Alex Barnett blog : Yahoo

Chris Anderson: Charlie Rose interview discussing FREE

alexbarnett — Sat, 03 May 2008 16:51:00 GMT

I spent some time this morning watching the Charlie Rose interview with Wired's editor, Chris Anderson, discussing FREE.

The interview covers the economics and ideas driving the Internet's current (and future) state: the Gift Economy; the Attention Economy; and the Reputation Economy. Rose leads the conversation into topics such as covering the Freemium business model and consumer perceptions about the value of privacy (or lack of thereof).

The interview also moves to the topic of the Yahoo! and Microsoft merger. Rose asks: "Why is it that Yahoo! can't recruit the people at Google - through some extraordinary salary offers - that would let Yahoo! replicate what Google has?"

Anderson's answer (paraphrased): "There is a basic philosophical difference between Google and Yahoo! Google is a Machine company. Google believes that data, machines and the Algorithms will drive the company's growth. Yahoo! is a people company - it believes content created by people and the conections made between them with its drive growth."

"And what about Microsoft?", Rose asks. Anderson responds (again, paraphrasing) - "Microsoft is a pre-web software company that philosophically wants to be somewhere in between Google and Yahoo!" An oversimplified analysis, surely (hey, it's a TV interview answer), but I think the Anderson's conclusion is pretty accurate at its heart.

Windows Live Flickr?

alexbarnett — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:52:00 GMT

Holy testacular Friday. Microsoft has announced in an official press release its proposal to acquire Yahoo! for $44.6 billion in cash and stock, offering $31 a share - a 62% premium over the current trading price.

Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft:

"Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure...The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own."

Bloggers, media and pundits are going nuts over this. Reading through some of the reactions, Larry Dignan at ZDNet asks some of the questions that come to mind when considering what this might mean if Yahoo! accepts:

"...the combinations of assets from a combined Microsoft and Yahoo is a bit staggering. MSN, Yahoo, Flickr, Zimbra and a bunch of other properties would be under one roof. The big question: Can Microsoft manage it all?

Some key questions to ponder: Would Zimbra become the future Office Live? How about rationalizing products, ad systems and search algorithms. What about ad markets? Cloud computing projects? The overlap is immense."

Leaving aside the financial, "economies of scale", increased inventory, IP, IQ aspects, the one thing the acquisition would certainly do is massively accelerate Microsoft's progress into the social media space, an area of innovation Microsoft has been lagging relative to Yahoo!

On paper at least. The question then becomes: could Microsoft really leverage the newly acquired social media assets or would the acquisition stifle the innovation in this strategically key area? Windows Live Flickr anyone?

Part 2 - Interview with Jeremy Zawodny

alexbarnett — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:30:00 GMT

Part 2 of the interview podcast with Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! is now published. Lots of ground covered again. Actually, I think the the better half of the interview...a bit more free-floating:

Topics covered

How would we feel about your friends being able to edit your profile on a social network? Scary? Well, that's what Mash lets you do. (Mash is currently an invitation-only beta service...I could do with an invite...nudge, nudge)
When Jeremy wrote about Hadoop and Yahoo!'s formal involvement, it got plenty of attention from the open source community. According to Wikipedia, Hadoop is a "Free Java software framework that supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers that process huge amounts of data." When the news broke, Tim O'Reilly considered Hadoop to be an important open source project since:

"Web 2.0 software-as-a-service applications built on top of the LAMP stack now generate several orders of magnitude more revenue than any companies seeking to directly monetize open source. And most of the software used by those Web 2.0 companies above the commodity platform layer is proprietary. Not only that, Web 2.0 is siphoning developers and buzz away from open source."

O'Reilly went on to write that Yahoo!'s support of the Hadoop effort indicates how open source is becoming an increasingly key component of Web 2.0 players' competitive strategy - build your own and spend gazillions, or support an open source project that does what you need and get dev-cred along thw way. Jeremy shared his views on the announcement.

Next, we went on the the topic of the WebOS meme, something Jeremy feels strongly about :-) That was fun. Watch out for the discussion on "Meta-API Providers"...
More APIs...From b2c APIs to b2b APIs
'dem Pipes and democratizing the mashupshpere

Big thanks again Jeremy for his time.

Part 1 (in case you missed it)
Part 2

Podcast with Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! - Part 1

alexbarnett — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 02:47:00 GMT

The latest Bungee Line podcast is up - this time an interview with Jeremy Zawodny, an 8-year-veteran of Yahoo! and currently a member of the Yahoo Developer Network team.

Lots covered, so much so that we had to break up the interview into two parts, Part 1 and er, Part two.

In Part 1 we discussed:

Yahoo!'s Zimbra acquisition
the Yahoo! Mail Web Services APIs
Jeremy's take on the Business Week article discussing Yahoo! Openness
the fruits of Yahoo! Hack Days and the Internal Yahoo! Hack Days initiative
Yahoo! Geocoding API
Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library
Yahoo!'s AJAX API for Maps

Part 2, we talk about about some of the recent topics Jeremy's been covering on his blog...will let you you know when it's up - in a week or so.

Microsoft missing out on Community talents

alexbarnett — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 12:58:00 GMT

Todd Bishop at Seattle Post-Intelligencer has picked up on the fact that Korby Parnell, ex-product manager for some of Microsoft's most successful developer community-related projects (e.g. Codeplex, Gotdotnet and Claimspace - but that's another story) has been nabbed by Yahoo's Seattle office (Chad Dickerson's team, who runs the Yahoo Developer Network).

Korby, a good friend and neighbour while I was living in Redmond, WA, didn't make a public song and dance of the move, but when he told me he was on his way I realized Microsoft had lost out on an amazing talent.

Microsoft has recently lost two other good community-oriented people: Josh Ledgard left Visual Studio's product team to join software dev company Telligent - developers of Community Server - in July 2007. Josh was closely involved in the development of the innovative MSDN Product Feedback Center, now Connect. Then Joe Morel left the same VS team to join the same software company two weeks later.

Microsoft has done a great job in recent years to foster a more open and transparent culture with respect to customer engagement and Korby and Josh were there at the beginning of the Microsoft blogging revolution and other community-related initiatives, really challenging the notions of old-style centralized command-and-control corporate communication. It's a shame to see this quality of talent walk out of the Redmond campus, true customer advocates - people with a real passion for customers and their needs.

I wish Korby, Josh and Joe the best of luck in their new adventures!

Update 9/2/07:

An anonymous reader has tipped me off on yet another leaver. Sandy Khaund, another big force in Microsoft's community development, has announced he's off to join a start up. Good luck Sandy!

Alex Barnett Podcasts

admin — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 19:58:00 GMT

Alex Barnett Podcasts - I like podcasting, here are the links to them.

2008 - Podcasts for the Bungee Line

Nate Bowler, CTO of @Task, July 20 2008

@task (or AtTask) is a Utah-based tech company providing a comprehensive, web-based project and portfolio-management package delivered in both a SaaS and on-premise model with a very rich web API set. We talked with Nate about the evolution of their web services design and @task's future product plans in light of the market opportunities presented by the availability of the increasing number of 3rd party programmable web services."

Steve Bjorg, Founder and CTO of MindTouch, June 20 2008

"Prior to founding MindTouch and Steve worked in advanced strategies at Microsoft focusing on distributed systems and web services. We talked with Steve about MindTouch platform, its rich set of web APIs and the implications of a programmable wiki. But MindTouch goes beyond providing open source wiki collaboration and content management - it's delivering a leading edge application integration and development platform called MindTouch Deki. Michael Coté, an industry analyst with RedMonk (analyst firm) picked up on both the podcast interview and news of the latest release of MinTouch Deki."

Update from John Musser of ProgrammableWeb, April 14 2008

"ProgrammableWeb’s John Musser returns to the Bungee Line to give us an update on the API action of early 2008. Alex and Ted apologize for the unfortunate audio treatment to the Bungee sound in the previous episode, promising “never again!” In related news, check out the new intro music for our “Cool Web Tips” segment."

Developer Community Management with Jono Bacon, March 14 2008

"There are few developer communities as large and distributed as that of Ubuntu, perhaps the most popular brand of GNU/Linux distributions available today. Jono Bacon is the first official community manager for Ubuntu. He joins to tell us what he has learned in his 18 months of working with this vast and disparate community."

Social Design with Joshua Porter, Jan 30 2008

"Joshua Porter is a usability consultant, web designer, researcher and blogger specializing in the art of social design for the web whose experience includes five years at world-renowned User Interface Engineering. Josh’s blog (Bokardo.com) is a must-read favorite for UI and web designers and is finishing up his first book, to be published in the next few weeks (details below)."

Alan Lewis on eBay Desktop and eBay APIs, January 15 2008

"As product manager for eBay Desktop, Alan Lewis relies on the same web APIs that eBay makes available to all developers. In this edition of the Bungee Line, Alan tells us about what the eBay Desktop is, how it came about, and various details about eBay’s developer program and web APIs. We ask Alan about eBay’s position Oauth and on open source."

2007 - Podcasts for the Bungee Line

Toby Segaran on “Programming Collective Intelligence”, December 13 2007

"Since the publication of his O’Reilly book Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, Toby Segaran has become well noted for his ability to explain easily-understandable algorithms for the kind of deeply complex problems involved in social applications. Toby joins Alex and Ted to discuss some of the high-level concepts that he tackles in his book."

Jon Aizen of Dapper.net, November 17 2007

"Jon Aizen joins Alex and Ted to explain how Dapper.net provides a no-fee tool for making almost any structured web site data accessible via a REST API. In a past life, Jon was involved in creating The Internet Archive. Jon also helps the Bungee Line introduce romantic intrigue into the podcast.

Punditry Alert! At the end of this show, Ted and Alex speculate a bit about Android, Google’s open source mobile device platform, the Apache License, and whether Robert Love is involved. Please consider this as another demonstration of Ted’s idiocy, brought to you by the Bungee Line."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 2), October 7 2007

"In part 2 of our interview with Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr, Alex and Ted ask Jeff about Flexible Payment Service, virtual user group meetings in Second Life, the Startup Project, and pry at Jeff’s views of possible futures of technologies that developers might anticipate."

OAuth Podcast, with Chris Messina (aka FactoryJoe), Larry Halff (of Ma.gnolia) and Eran Hammer-Lahav, November 3 2007

"OAuth is a big idea, but is it a "solution looking for a problem to solve"? I don't think so. The problem for end users today is real, i.e. authorizing one service to access your data by another service for use by the first service, securely and with control. For developers wanting to develop apps and services that create value through the use of customer data stored on other services, there is no standardized means set of protocols to lean on. Instead, developers need to waste time learning a new way for their app to be authorized to do so for each service provider, having to jump through the various specific means and idiosyncrasies of each service."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 1), October 18 2007

"Developer evangelist for Amazon Web Services, Jeff Barr tells Alex and Ted about how he became a native Amazonian, his recent visit to “The Business of API’s Conference,” and a bunch of stuff on Amazon Web Services, including: Mechanical Turk, EC2, and S3. Additionally, Jeff explains the newly announced S3 Service Level Agreement*."

Interview with Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! - Part 1 and Part 2, October 1 2007

Part 1

"Yahoo!'s Zimbra acquisition, the Yahoo! Mail Web Services APIs, Jeremy's take on the Business Week article discussing Yahoo! Openness, the fruits of Yahoo! Hack Days and the Internal Yahoo! Hack Days initiative, Yahoo! Geocoding API, Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library, Yahoo!'s AJAX API for Maps"

Part 2

"What Mash lets you do, Hadoop and Yahoo!'s formal involvement, the WebOS meme, something Jeremy feels strongly about :-) That was fun. Watch out for the discussion on "Meta-API Providers"... More APIs...From b2c APIs to b2b APIs, plus Pipes and democratizing the mashupshpere"

Interview with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com, September 19 2007

"Topics covered include Facebook APIs, Amazon's recently launched Flexible Payment Service (FPS) , Google Base, Microsoft's Astoria and relational-data-in-the-cloud programming models and services, SaaS models and API SLAs, REST vs SOAP, "Closed is Still the Old Closed" and plenty more."

-

Older podcasts:

Search & Enjoy! (Podcast) The Power of Search and Recommendation, June 6 2006

"Speakers from Microsoft, Blinkx and Last.fm discussed issues of content regarding search, recommendation, the semantic web and the ownership of data in the Web 2.0 era at Content 2.0 on 6th June 2006."

-

Microformats Podcast, March 31, 2006

"Here's a great podcast for you. All about microformats..."

Guests: Tantek Çelik, Dan Connolly and Rohit Khare. I think it's safe to say these guys know a thing or two about the web and microformats.

-

OPML Podcast, March 10, 2006

"It's all about the draft OPML 2.0 spec and a few other things thrown in such as structured blogging, OPML tools, namespaces and microformats."

Guests: Joshua Porter, Adam Green and John Tropea.

--

OPML and Reading Lists Podcast with Danny Ayers and Adam Green, Feb 12, 2006

"Last year Dave Winer started to push the idea of Reading Lists for RSS. More recently, the idea of Dynamic Reading Lists and Feed Grazing (or Grazing Lists / Glists) has been kicking around.

Its likely that Reading Lists support will become a common feature of Feed Readers / Aggregators."

Guests: Danny Ayers, Adam Green and Joshua Porter

--

Attention podcast : Attention with Steve Gillmor, Feb 08, 2006

"Steve has been leading Attention conversation for some time now. In 2003 he, along with David Sifry (CEO of Technorati), initiated the attention.xml efforts and has since taken on the role as president of the non-profit Attention Trust."

Guests: Steve Gillmor and Joshua Porter

--

MSN Search Champs podcast - Privacy conversation Jan 26 2006

"I attended the MSN Search Champs today....and what a day. Given the recent news and concerns around the data MSN Search, Yahoo and AOL provided to the government, there was a session set up where the 57 bloggers / online experts at MSN Search Champ were invited to discuss the topic with senior MSN management (Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi and VP Chris Payne)."

Guests: Fred Oliveira, Dion Hinchcliffe, Joshua Porter, Chris Pirillo, Thomas Vander Wal and Brady Forrest.

--

Attention podcast: RSS feedreaders and aggregators Jan 22, 2006

"I asked two of the RSS industry's leading lights to join me for a call and share their perspective on the question of where Attention is going with respect to RSS feedreaders and aggregators: Nick Bradbury creator FeedDemon, part of Newsgator (Nick also developed Homesite - sold to Macromedia - and Topstyle) and Kevin Burton of Tailrank (also co-founder Rojo)."

Guests: Nick Bradbury, Joshua Porter and Kevin Burton

--

Structured Blogging podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger, Dec 16, 2005

"You might have heard of the Structured Blogging initiative announced earlier this week by Marc Canter and others...there was certainly plenty of buzz and reaction to the news, but not all the reaction was rosy."

Guests: Marc Canter and Joshua Porter

--

Identity Podcast with Kim Cameron and Dick Hardt, Dec 09, 2005

"A couple of weeks ago Joshua and I had a conversation about attention data (as podcasts).

In that conversation we kept touching on the topic of online identities and their management, so we thought we'd invite two pioneers of the identity space, Dick Hardt and Kim Cameron, to a podcast session and discuss how they saw the connections between these two related topics: attention and identity."

Guests: Dick Hardt, Kim Cameron and Joshua Porter

--

OPML = Attention Data, Attention Engines and Tailrank, Nov 12, 2005

"Although we met briefly last week, Kevin Burton and I didn't manage to get enough time to discuss some of the things on our mind at the time, so we got a Skype call together and posted it as a podcast (.mp3, 42mb).

We focused the discussion around what he calls Meme Engines and I call Attention Engines, Tailrank (Kevin's latest project), OPML, RSS and Attention.xml"

Guests: Kevin Burton

--

Web 2.0 podcast, July 01, 2005

"Richard MacManus of Read/WriteWeb and I had a Skype chat this evening and recorded the call Talked about Web 2.0, attention.xml, a bit about RSS, APIs and more."

Guest: Richard MacManus

-

Attention podcast with Joshua Porter, Nov 26, 2005

"About OPML, Attention, and empowering people."

Guest: Joshua Porter

--

MSN Search Champs Podcast - Privacy conversation

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 19:43:00 GMT

I attended the MSN Search Champs today....and what a day. Given the recent news and concerns around the data MSN Search, Yahoo and AOL provided to the government, there was a session set up where the 57 bloggers / online experts at MSN Search Champ were invited to discuss the topic with senior MSN management (Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi and VP Chris Payne).

As Robert Scoble wrote, MSN VP Chris Payne took the opportunity to confirm that no IP address or PII (Personally Identifiable Information) was provided. It became apparent to me at least, that many (maybe the majority) of the MSN Search Champs didn't realize this prior to today's event. I think this misundertanding is one of the reasons there was such a deal and story made front page news in the media and in the blogosphere.

And so conversation started.

And it carried on into the night, even after the event was over - here's a podcast (mp3, 42 mins, 10mb) recorded tonight to discuss what we heard and learnt today. We had five Web 2.0 Workgroup members on the podcast: Fred Oliveira (post), Dion Hinchcliffe (post), Joshua Porter (post), and myself. We also had Chris Pirillo, Thomas Vander Wal of Infocloud the organizer of MSN's Search Champs, Brady Forrest.

Michael Arrington, Richard MacManus and Live Side have some info on their first day at MSN Search Champs.

download the podcast (mp3, 42 mins, 10mb)

Update: Thursday 26 2006: One point of clarification since the podcast was provided to me by Ramez Naam, director of program management at MSN Search: the DOJ did not ask MSN for PII specifically. They asked for MSN Search logs. MSN told them that they would not give them PII and they were fine with that.

The major push-pull between MSN / DOJ was in the amount of data - they asked MSN for a much larger volume of data, and it was scoped down to a relatively small period.

Tags: Microsoft MSN Google Yahoo privacy