Saying goodbye to my big, purple friend. And all my little purple friends, too.
June 12th, 2007After almost 5 years (4 years, 11 months to be more precise) I’ve officially left Yahoo!
I remember so clearly the first time I stepped onto the campus in Sunnyvale, back in 2001. It was awesome, especially for someone who’d worked at a string of small startups. Here I was at Yahoo, the #1 site on the internet. Blazing fast. Easy to use. Beautiful, modern buildings. Sunny and bright. Glass cafeteria. Outdoor volleyball courts. I wasn’t sure if I was at an office, or some futuristic college campus.
It still is an impressive place. Now, of course, there is also a Mission College campus, a Santa Monica office, an OvertureYSM office in Pasadena, the San Francisco offices, Berkeley offices… apparently it’s part of Yahoo’s strategy to seed various cities with purple and yellow furniture, candy, caffeine, laptops, and some cool, smart people.
No doubt what I’ll miss most is the great people I had a chance to work with. If I try to list all of those people, this post would get insanely long. And then I’ll decide I have to link to their various online profiles, put up their photos, thank them specifically, maybe format the list yet again. Basically, I’ll never finish this post. I can’t even do the “team” shout out since I worked with several teams and groups across the Yahoo matrix. Is “you know who you are” good enough?? I hope so.
Suffice it to say that the time came for me to start something new, from the outside of the purple kingdom. The beauty of it is, I still have my friends and colleagues from the big Y (all day, every day, omnipresent on Y Messenger). It’s not really goodbye at all, except to the Yahoo! campus. To all my Yahoo friends, it’s just TTYS.
Facebook move shows how they think ahead, rather than defensively
May 24th, 2007Facebook is opening up its platform.
Facebook has become a primary relationship and identity broker for millions of people. Now outsiders can capitalize on that information in a safe way, pulling from users’ expressed interests in their profiles, building on their stated intention to attend events, or simply giving them more dedicated tools for expressing themselves. The outside apps will be woven into a structure that’s already been built and is utilized every day.
While other companies scurry to protect and seal off their user base, Facebook will help create a bigger network. It just makes intuitive sense that people want to tap into relationship networks, both developers and users. Facebook platform is great news, except for those companies who haven’t figured out they’ll have to open up eventually. Hopefully closed-minded companies will change their tune and open up, rather than take on the boring task of defending a shrinking network.
Write your own “Mission Accomplished” banner
May 2nd, 2007Now, normally, I try to keep my political blog separate from this one. But… yesterday was the anniversary of Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” stunt on a US aircraft carrier, in which he showed off his flightsuit, codpiece and all.
So check this out: a site where you can write your very own banner, and watch a great video to boot.
I hope you like mine.
(h/t Digby)
get ‘on stage’ at MTV awards: innovative twist
April 30th, 2007First of all, this MTV movie awards contest site is pretty cool. Submit your spoof, a spoofer can win their own freaking MTV movie award.
But the part of the site I reeeeally like is the ‘get on stage‘ component. Send in a short clip of yourself, and you can show up on the ‘video wall’ during the live event. You even get a page listing all your submissions, by type. Visitors can browse the various submissions, if you happen to find yourself wanting to browse videos of people clapping, or, cheering, or waving lighters. (Now, if they only had “waving lighters while standing by their camaro’s in the Dodger stadium parking lot…. but I digress).
The video wall is creative. And fun. It’s great to see the folks down in Santa Monica doing something cool with their sites. Hats off to Steve K, Geraldine, Bob, Drew and the rest of the team there.
The greatest social media niche site, for haters. Of cilantro.
April 25th, 2007This is one of the funniest sites I’ve seen in a while. I hate cilantro. (h/t Cam!)
Great features, great content. Hilarious. Talk about social network networks going niche. In fact, this is a niche for a niche. On the one hand, it’s a site for cilantro haters. On the other hand, it’s got to be a parody site. So it’s a parody niche site, for haters, who hate cilantro.
We must remember, that some people hate cilantro because they lack the cilantro taste gene, and therefore cilantro tastes like soap.
Some people instead perceive an unpleasant “soapy” taste and/or a rank smell. This perception is believed to be a result of an enzyme that changes the way they taste cilantro, a genetic trait, but has yet to be fully researched.
Yet to be fully researched?!? I smell opportunity. First to build a social network for aspiring cilantro enzyme geneticists wins.
blogposts peak, signal new phase?
April 8th, 2007steve rubel thinks blogs have peaked, based on the latest technorati report, in terms of blog posts per day.
He actually first noted this back in 2006
we might be at the point where every individual who wants to publish a blog actively may already have one. However, press citations continue to climb. So blogs continue to remain extremely influential. There are countless anecdotal examples over the past several years that demonstrate blogging’s impact in shaping how the media covers news.
Further, traffic and participation on video sharing sites continues to rise sharply. So, while blog volume may be peaking (I underscore that we still need more data), online expression is evergreen. The center of gravity will always shift as technology gives us new powers we didn’t have before and new communities pop up.
It seems like the relevance and quality of the information on the blogosphere is still increasing, in large part because web 2.0 media sharing networks make it easier to publish and connect with an audience.
So, if blogs have peaked, will we start to read about a new “post-blog” world? I could really see the “post-blog” era as a headline on, um, some blogs I read.
But we know that blogs are increasingly important as news sources. Even corporate media outlets like the NyTimes, WaPost, and USA Today are using blogs, and giving their sites bloglike features. Which means that the “post-blog” era could actually be the sign of a new, more blog-like future.
Yahoo! Canada gets social
March 28th, 2007If you haven’t seen it, check out Yahoo! Canada’s “Up Your Music” contest. They’ve taken the concept from the first Yahoo! Talent Show, and applied it to a chance to win a music deal from Universal.
Now, it’s not just that I love seeing software infrastructure scale… there is some good music here. I also think that, like the first Y Talent Show, the quality of the comments are quite high. Kudos to the Yahoo! Canada team. I want to point you to some good videos, but then, since I work at Yahoo!, that could probably be considered not cool. I mean, we don’t want the 2 robots that crawl my site to be unduly influenced.
Now, go check out the tunes!
Transparent web, transparent world
March 25th, 2007What’s the next big thing going to be on the web? I think location-based networks and services will definitely be part of what people will call web 3.0. I think they’re going to be a distinct feature, like tagging is a feature of “web 2.0″ applications. But I think the combined effect of location-based mobile data, robust social networks, increased automation and bandwith will lead to an entirely new experience. I’ll call it the ‘transparent web’. This isn’t really the same as more future versions of spimes and ubiquitious computing where rfid’s and remote computation power our environment. I think this first glimpse of transparency will be the first solid sign that the type of immersive technology is coming much faster than people realize. Imagine your cell phone starts telling you what’s around you, giving you advice by connecting you to your friends, experts, and live data feeds about any of your particular interests, as well as alerting you to what the overall community deemed important. All the time. From around the world. And through this network where you can tune in to the data right around you, you can flip the switch and find out what’s happening (or what’s happened) anywhere around the world. And all this info flows through other people just like you. The world is going to become much more transparent. It’ll be like you can look right through it, zero in on what’s important, and zoom out to see broader effects and patterns. Transparency means more acceleration across the spectrum of our human endeavors, because people tend to act on what they can see. Right now, the internet and web 2.0 let us see more of the world around us. Web 3.0 will feel like we just got a very personal telescope. Which makes sense, because each generation of the web could really be depicted in terms of pure bandwidth. I’m excited about web 3.0. Whatever it is, I want to see it.
Hi there
March 21st, 2007After creating profiles on a bunch of social networking sites, media sharing sites, and blogs, I’ve decided to centralize. By centralize, I mean that I’m going to start a new blog right here, where you’ll also find links to my political blog, my Flickr photos, YouTube videos, various online profiles, and more. Much more. Ok, fine, not that much more, right this minute. But I’ll write more soon. Thanks for stopping by.