- Posts tagged yahoo
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Flickr Video Goes Live
One of the last projects that I was working on prior to leaving Yahoo was laying out the support guidelines for Flickr Video.
I’m really happy to see that the team launched Flickr Video tonight. Like everything that the Flickr team does, this product is really nicely done.
Congratulations to the entire team!!!
Here is the link to my first video.Eric Marcoullier Is Blogging (again)
First, this is very late. I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but it has slipped. Eric is one of the co-founders of MyBlogLog and, while we were at YHOO, we had a few conversations about the integration of MBL to Yahoo just before he left.
I am of the belief that MBL is the best acquisition that YHOO made since Flickr and I think that it is really sad that YHOO doesn't (didn't?) see the potential of it (or maybe I didn't see YHOO seeing the potential of it). In any case, while working with him, I found Eric to be a really good, smart guy. It is always a drag when people like that leave.
I do enjoy when good, smart people write in a unique fashion. Eric had a blog that he shut down to focus on MBL. Good news is that he started writing again, in cool, 100 word increments. His posts are funny, articulate and, due to this self imposed limit, really quick to read.
Check it out.
YHOO + MSFT: Did You Hear?
I've been thinking about MSFT & YHOO ever since Steve Souders went to Google about a month ago. Not so much in regards to an acquisition, but for what MSFT did to Borland during my first year there back in 1996 (I'm old).
If you aren't familiar with the history, during the battles between Visual Basic (MSFT) and Delphi (Borland), MSFT recruited away 30 members of the Delphi development team, including Paul Gross and Anders Hejlsberg, essentially killing Delphi and with it, Borland. MSFT threw obscene amounts of money at the Borland Delphi team. Literally, tens of millions of dollars.
Why wouldn't MSFT & GOOG do the same thing? Why not just identify a few dozen of the key people within the company, throw a ton of money at them and kill YHOO from the inside? Facebook did it to the west coast sales team a few years ago. Why not keep that going? It would be cheaper than doing an acquisition.
Then I started thinking about the old Bill Gates spam that came out in the early days. Remember that? If you forwarded an email, Bill Gates would give you a few dollars for each person you sent it to because he was tracking some new email service?
For $45 billion, MSFT just paid about $55 per user for YHOO's 800 million users. MSFT may have been able to extend an offer to pay key users $100 to migrate their usage to MSN and generate some pre-defined number of page views. They would have still paid out a bunch of money, but it would have been far less than the $45B that they are paying for YHOO and they would have killed YHOO, possibly making them more intimidating to GOOG (maybe). It also would have gotten users on MSN faster than the integration will happen.
Alas, Ballmer didn't call me for guidance and selfishly announced the acquisition before I could offer my two cents. Two of the more perfect metaphors that I've heard are 'two elephants mating' (Paul Kedrosky) and 'Tying the Titanic to the iceberg' (Andy Baio).
The problem that YHOO has faced, with few exceptions (Flickr, MyBlogLog, Upcoming), for at least a couple of years is that YHOO needs to pander to the lowest common denominator. YHOO needs to make 800 million people come back to their pages on a regular basis. Not an easy task, but it is hard to release services that are unique and innovative that 800 million people will adopt (Twitter is awesome, but only has 800K users). In other words, YHOO has become the Wal-Mart of the internet.
There is nothing wrong with being Wal-Mart mind you. Wal-Mart is a big, consistently profitable company, but don't expect the next big thing to come out of it. The company will be too conservative or too slow.
In the end, the MSFT acquisition of YHOO will go through. The integration of 3 different ad plaforms (YHOO, RightMedia & MSN) will take a really long time. This will frustrate advertisers who will migrate to GOOG (for contextual) and Facebook (for display). The really good people within YHOO (the people they should have targeted in the first place), will get frustrated with the stock price, the direction of the integration and the idea of working for 'the man'.
If there is a negative impact for my friends, I'll be bummed. They are smart, they will land on their feet. I'll be more disappointed if the YHOO services that are really interesting, like Flickr, like MyBlogLog, like the stuff coming out of Brickhouse, gets mitigated to the back burner in favor of less exciting services that pander to the masses.
Last Day at Yahoo, Pt. 2
Building a Sweet RSS Feed in Yahoo! Pipes
I've been working on and off on a series of posts on web 2.0 tools that sales people can use to be better prepared for sales calls and to outperform the competition. You can find the beginning of the series here.
One of the posts that I've really been looking forward to writing is one on Yahoo! Pipes. Pipes, while it appears complicated, is actually a fairly simple data aggregator. Do you have a penchant for building a gizmo that scours criagslist for something and sends you a report with a link and price? Pipes can do that for you. Want to combine Last.fm with YouTube? No problem (that one is really cool). Pipes is really super fantastic good for making any kind of mashup you can envision.
I actually discovered Pipes when I was trying to develop a golf / Flickr mashup. Tangent: It would have combined Flickr with golf course reviews in local. If anyone wants to build it, please do so, I couldn't make it work. What I could do, though, was develop simple, combined RSS feeds. Essentially taking feeds from a number of different sites and combining them into one data feed that I could subscribe to. In other words, I could take all of the official Yahoo! RSS feeds and, rather than subscribing to 20 different feeds, I simply subscribe to one.
Using this in a sales environment is really quite simple. I'll walk you through the first one and you can take it from there. I'll show you how to make a basic pipe that aggregates a number of sales blogs together. The really nice part about Pipes is that the code is open. I'll give you a link to my pipe and you can modify it as you see fit.
The first step is to go to Yahoo! Pipes and login.
Now, you can do one of two things. What I would recommend is that you browse around the pipes and find a couple that you like. From there, just steal their code and modify as indicated above. If you are more of the macho, I want to build this on my own type of person, press the 'Create a Pipe' button.
You'll be presented with a screen that looks like a piece of graph paper with the words 'drag modules here' in the center. On the left hand side, you'll see said modules starting with Sources, User Inputs, Operators, Url, etc. These will be your building blocks for the application you are building.
To build an RSS aggregator, first, it is important to think about which feeds you want to subscribe to. In my case, I'm going to grab the following sales & marketing blog feeds:
Grab a few of them and put them on your graph paper.
Next, fill in the boxes with the site feed address. This is the one that ends in RSS, atom or has Feedburner or something like that in it. For example, the feed address for my site is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/scottschnaars/kVtx. Just right click (if you are right handed) on the little orange box and select 'Copy Link Location'. Hopefully you have something that looks a little bit like this:
(Click for Bigger Image)
You don't need to be nearly so anal about how clean it is. We are pretty smart at Yahoo and can figure it out if you have modules all over the place.
You have to hook all of these feeds together. Grab a module under 'Operators' called 'Union'. This will take all of your feeds and stuff them into one pipe. The 'Union' module will support up to 5 feeds and you can unionize unions of unions if you want. Very Big Love.
Next, under operators, grab a module called 'Sort', drag it to your graph paper and from the drop down menu, pick 'Itemby.pubDate' and leave the default as ascending.
Now the fun part, connect your modules using Pipes. Simply grab the little ball underneath your 'Fetch Feed' module and drag it to your 'Union' module. When you are finished dragging feeds to unions, drag your union to your sort. You probably notices that you also have a 'Pipe Output' module that was on the page when you dropped your first module there. You want to hook everything to this. In the end, you should have some type of Dr. Octopus schematic that looks more or less like this:
If you did it right, data should be coming out in the gray part at the bottom of the screen. Not just any data, but the data that you want in your application. Congratulations, you're a Yahoo! Pipes developer. Share your apps with your friends and colleagues.
Like I said above, my recommendation would be to find an application that you like and tailor it to your needs. You can access this application and copy the code by clicking here.
If you create an application or an aggregator using Pipes, please share them with me.
Sweet, you're with me right? Pipes is open to the front page looking like graph paper and you have the blogs you want. Here is the easy part. From the left hand side of the screen, grab the module called 'Fetch Feed' and drag it onto the graph paper. You should have a cool little box that looks like this:
Flickr Stats, Uploadr 3.0, & Y! Shortcuts
