Joel on standards (another classic).

Mefeedia, the product I developed from end 2004 to end 2006 and sold in Jan 2007 to Frank Sinton (over a phonecall from Medellin, Colombia), has been doing good. Frank has kept developing the technology and the vision, traffic's way up, and now they've raised $250K to develop it further. More coverage at ReadWriteWeb. Congrats to the team!

Haha, friendfeed is blogging their CVS changesets. Why blog about new features if you can just send your changesets straight from CVS?

And here's another thought; the professional bloggers always post these long posts, but I always felt like short thoughts were more fun for me to write, and I also like to read them on other blogs, and (so here's the thought): short posts also fit nicely into friendfeed. At least, I think they do. Unless friendfeed doesn't show post texts.

Nevermind.

Friendfeed's my hangout bar of the week.

Yea yea friendfeed, been there, done that. Anyways, it's weird, I find myself hanging out there today (since others that I know are) and posting comments (since it's easy). Which leads me to think: if people I know are there (and I can find them), and it's easy to chat, I'll probably chat a bit.

OK this is crazily even better than those starwars robots, and its real:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww&hl=en]

Elastra looks really hot. A scalable MySQL service on EC2 and S3. If it works as well as advertised I'll probably end up using it for some project. The only disadvantage is that your database is hosted somewhere else than your servers (unless your servers are also on EC2 of course), but according to their benchmarks that only means a tiny slowdown. If so, this rocks.

I dislike how Firefox won't animate gifs, now that they're cool again.

Tibet

I got an email from a good friend of mine about Tibet. With the Olympics happening, Tibetans are risking everything to stand up against China and hope to get the attention of the world. Forward this if you can.

In short: go subscribe to this blog: http://blog.studentsforafreetibet.org

This is happening now, and in the coming weeks, and you can be involved by simply blogging about it. Go subscribe to http://blog.studentsforafreetibet.org

Here's his email:

"I am writing to you today not to ask for money or donations. I simply want you to know what is happening in Tibet, from my perspective, and to share what I tell you with others. What Tibet needs right now is just our attention. To those of you who supported our Facebook fundraising efforts, thank you. Know that your money is going to good work.
This video on CNN tells the complete story of the last 50 years in Tibet and what will come in the next year:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/03/13/vause.china.tibet.troubles.cnn?iref=videosearch

(As some of you may know, the protests from the story that occurred on Everest and the Great Wall used some pretty amazing live satellite technology that I am proud to have played a role in making them happen)

Tibetans across the "Tibet Autonomous Region" (TAR) inside of China are taking to the streets, risking everything they have. They do this knowing, expecting the world to be watching and to care. They are unarmed and (mostly) non-violent, isolated on the Tibetan Plateau, surrounded by countless Chinese police, military battalions and tanks.

When you protest in Tibet, it is not a small act. If you are a monk, you are arrested, often beaten or tortured, sometimes executed or imprisoned for life, and most always defrocked and forced into a life outside of the monastery.

Other lay Tibetans have lived their entire lives with memories of previous uprisings and the resulting crackdowns. No one has very much, and everyone lives under a veil of fear, balancing their need to survive and help their children succeed in modern China with their desire for the Dalai Lama to return and for true freedom. It is a heartbreaking situation.

Lhasa's internet is off and mobile phone service is generally restricted. There are no foreign press allowed openly to report, just a taste of China's standard reaction in these situations. Still, we are starting to see pictures and video here and there, a few of which are posted here: http://blog.studentsforafreetibet.org/2008/03/14/incredible-images-of-lhasa-unrest/

I have been to the three main monasteries where the uprising began - Drepung, Sera and Ganden. I spent half the day with one monk at Drepung, eating food cooked in his small room, who was the brother of a former Tibetan nun and political prisoner who I am friends with in New York. My translation of "computer programmer" into Tibetan was "man who makes machines do things" which made him laugh as he endlessly filled by cup of butter tea. I took a day trip to Ganden and walked the long holy walk ("kora") around the monastery, stopping for lunch along the way with another one of my Tibetan foster families. I took two trips to Sera, one with the "Five Tibet Guys", a crew of young kids and amateur tour guides, and the other by myself, walking the long road from Jokhang square all the way up the hill, a road that today is filled with tear gas, burning cars and blockades.

Below is a photo I took in 2004 outside of Sera monastery of a young Tibetan monk. At this moment, that very spot is surrounded by armed police and military troops, and the monks inside are hungry, hurt and wondering if their actions will matter. For their sake, please, talk about this, tell people what is happening, share the video link above and the blog link below.

Students for a Free Tibet, the organization I am on the board of and have volunteered with for over seven years, is staying on top of all the news and doing our own coverage on our blog here: http://blog.studentsforafreetibet.org
This is just the beginning. There are 146 days until the Beijing Olympic Games, and we are going to make each one count.
Thank you for you time."

LukeW is teaching a full day (!) workshop on form design, which looks great and I'd love to attend (but won't since I'm teaching my half day on global IA, which you can also still sign up for. Ha, you didn't see that one coming, right?

Great post on the economics of optimizing mysql, with good numbers.

Workshop: organizing global websites

There are 11 attendees already for my pre-conference workshop about global IA at the IASummit this year.

I've been evolving my material a lot, this is the new outline:

• Themes of global IA.
• Locales. This part is getting much more interesting than I originally thought - it turns out that structuring and developing your locales is a BIG part of global IA.
  
• Exercise.
• Break.
• Global IA constructs.
• Translating taxonomies.
• Intercultural user research. This bit is rocking too.
  

I'm still working on the workshop, if you have thoughts or requests please let me know. Also, if you already signed up, I'd love to hear from you, why you signed up, what problems you're struggling with etc.

Go sign up now if you're interested in global IA.

Google Calendar now synchs with Microsoft Outlook Calendar.

Lightweight PHP form api

I released a first version of a lightweight PHP form API today, open source. You can download the code, it works but it's just a first step (doesn't even do all possible formfields, and still has lotsa hardcoded stuff in it).

I was always a hater of these form api's, but I've finally clicked, and when you're coding a website with lotsa forms, this should come in handy. It's totally focused on being easy to program for, since I'm a lazy programmer, so the form definition is in YAML format, it writes like English almost. Define the form structure, define a function that should be called upon submit, and you're done.

Let me know what you think!

I have to say, Anil's description of how MT is better than Wordpress does sound kinda desperate.

An interesting and extendable taxonomy of relationships.

The problem with Google's social API

Google's social API group is pretty interesting (got a who'swho of alpha geeks on it). The biggest problem with testing seems to be that the API uses Google's index, which doesn't get updated that often, so if you make a change to your page, you can't test it immediately, you have to wait for Googlebot to catch up. I guess there's just not much you can do about that.

iA SUMMIT 2008

A quick promotion for my global IA workshop at the iA SUMMIT 2008 - it's shaping up to be the most in-depth workshop I've ever given, in a field that's so new that the wheel is being invented again and again all over the place. I'll post some more info on the coming weeks.

Front end developers rejoice

via Simon: "A quote from IEBlog: We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously."

That's big news.

MySpace Russia Quietly Launches; MySpace Turkey Coming

MySpace Russia Quietly Launches; MySpace Turkey Coming: "MySpace likes to put a team on the ground before launching a localized site, Travis Katz told me today (MySpace’s Managing Director of International). The key to a successful launch isn’t just localizing the site’s language. It’s also about figuring out what local bands and artists are hot, and integrating them into the service. He confirmed that Turkey is on their short list of new launches, although he won’t say when the site will launch."

As opposed to Facebook's approach where there are no local offices.

What the heck do I really know?

Lou Rosenfeld: "So sure, I can make plenty of recommendations, but, ultimately, what the heck do I really know other than the stuff that's probably obvious to anyone else with some experience in the field?" Says the master.

Why? Don't ask why. Ask why not.

It's a classic. (check out the pants too)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlejfA5NCbQ&rel=1]

Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.

Michael is blogging great stuff about user experience at Konigi.

Incredible video.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAfaM_CBvP8&rel=1]

Blogtard

One of my colleagues (I won't say who) thinks of themselves as a blogtard, but meaning the opposite of the Urban Dictionary definition.

Misery is not Miserly (PDF): a paper on how sad people spend more.

Mental model book discount code FOPVD10

Indi Young's mental model book is available, and if you use the code FOPVD10 (for "friends of peter van dijck get 10% off"), you get 10% off. So order it now, preferably from the Rosenfeld media website (as opposed to from Amazon) since they'll make more money like that :)

If you have a company, you can get a company license for the electronic format too.

Mental model book

The first book by Rosenfeld media (which you should buy for that reason alone), Mental Models, is now for sale in both digital and paper formats. Get it while it's hot.

Mux, the happy, hungry videobot

Mux, the happy, hungry videobot, created by my friend Nathan and running on Amazon services, is now in open beta. It lets you encode videos from and to pretty much any format.

A new mouse

When someone in the office asked: "what's that squeeky sound?" I knew it was time to get a new mouse. I went with the standard Microsoft model. My old mouse was also a standard one, but not optical. I cleaned it out every few months but it was really worn down. And now I'm flying around that ol' screen!

Aren't you glad you're reading my blog, btw?

Wouldn't it be incredible if Barack (is that how you spell it?) actually wins and becomes president of the USA?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHEO_fG3mm4&rel=1&border=1]

A big march ("No mas farc") of the Colombian people who've finally had enough of the violence in their country, organized in a few weeks on Facebook.

Open?: "Being socially exposed is AOK when you hold a lot of privilege, when
people cannot hold meaningful power over you, or when you can route
around such efforts. Such is the life of most of the tech geeks living
in Silicon Valley. But I spend all of my time with teenagers, one of
the most vulnerable populations because of their lack of agency (let
alone rights)."

Martin Belam has a great OPML file of the IA Summit attendees (so far) that have blogs. I just imported it into Bloglines. Thanks Martin!

Not a hoax :)

There's a challenge on Facebook going on, it ends in about 2 hours. The
charity with the most people donating (it doesn't matter if you donate
the minimum) gets an extra 50,000$.



My friend Nathan is part of a GREAT charity called the Tibetan Freedom Movement.



They're 5 people away from winning. If you want to help, do this within the next hour or so:



1. Log on to your Facebook account. If you don't have an account already, please open one at www.facebook.com.

2. Once you're logged in, go to: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/view_cause/47691

3. Donate $10 to the Tibetan Freedom Movement.



Thanks so much! I'd consider it a personal favour. Again, they only need just a few more donations...

Chupacabres suck. No, wait, Verizon sucks, chupacabres are cool! Well, they do suck, but in a good way.

I love it when an old post gets lots of discussion, like the chupacabre one, or the verizon sucks one.

Clear up that forest

p.s., Facebook must be happy, M$ is trying to take out ("acquire" they call it) a major competitor, and Google was never good at the social stuff. It's like suddenly some big trees in the wood are cut and now there's more sunlight for smaller trees.

A freestyle translation of the Microsoft offer to buy Yahoo

January 31, 2008

Board of Directors
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Attention: Roy Bostock, Chairman
Attention: Jerry Yang, Chief Executive Officer

Dear Members of the Board:

"Yahoo is cheap right now, we want to buy it" I am writing on behalf of the Board of Directors of Microsoft to make a proposal for a business combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!. Under our proposal, Microsoft would acquire all of the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 based on Microsoft’s closing share price on January 31, 2008, payable in the form of $31 in cash or 0.9509 of a share of Microsoft common stock. Microsoft would provide each Yahoo! shareholder with the ability to choose whether to receive the consideration in cash or Microsoft common stock, subject to pro-ration so that in the aggregate one-half of the Yahoo! common shares will be exchanged for shares of Microsoft common stock and one-half of the Yahoo! common shares will be converted into the right to receive cash. Our proposal is not subject to any financing condition.

"We'd pay a good price" Our proposal represents a 62% premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock of $19.18 on January 31, 2008. The implied premium for the operating assets of the company clearly is considerably greater when adjusted for the minority, non-controlled assets and cash. By whatever financial measure you use - EBITDA, free cash flow, operating cash flow, net income, or analyst target prices - this proposal represents a compelling value realization event for your shareholders.

"The Microsoft stock you'd get ain't bad either." We believe that Microsoft common stock represents a very attractive investment opportunity for Yahoo!’s shareholders. Microsoft has generated revenue growth of 15%, earnings growth of 26%, and a return on equity of 35% on average for the last three years. Microsoft’s share price has generated shareholder returns of 8% during the last one year period and 28% during the last three year period, significantly outperforming the S&P 500. It is our view that Microsoft has significant potential upside given the continued solid growth in our core businesses, the recent launch of Windows Vista, and other strategic initiatives.

"We've tried this before." Microsoft’s consistent belief has been that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! clearly represents the best way to deliver maximum value to our respective shareholders, as well as create a more efficient and competitive company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. In late 2006 and early 2007, we jointly explored a broad range of ways in which our two companies might work together. These discussions were based on a vision that the online businesses of Microsoft and Yahoo! should be aligned in some way to create a more effective competitor in the online marketplace. We discussed a number of alternatives ranging from commercial partnerships to a merger proposal, which you rejected. While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! that we are proposing.

"You said no last time, but come on, you're not doing well fighting off Google by yourselves." In February 2007, I received a letter from your Chairman indicating the view of the Yahoo! Board that “now is not the right time from the perspective of our shareholders to enter into discussions regarding an acquisition transaction.” According to that letter, the principal reason for this view was the Yahoo! Board’s confidence in the “potential upside” if management successfully executed on a reformulated strategy based on certain operational initiatives, such as Project Panama, and a significant organizational realignment. A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved.

"We can combine our advertising bits, there's a lot of money there!" While online advertising growth continues, there are significant benefits of scale in advertising platform economics, in capital costs for search index build-out, and in research and development, making this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers, and publishers. Synergies of this combination fall into four areas:

"If we partner up in advertising, we can kick Google ass!" Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale. This includes synergies across both search and non-search related advertising that will strengthen the value proposition to both advertisers and publishers. Additionally, the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending.

"Let's combine our advertising platforms into one." Expanded R&D capacity: The combined talent of our engineering resources can be focused on R&D priorities such as a single search index and single advertising platform. Together we can unleash new levels of innovation, delivering enhanced user experiences, breakthroughs in search, and new advertising platform capabilities. Many of these breakthroughs are a function of an engineering scale that today neither of our companies has on its own.

"It'll be a good excuse to fire some people too." Operational efficiencies: Eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity.

"And you can give us Flickr too." Emerging user experiences: Our combined ability to focus engineering resources that drive innovation in emerging scenarios such as video, mobile services, online commerce, social media, and social platforms is greatly enhanced.

"Join us and we'll give you all a big payraise too!" We would value the opportunity to further discuss with you how to optimize the integration of our respective businesses to create a leading global technology company with exceptional display and search advertising capabilities. You should also be aware that we intend to offer significant retention packages to your engineers, key leaders and employees across all disciplines.

"Let's work on this now." We have dedicated considerable time and resources to an analysis of a potential transaction and are confident that the combination will receive all necessary regulatory approvals. We look forward to discussing this with you, and both our internal legal team and outside counsel are available to meet with your counsel at their earliest convenience.

"It'll take some time to work out the details." Our proposal is subject to the negotiation of a definitive merger agreement and our having the opportunity to conduct certain limited and confirmatory due diligence. In addition, because a portion of the aggregate merger consideration would consist of Microsoft common stock, we would provide Yahoo! the opportunity to conduct appropriate limited due diligence with respect to Microsoft. We are prepared to deliver a draft merger agreement to you and begin discussions immediately.

In light of the significance of this proposal to your shareholders and ours, as well as the potential for selective disclosures, our intention is to publicly release the text of this letter tomorrow morning.

"Yahoo board, we're serious here, get off your butts or we'll go around you." Due to the importance of these discussions and the value represented by our proposal, we expect the Yahoo! Board to engage in a full review of our proposal. My leadership team and I would be happy to make ourselves available to meet with you and your Board at your earlies t convenience. Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.

"Yey!" We believe this proposal represents a unique opportunity to create significant value for Yahoo!’s shareholders and employees, and the combined company will be better positioned to provide an enhanced value proposition to users and advertisers. We hope that you and your Board share our enthusiasm, and we look forward to a prompt and favorable reply.

Sincerely yours,

/s/ Steven A. Ballmer

Steven A. Ballmer

Chief Executive Officer

Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft proposes to buy Yahoo. Surely nothing good can come from this.

Videos of people explaining why they will vote for Obama, on Youbama. Brilliant.

I wonder why the sharing of OPML has never really taken off? The lack of a good and easy to use service? mmm... there's an idea :)

Between LinkedIn, Facebook, Crowdvine and others, I now have to spend like 10 or 20 minutes every morning adding friends all over the place.

ps: I was playing with Facebook photo albums the other day: it's better than Flickr. Truly. Better. It doesn't look as hip, and it's not as focused on photographers, but it does much more with your social network than Flickr (an area they have always kinda neglected), and the images load faster (I think they just preload the next image while you're watching the current one, a simple trick Flickr should copy.) Overall, it's a much nicer social experience, which in turn encourages you to share your own pictures too.

I still don't like behemoth social networks though.

The ia summit is using crowdvine to power the social network for the conference. One thing I don't like about it (I love it overall), is that I want to meet everyone and am a fan of everyone. So then I have to click those things 500 times and spam everyone I know?

Check out Konigi!

Hey, Snap started a blog defending themselves against people who don't like snap (I don't like Snap previews, they're just sooooo annoying and 1996).

The fact they felt the need to start this blog speaks for itself I think. And things like "Peter Van Dijck won't give it a rest" after a blogpost or 2, 3, ... bad taste, I feel kinda intimidated almost, not sure why, maybe it's because they use my entire name. Oh well.

I started http://snapsucks.org to have an easy link that explains why I dislike snap. Now, I have to admit, I understand where they're coming from. You've got a product, a startup, traffic is going well, you work hard, then someone starts a yousuck.com site, it's no fun. And the Snap guys have been cool about it, defending their product in blog comments and such. But I'm sorry guys. I dislike snap shots, I think they're bad, and I don't feel any urge to not say that to people.

Weird.

Some damn nice recipes here. Simple ones, but I made the humus and it rocks. 5 minutes.

The language of social networks

Just a few messages from Facebook the other day:

• "You are now friends with X".
• "You now have a relationship with Y." (my wife) (!) (We had a little celebration after this one, it felt like something official.)
  

Etcetera. Read those messages literally and they start to creep you out. Thank you Facebook, for clarifying my relationships for me. It's as if I need to confirm my relationships on Facebook, as if they're not real if I don't. Anyone else have this feeling?

"Something that Anil Dash once wrote on how to charge: Slap the client
in the face as hard as you can, then tell him your rate. If he’s
shocked that you slapped him, you’re not charging enough."

A year after I moved on from Mefeedia, the team is still going strong and cranking out features, as evidenced in this new video playlist.