What went wrong at Yahoo?

I noticed something today: the Yahoo homepage contains multiple links to total spam sites. There's an online degrees site features that goes to an adsense filled page (a spam site in other words), and a link to the ripoff company "freecreditscore" (they will sell you a monthly subscription without you noticing to get your "free" credit score).

What's worse, these links are not advertised as "ads", but as editorial content.

That's not good for Yahoo's brand or credibility. (SEO's of this world, have your fun with it!)

I noticed today that surfing around some of the Yahoo properties really feels like surfing around an ad-filled bunch of rather useless features.

So what went wrong? I'm not sure, but these kind of mistakes tend to be institutional. I think this page was designed by good designers, tested for usability, but nobody really owns it as their baby and worries about its quality. If they did, things like this wouldn't last a day. Also, it's probably the most stodgily conservative page in the company (homepages usually are), but come on!

What's more, as I was playing with Yahoo, I started to think their information architecture is a mess. For example, there are links to Yahoo services scattered all over the homepage, mixed in with some crappy ads like the above and some really pretty useless "news" items. Come on guys, it's 2007! You can do better.

ok, petervandijck.com is now the number 1 for the peter van dijck search. That was easy ;)

The reported cluelessness of Google's interview process compares quite badly with the brilliance of Microsoft's, who really don't fool around when hiring people. Expectations!

Is there any lightweight app out there that lets you browse with other, ie: if 1 person goes to a different page, the other person is also sent there? No download preferably, should work with any website, hopefully lightweight (don't want to download a crazy whiteboard sharing app).

A good idea: a universal wiki edit button design. Hey, make it a universal "edit this page" button.

Hey, Google translate is like Babelfish (translate text or pages), but it also can translate search results. Cool, Babelfish hadn't had a competitor for too long.

Google bought Feedburner. Now that's an acquisition that makes sense. I still insist that Google's acquisition of Youtube was a short term win (that ad inventory couldn't fall in the hands of the competition!) but a long term strategic mistake (every piece of inventory Google owns makes its ad serving technology less independent).

By the way, in my dealings with the Feedburner team, I have to say they rock!

I added another great presentation, this time a video, to my page of scaling presentations.

If Google really made a deal to pay large news providers for the privelege of listing them in their Google news section, the person responsible for this deal should be fired immediately. It's also most likely not true.

"enhanced interrogation"? Or torture? One aspect not discussed in this article of questionable interrogation techniques is their effect on the perception of the US and any "moral authority" they might claim.

More great Simon slides explaining OpenID.

A great comparison of js libraries by Simon Willison.

A great Flash upload library to upload multiple files with upload indicators and everything.

Oooh, the new Google analytics is niice! That's a BIG leap!

Let me know if you want a Joost invite (leave a comment).

And: "Treat a startup as an optimization problem
in which performance is measured by number of users." Number of active users, that is :)

Always a classic: "If you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think
it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different
ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head.
You'd think."

I wonder if there is any coworking going on in Belgium or Antwerp? Anyone?

And for the record, I think 2007 is the year of offline web apps. In 2008 that market will be huge.

Firefox 3 has "online" and "offline" events. That's javascript-speak for saying: now your webpage can know when you're offline (and hence queue it's actions) and when you're online (and then send all the queued actions to the server).

In other words, offline apps will be possible in Firefox 3. Hopefully we'll soon see experimentation and then an open js library to enable easy offline app-making (like js libraries now make ajax easy for dummies). IE is the only problem factor then.

A PHP logger class to easily create logfiles.

The ux zeitgeist.

hkit to parse microformats in PHP: looks supereasy:

    $hKit = new hKit;
    $result = $hKit->getByURL('hcard', 'http://microformats.org/');
    print_r($result);

wayut is now running in closed beta. If you want an invite let me know :)

Belgium applicants to the European web2.0 startup contest. A LOT of education-related things, but nothing really interesting that jumps out.

I was calculating: let's say you take, say, 10 pictures a day, for 3000 pictures a year. And we can optimize a picture into a decent size jpg of 130K. Not perfect but better than nothing and reasonable size. That is 400MB worth of optimized pictures, a year.

In Amazon S3, we can store this for you for about 80 cents a year. (15 cents/G times 12 / 2 coz we only have 400MB). Year two, the price doubles.

Why hasn't anyone built a business like this: free backup of your photos (up to say 5000 photos a year at optimized quality), with additional services extra?

There are a whole bunch of services out there, but none that I know of that do this. Pointers in the comments. For free, I'd take the piece of mind knowing that if my computer crashes, I'd have access to a backed-up version of my photos, be it not in 100% resolution.

I've been using the free version of Mozy to keep my business files (word docs, ...) backed up, and it rocks. It reliably backups everything, I can easily restore files, and it's free. There's really no reason not to use that for backing up your files: it's free and works great. If you want to back up big folders (like your pictures and music), you can get a paid account. Check it out.

What I learnt from working from home.

15 startups in Europe.

The deadline for submissions for the European IA Summit is May 15th (in a week!). So hurry, they won't be extending the deadline this year.

hahaha

Kevin Rose listen up :)

Is there a word for "little optimization"? I mean, "early optimization" of code is the root of all evil, and that's kind of the same thing, but what I mean is making changes to your code and making it less logical/readable in order to do "little optimization", ie. get some gains that might as well be solved with an extra server or so?

(This post might not make sense, haven't had my coffee yet.)

Joost are gonna have to do better if they want to be successfull. This kind of sums up my feelings, too: "Unfortunately, the content they offered was crap. The colleague who
invited me said the same - after the first amazement at the coolness of
it all, you spend about 10 minutes zapping through the programs, and
then you switch it off, bored already".

Still, no good underestimating the Skype/Kazaa guys.

Barcamp Brussels was really cool, very Belgian and I saw a few Belgian startups I didn't know of before. Wikifonia does sheet music, and not so-so (not live yet but they have a blog) is in the get-your-friends-reviews-of-places business. I was impressed with how smart they were.

Old but good: "The user of social software is the
group, and ease of use should be for the group."

You could use Anguish Languish instead of Lorem Ipsum.

"Many years ago I received a tree identification book for Christmas. I was at my parents' home, and after all the gifts had been opened I decided to go out and identify the trees in the neighborhood. Before I went out, I read through part of the book. The first tree in the book was the Joshua tree because it only took two clues to identify it. Now the Joshua tree is a really weird-looking tree and I looked at that picture and said to myself, "Oh, we don't have that kind of tree in Northern California. That is a weird-looking tree, and I've never seen one before."

So I took my book and went outside. My parents lived in a cul-de-sac of six homes. Four of those homes had Joshua trees in the front yard. I had lived in that house for thirteen years, and I had never seen a Joshua tree. I took a walk around the block, and there must have been a sale at the nursery when everyone was landscaping their new homes-- at least 80 percent of the homes had Joshua trees in the front yards. And I had never seen one before! Once I was conscious of the tree-- once I could name it-- I saw it everywhere."

More

A great post that finally explains what Amazon's SQS service does and (most importantly) why. I get it now.

Twitter explained in 140 characters.

"Write short 140 character messages. See your friends' messages, and receive them as SMS on your cellphone. Popular with geeks. Growing crazy"

Try to explain twitter in 140 characters.

I'll be at Barcamp Brussels tomorrow - looking forward to it! I don't think I'll talk, there seem to be loads of good talks already. Can't wait!

Microsoft buying Yahoo?

Microsoft opened talks again with Yahoo to potentially acquire them for 50 billion $, it seems. As we've seen before, Microsoft’s profits continue to be staggering, they could buy Yahoo at this price with the profits of less than 1 year. I don't think it'd be a fit though. All the cool people would leave Yahoo, and it would open up space for another powerhouse to emerge. What would be the pros for Microsoft:

• They get a web savvy company
• They get a strong brand and loads of traffic
• They get to strengthen their position in the advertisment market

And the cons?

• For us: Yahoo gets assimilated, which means Flickr and del.icio.us get assimilated.
• For M$: they get lots of internal competition. Yahoo just shut down their own internal photo competition. But now Yahoo Mail and Hotmail would be under the same roof, and so on.
• The cultural clashes might last 10+ years and be deadly.

OK, for your wayfinding presentations, check out this:

The memcached list is also regularly scaling porn. Today these gems:

"No clue if we’re the largest installation, but Facebook has roughly 200 dedicated memcached servers in its production environment, plus a small number of others for development and so on. A few of those 200 are hot spares. They are all 16GB 4-core AMD64 boxes, just because that’s where the price/performance sweet spot is for us right now (though it looks like 32GB boxes are getting more economical lately, so I suspect we’ll roll out some of those this year.)"

That's 3200 Gigs (!) of cached data on Facebook. At say 20Kb text per page, that's 160 million cached pages. (I know it's not entire pages they cache, but still). Of course those boxes don't have all their memory for memcached, so it'd be less. :)

Cruxy is live now, it's a great platform for bands and such to sell their music online *themselves*. Cruxy takes care of all the technical details, hosting, transcoding, SecondLife-ing and so on.

Michael (not a newbie, exactly) gets sucked in by tagged's signup process which tries hard to spam all your contacts (and often succeeds).

Yahoo is launching a new web-based messenger client at http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/ - no download! Good move.

"Since a particular source is limited to the number of times it appears in the top ten" - from the horses mouth: so on Yahoo you can only get a fixed number of pages in the top 10 of any query.

Damn Mark Pilgrim still writes like the best. Silly season: "Reactions? “The web just got richer.â€? Well, somebody’s getting richer, but I doubt it’s gonna be the web."

I learnt something today: sometimes, you repeat a lot of code all over, and it's NOT a good idea to put that in a separate function, coz that means you'd be abstracting away too much stuff. (But usually it is of course.)