluate performance — that would be the single biggest thing she could do to turn around the company,” Peretti wrote. The idea makes sense, too. One reason why Yahoo’s become stagnant over the years is that it always had a steady stream of traffic flowing to its homepage, giving the company little motivation to build out other parts of the site. This move would also acknowledge the more general shift from a portal-driven web to a traffic model that’s relies on social media.Inevitably, Marissa Meyer’s job at Yahoo depends on answer the simple question of the company’s identity. Over the weekend, New York Times writer David Carr asked the question: What is Yahoo? “Yahoo has what all media companies want, which is a large audience,” Carr writes. “The company just doesn’t know what to do with it.” And so it seems that before Meyer thinks about reinventing Flickr, hiring up new staff, shifting focus away from the homepage and any of the other ideas floating around out there, she ought to clarify the company’s purpose. That, and have her baby.
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