the blog: tag= yahoo
More than bleeding purple
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- http://valleywag.com/5017424/stewart-butterfields-bizarre-resign....
Click it, read it. It's Stewart Butterfield's—Flickr co-founder—good-bye resignation note. Simply unreal and hilarious. I wish I had the cajones.
It's an appropriate metaphor for Y!'s 2005 ascent to its current cluster-mumbo-jumbo. It's rather sad because in early '05, Y! began to hire big guns, major frackin' talent. Flickr had just been gobbled up. Soon, upcoming.org del.icio.us and Jumpcut joined the ranks, and with 'em, some extraordinary peeps. Internally, the Y!UI library, YDN network sprouted wings both as critical platforms for Y! properties and external entities in the wide open web. Yahoo! Answers busted its nut in late '05 too, growing to 20 million unique users in 6 months and over a dozen languages. Hack day, Y! Teachers and Y! Photos shone brightly. Man, those were good times. We were all doing some good companywide.
But .... 2007 reared its ugly head and somewhere, somehow the egos and bureaucracy ate into that spirit. Panama's flop and a deteriorating stock price didn't help.
Y!'s bookmarking services is a prime example of "does anyone have a clue?" There's del.icio.us, Bookmarks, and MyWeb, all of which do similar things, but no one has a clue how to offer a complete service. And some of these were supposed to help Search results in the losing battle against the Big G!. Again, never happened. Most of the resources were allocated towards dinky and trivial features, including color changes / reskinnings—except for the del.icio.us Firefox and IE extensions which rose to awesomeness. Overall, if there's one product that persevered the hogwash, Flickr did it best. Best example? Its well-thought out approach to video; otherwise corporate would have probably demanded Youtube on Flickr. Ha!
It's really sad to see the top dawgs go, beginning early this year: Bradley, Ian, Zawodny, Leonard, Caterina, Stewart and many others. (Yes, I'm name-dropping) They're not just any ol' rank-n-files. They were the ones that made you work hard and feel proud at Yahoo!.
*sigh* Too bad.
At least, Joshua still bleeds purple ;) But for how much longer?Labels: bureaucracy, del.icio.us, flickr, jumpcut, upcoming, yahoo, yanswers, ybookmarks
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hey, lookie here! Tiger pride!
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I didn't notice til now, but Marco, a Y! colleague o' mine, posted my little spiel outside the Tiger Team bullpen (a general area of cubes).
"Trust your gut, do what's right and cut the bullshit."
It's like I died. Fellas, dudes, I'm still here =D
I just hope I don't get in trouble. Heh heh, like I'd give a f... anyways.Labels: yahoo
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Pipes
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Yahoo! Pipes revealed itself today. I test-drove it a couple of months ago. It didn't look as fancy as it does now, but it did pack the wallop that Y! needs!
In my words, Pipes is a nifty IDE to mashup various data sources (open APIs, RSS feeds), interfacey tools (input fields) and easy-to-use programming modules to wire it all up. It reminds me of the Visual Basic IDE. I'm not describing Pipes correctly, so you should see for yourself. It's def. motherfrackin' cool.
Congrats to the Pipes team! More and more of this good stuff!
Now pass the pipe on to someone else ;) Heh heh, that one was lame.- 0 +add yours