Results tagged “yahoo”

Humans create the web, but we've largely abdicated the act of organizing web content to software. That could change.

• Twitter this week made its new Lists feature broadly available. As they've been described, Lists, allow you to enumerate a collection of some of the Twitter accounts that you follow, and then easily read updates from just those accounts. Others can view your lists, and choose to subscribe to them as well. But Lists are also available for other applications to use, modify and share. Looked at from a slightly different perspective, this means Lists are a way to tag an arbitrary set of realtime web feeds. You could look at the lists that I've been added to as a set of tags describing my Twitter feed.

• Much of the precedent for the idea of sharing (non-realtime) feeds comes from the world of outlining, and in particular Dave Winer's work here in creating OPML. Though it was designed to generically exchange outlines, OPML is the most popular format today for sharing arbitrary lists of feeds. (The computer science folks balk at some of the technical aspects of OPML but it's a bit like Churchill's comments on democracy — it's the worst format, except for all of the other alternatives.) What's interesting about having an established format for exchanging feeds is that there doesn't really need to be any changes in order for the format to accommodate realtime feeds like Twitter accounts. In fact, a few weeks ago, I moved about 150 the noisier, less pressing Twitter accounts I follow into Google Reader, by exporting them as an OPML file. Twitter became more pleasant to use, and I could still keep up with all of those folks by dipping into my feed reader whenever I want to.

• Lists have a few traits that make them more interesting than they seem; we can think of these as the Laws of Lists. First, you have to be signed in to Twitter with a valid account in order to create them. (This seems obvious, but it's important.) Second, by adding a Twitter accounts to a list that you create, you follow that user's updates, at least while viewing that list. This combination of authentication and requirement of relationship is a very good recipe for reducing spam.

• One of the earliest hopes for organizing web information was the human-edited directory. Efforts like the Open Directory Project still exist, but the model focused a lot on having defined editors for topics and a hierarchy of who could edit the site. That's a stark contrast to the default-open editing permissions of projects like Wikipedia, and is probably the most significant difference between the "human-edited" and "user-generated" eras of the web — we've always had people contributing content, the difference was in how much we trust them. Similarly, more outline-focused directories of content emerged, like Halley Suitt's Top Ten Sources, which is now defunct, but was based upon the idea of curated lists of feeds by topic. In each case, trying to scale a team of editors to keep up with the rate of growth in new sites on the web has been a losing cause. But we've seen sites like Delicious demonstrate the value of tagging individual pages or posts on a site — a new generation of directories could demonstrate the value of tagging entire streams of posts, or as we call them, feeds.

• Of course, you can't talk about directories and lists on the web without talking about Yahoo. Yahoo's original sin was in trying to create a human-edited directory of the web, and before they unfortunately achieved their goal of becoming the only successful web portal, the directory was Yahoo's signature element. (Until recently, Yahoo had maintained a page with the directory in a format resembling its original state, but even that is basically a blog now.) Instead of embracing authentication and relationships to prevent spam submissions from overwhelming the site, Yahoo leaned heavily towards requiring payment for inclusion of companies in the directory, limiting its utility. Human edited directories became mostly a footnote in both Yahoo's, and the web's history.

That fundamental history of being made by humans is some part of Yahoo is trying to evoke with its Y!ou and Yahoo campaign. But of course, it's a pretty good sign that a campaign isn't going to hit its mark when a completely unknown brand like HTC can launch virtually the same campaign as a household name like Yahoo, yet both companies think their message is going to resonate.

The truth is, if Yahoo wanted to help people reimagine the web stalwart at its best, they would do well to look to their roots in a human-edited or user-generated directory. Thinking of Yahoo at its peak of influence a decade ago, it becomes clear that instead of trying to insert their ubiquitous exclamation point into you, Yahoo should look at the story of The Matrix. I don't know if the brothers Warner or Wachowski would be inclined to license the property, but the only way to truly resonate with people in a narrative of Yahoo vs. Google is by adopting this theme: Man vs. Machine.

Just as in the Matrix the humans had originally created the machines that undermined them, to some large degree, Yahoo begat Google. And Yahoo would do well to suggest that the most human way for the web to evolve is if we all work together to organize it ourselves — a mission that happens to fit in well with Yahoo's largely-mishandled acquisitions of Flickr and Delicious. I'm not sure that the marketing folks at Yahoo are going to embrace that narrative, but an interesting opportunity definitely exists around the larger concept.

We all have the ability to create and exchange curated collections of feeds, using hubs like Twitter's Lists as connection points. We can extract the descriptions from those collections to form tag clouds about individual feeds. If we want to embrace hierarchy, we can organize the collections into a hierarchy by inheriting the category structure of sites like Wikipedia. If we're worried about spammers, we can now use widely-available systems of authentication and defined relationships to define who has the authority to create lists in a particular context. And of course, the ability to aggregate all of the distributed content from a defined set of feeds in realtime has now been commoditized, where i would have been exorbitantly expensive a decade ago.

In short, we can learn from Twitter's Lists to resurrect one of the web's original ways of organizing itself: Human-curated directories. We're used to exploring photographs or individual web pages by clicking on tags that were assigned by the creators or their community, and it will be just as valuable and useful to be able to explore entire feeds the same way. Open formats and APIs for exchanging this data already exist, so I can't wait to see a few enterprising hackers build the tools that let us revisit the idea of web directories. I love computers and robots, but I love humans even more, and I think we can do a pretty good job of guiding each other to the most interesting feeds around.

A little while ago, my friend Michael Sippey, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing the other day, sent me a link to the new Google Voice Local Search.

Now, this new services seems like a good product, and I know I'm supposed to say "Wow, cool! Nice work, Google!" But because I work with Michael, we are often each other's toughest critics -- we want the stuff we do to not suck, and try to structure as much of our work as possible in a way that prevents the sucking. So my initial response wasn't positive. My gut feeling was "Why the hell aren't they charging for this? That sucks!"

Here's the thing -- I don't care about whether Google makes money on 411 services or not. They're going to do billions of dollars worth of AdWords sales regardless, and even if this new service becomes a huge hit, the revenues would just be a drop in the bucket. Certainly not enough to affect the overall direction of the company.

But having paying customers (or the equivalent -- something to indicate users were invested) would help focus the product team. This is Google, which means you've got enormous resources behind you if you're launching a product, both financially and intellectually. If your product "may not be available at all times and may not work for all users" (as it says on the product's homepage), then either fix it or get yelled at by angry users. Either one is a good option. Don't hide behind a "well, shucks, we said it was beta, and it's free..." excuse. Being accountable to your users makes your product better.

What's worse is the uncritical evaluations of new technologies. I don't care if an individual product or feature seems cool if it's just going to go away in a few months when the company folds. See The starting line is not the finish line:

I am, frankly, tired of reading reviews of new technology that omit the commitment of the team, that don't mention how the success of the product almost feels like life-or-death to the people making it, or ones that ignore the people who make the damn thing happen.

If we aspire to making meaningful technology (and if you don't, then please, just quit now), then it's irresponsible to let users become connected to, and perhaps even emotionally invested in, a tool that isn't going to be around for the long haul. If nothing else, it's a waste of someone's precious time to use a small company's tool that's evaporates because a big company found it trivial to clone, or because a big company decided it was too hard to charge what a product was worth. I don't believe AdWords will subsidize Voice Local Search indefinitely any more than I believed Windows 95 would subsidize MSN Sidewalk indefinitely, even though that was a fantastic online local guide product as well.

And connecting people via VOIP or sending them an SMS, two of the key features of the new service, cost money. At Google volumes, they cost a lot of money. I want to have a service I can rely on -- which again means I need to invest in it. I understand that the idea here is for this product team to use a beta test as a starting point to make the service more reliable, but the sad reality is that a line has been crossed where there's no sense of urgency or expectation that those actual launch days ever arrive.

Google's made the leap here before, by starting to charge for Google Apps. Even people who use the service for free were reassured by the fact there was a paid version. So there is still the opportunity to be brave enough again to assert that a product is worth paying for, even paying a premium for. Millions of iPod users are willing to listen to the argument.

This, I think, is the crux of the problem that David Galbraith highlighted on his site. David's is one of my few must-read blogs; I don't always share his tone of righteous indignation, but I love that a person who's often so reserved in person can be so passionate online. David mentions that new efforts by Google or Yahoo (see Google My Maps vs. Plazes, or Yahoo Alpha vs. Rollyo) can kneecap some Web 2.0 startups en passant, and posits that this is the death knell for Web 2.0. Leaving aside whether that's oversimplifying the efforts of those startups, it's an attractive argument just for the sheer audacity of his phrasing.

But that sort of reckoning is not the death of Web 2.0, that's it's promise. It's very possible to build a successful business and thrive while competing with Google and Yahoo, even in an established market. (Oh hey, that's my day job.) What's not possible is to make a business without adding significant value to the platforms provided by existing companies. This is, roughly, exactly what distinguishes current successful business models from Web 1.0.

Or, put more succinctly, I like paying for Flickr Pro. Like us at Six Apart, the Flickr team was lucky enough to start working on their company, and on Game Neverending, back before there really was AdSense to run on your site, and when virtually the only small startup charging money for a consumer web service was Oddpost. I'd argue those sorts of innovations are as important as all the Ajax work that either of those companies ever did, even though I admire and respect both teams tremendously.

This refrain never goes away, but it bears repeating. Those of us who love technology and believe in its potential owe it to our communities, our audiences, and our customers to make our efforts sustainable and accountable. I'm not an unabashed, uncritical capitalist, but I do recognize that one of the most positive effects that a classic charge-a-fair-market-value-for-your-goods business model offers is the opportunity to create an accountable and sustainable relationship with a customer.

I pay for a lot of products because it gives me the potential opportunity (though I almost never use it) to yell at someone when it breaks. I pay for a lot of other services because I want to make sure they don't go away, or they're not forced to make ugly choices about privacy or ethics in order to keep the lights on. And I am glad to use services or sites that are ad-supported when it's made explicit that the advertising is supporting a useful good or service.

If you believe in what you're doing, in technology or anything else in your life, make a commitment that it's here to stay. Do what it takes to prove it. Do what it takes to sustain it. And if it's the kind of service that you think is okay to just give up on, or that you don't want to bother to figure out a way to keep running, then why are you doing it in the first place?

Background: Yahoo's launched an interesting and innovative new service, Pipes, which lets users with a relatively low degree of technological expertise combine structured sources of web data such as feeds. In this way, it's possible for non-experts to create new web services for their own use or for public consumption. Pipes combines a remarkably sophisticated development environment with some core social features such as the ability to clone or share the web services you produce. The service is fairly approachable, but somewhat complex once you get just under the surface, and should be moderately successful while radically raising the bar for other tools in its category.

Some quick links if you're interested in this topic:

• Plagger: an open-source, installable feed routing system created by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa which performs much of the core functionality of Pipes and is customizable, but lacks the user interface and integrated development environment (IDE) which distinguish Pipes. (Disclaimer, for what it's worth: I work with Tatsuhiko. But Plagger's free and not a Six Apart product, so... shrug.)

• Ning: Perhaps the archetypal social application platform for the web. Headed by Gina Bianchini, Ning has thus far defined the feature set for end-user creation of web applications, though the focus has not been on creating web services.
• An introduction to Unix pipes. Not merely the inspiration for the name of pipes, the powerful idea of routing data through a series of loosely-connected applications is one of the core concepts that powers most lightweight automation and data processing by non-programmers.
• The Mario-inspired image you see here is available on a Threadless T-shirt. My wife has one and it is very cute.

So, what is Pipes?

Okay, with all the introduction out of the way -- what the heck is Pipes? Yahoo's overview page offers the following explanation:

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

In practice, this means you can use Pipes to pick a few feeds or APIs to retrieve data from, set up rules for processing the data which is provided by those feeds, prompt for user input in your processing, and then output the processed results as another feed or object format for use in your own applications. In the simplest case, you can apply some straightforward rules to a feed and then subscribe to the end result.

Pipes also has a full web-based IDE. Even more amazingly, the IDE is incredibly rich and powerful, with the usual complement of editing tools you'd expect from a visual editor in a desktop application. I'd first seen a browser-based IDE for editing LiveJournal's S2 style templates, but even that impressive effort pales next to the Pipes IDE. I'll never learn all of the Pipes IDE's features, but I will always admire its gee-whizzery.

Passing the Pipe

Most importantly, and perhaps most key to the success or failure of Pipes, are the social functions that underpin the application. With Pipes, it's easy to make your own web services public, to clone web services that others have made, or to offer your own services for others to clone. That element of social sharing of code, first pioneered by platforms like Ning, makes the open source ethos much simpler to participate in. Instead of setting up complex version control systems and submitting patches to a central repository, application cloning works on a principal of infinite forking, taking the idea of embracing failure and building it into the platform. Code 'em all, and let blogs sort 'em out.

There's also another key accomodation of social functionality: Pipes is pretty. As I mentioned in the introduction, much of this type of functionality is technologically possible with tools like Plagger. But, much as I love Plagger, I just don't have the patience to install half of CPAN to get it running just so I can hand-code an application on top of it. And that's even though I think it's a cool idea -- imagine if I weren't already familiar with the concept of routing feeds around.

Pipes is attractive without being overly pretty; There are the requisite nods to Web 2.0 design (it's blue!), but overall the site is refreshingly straightforward. The IDE is, frankly, a little cluttered unless you're running on a gigantic monitor, but that's been true of IDEs since Visual Studio was still Visual C++.

The Bottom Line

Is Pipes going to be a success? In many ways it already is. It lets Yahoo unequivocally be first at something, and if you count the broader market of web-based application development tools, it lets Yahoo be best at something, too. It's innovative, exciting, and well-done. There are still rough edges and inexplicable nods to the Big Purple Monster. (Whose idea was it to have the Yahoo Messenger anime avatars next to developer names on the site?) But the web needs a way to rip, mix and burn feeds, and Yahoo has stepped up to provide an essential platform in a way that seems open and approachable.

So, take a look at the docs, browse some pipes, and let me know if any of you can get it hooked up to the firehose that is the Six Apart Update Stream (that's an endless Atom feed of blog posts, flowing into your pipes at 30 posts a second). Because routing all these streams to the right place is exactly what pipes are for.

Picture Terry Semel holding a little lion cub up in the air with both arms extended. What's that? It's the Circle of Life! Well, maybe Circle of Life 2.0? Okay, enough Lion King -- maybe it's just Justin Timberlake again: "What Goes Around... Comes Around".

The story I'm referring to is how each half-decade's web love story begets its successor for the attention and adoration of the press, the stock market, and the public at large.

In the beginning, there was Netscape, and it was good. But the old-timers among you will recall that Netscape began as Mosaic Communications Corporation, based on the old Mosaic browser. When that name became unusable, the codename for the browser being built was naturally named after the terrible lizard that would cause Mosaic's demise: Mozilla.

Among the many kind things the Netscape kids did (giving us a free email client, open-sourcing the code once they sold out to AOL, indirectly funding a nightclub in San Francisco), they decided to feature amongst their default links an up-and-coming web directory called Yahoo! The prominence of the nascent Yahoo site on the young Netscape browser's toolbar in an era when there were so few comprehensive guides to the web helped cement the company's position in the vanguard of web companies.

Fast forward a few years, and among the many kind things the Yahoo kids did (giving us free email, hooking Flickr up to Target once they bought the photo-sharing site, enticing Scientologists to visit), they decided to feature as their default search technology an up-and-coming web search technology company called Google. The prominence of the nascent Google engine atop the maturing Yahoo site's directory in an era when search had been largely abandoned helped cement the company's position in the vanguard of web companies.

Fast forward a few years, and among the many kind things the Google kids did (giving us free email, trying to give us free WiFi in San Francisco, building the memex), they decided to feature as their preferred browser technology an up-and-coming web browser technology called Mozilla Firefox. The prominence of the nascent Firefox download amongst Google's software offerings in an era when browser development had been largely abandoned helped cement the browser's position in the vanguard of web technologies.

This concludes today's history lesson. We have provided, above, an educational infographic offering a detailed look at the flow of linky-love between these Internet behemoths.

Related reading:

• Upon the Demise of Netscape: The Google Browser
• Wired's article on how Yahoo screwed the pooch on Google
• Some love for Mitchell Baker for being so open about Mozilla's business
• The Lion King on DVD

A few years ago, I wrote a post called Portalization which showed a Yahoo homepage screenshot with certain services grayed-out, as an indicator of which corresponding tools Google offered. It was a look at how Google's feature set had expanded with the (then-new) Gmail, and inspired some comments speculating about My Google, which later launched as Google Personalized Homepage.

A couple of years later, Google offers many more of the services that used to be Yahoo's domain -- and Steve Bryant's independently come up with a mockup of a Yahoo-style Google homepage. I can't decide if it's brilliant or terrifying, but I do wonder what adoption of Google's non-search services would look like if this design were adopted.

If you were interested in How Matt Haughey beat Google with Ask MetaFilter, you might enjoy some more information about the site.

• The Chicago Tribune's Steve Johnson offered an astute look at Google Answers, as well as a nice plug for Ask MetaFilter, last week. The site requires an exasperating login, but the good news is you can also find the piece without a registration Hypertext blog. (Yay, it's a TypePad blog!)

A more enticing Ask is Ask MetaFilter (ask.metafilter.com), which also poses questions to a user community. The longstanding site is highly entertaining reading because it gets metaphysical, although the drawback is that it'll cost you $5 to join the MetaFilter community.

While Yahoo Answers is more about facts, Ask MetaFilter, in its best moments, is about feelings, opinions, theories of life. A recent, not atypical question: "Did you marry someone despite misgivings and have it actually work?"

• One trope that's rapidly gaining currency among lazy resourceful young professional bloggers is to collect Ask MetaFilter answers about a topic of interest. MediaBistro collects writing advice; LifeHacker collects, well, life hacks.

• Last week, NPR's Five for Friday gave some love to the site, too.

The best answers on Metafilter are those that provide an Aha! moment -- like the obscure book you remember from childhood, only you can't recall the title. Someone will know. And when you want to find the best (used book store/pancake joint/park) anywhere in the world, chances are that one of Metafilter's thousands of members will tell you exactly where to go. So if "Five for Friday" didn’t give you the right mix of ideas for weekend fun, go ahead, ask Metafilter. We won’t be insulted. And we may even give you the answer.

• If you want to see what other prominent Q&A sites look like, look no further than Amazon's Askville (Yay, another TypePad blog!) and Yahoo! Answers. There are some great things about both sites, but neither really holds my attention, at least so far.

• And then the absolutely funniest Ask MetaFilter-related link: MetaFilter spinoff site MetaChat's hysterical conversation about the worst, most blatantly trolling Ask MeFi questions possible. They're offensive, insulting, intellectually dishonest, and wonderful. Even better, after being discussed on MetaFilter, an enterprising site member actually submitted some of the ridiculous questions to Yahoo Answers. Hilarity ensues!

How long can a normal, healthy 8 week old kitten survive inside an adult python? URGENT?

I am fairly certain that the python did not chew much. I also do not want to damage the python much.... what is the best strategy for rescuing the kitten?

The answers are a lot better than the questions.

You want links? You got links.

• Seth Stevenson defends the word "sucks" in Slate. This seems relevant to me because my keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference last week was callled Trying Not To Suck and because I used to get in trouble with my dad when I was a kid and said something sucked
• On the entitlement of fandom addresses the fundamental issue of people who try to kill the things they love. This an especially pronounced trait amongst crowds or groups of fans.
• Just randomly, this old Salon story about the acquisition and death of Webrings by Yahoo came up in a conversation today. I always loved reading Katharine Mieszkowski's stories back then.
• What's wrong with Social Software? Part one, part two, and part three. Greg Knauss is so smart I'm surprised The Man hasn't had him killed.
• I do a lot of public speaking, so I tend to be pretty critical of presentations. ("Steve Jobs is a fantastic presenter, but do people really find smugness that appealing?") However, I'm comfortable in saying this presentation a few months ago by Intel CEO Paul Otellini is just plain grim. If he's not a natural presenter, why not get someone who is? If he's excited about it, why doesn't it show? This stuff matters!
• We will unleash a swarm of 480 million tiny satellites to blanket the globe in a coppery ring of surveillance! Bwa ha ha ha! Except it actually happened. Project West Ford makes the looneys seem sane.
• Beaver Cheese, Cheese Reviews. Reviewing all 43 cheese from Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch, and a number of other cheese as well. I also admire CheeseReviews.org: "Cheese Reviews is still in it's vestigial stages. But it is envisioned as ultimately being a full featured cheese portal and community." I love cheese, and I love the web.

Like many great social software applications, Flickr began its life as something else. Flickr was built on a platform for a game called Game Neverending, which had a lot of great features including an in-game economy based on exchanging various totems that had different relative values. There was really only a barter economy, which left the "innate" value of any individual item to be pretty opaque.

Today, Flickr has interestingness, which is a measure of some combination of how many times a picture has been viewed, how many comments it has, how many times it's been tagged or marked as a favorite, and some other special sauce. I suppose revealing the exact mix would encourage even more people to game the system, but the fact that it's not disclosed has led to a number of attempts to reverse-engineer the system. I doubt any of them are/will be successful (Flickr can update/evolve fast enough to change the algorithm if they figure it out) but that's probably going to be an ongoing dialogue.

When I think of things getting gamed, I think of Clay Shirky saying "social software is stuff that gets spammed". So maybe economies are things that get gamed.

What I'm wondering is, how is Flickr's interestingness different than the economy in Game Neverending? Than Second Life? (Or in Evercrack or Neverwinter or any of the other gaming platforms.) Is interestingness its own reward? Why don't I get to level up or power up when I create something interesting?

More to the point, the in-game economies of these games translate pretty cleanly into real-world cash, with eBay amplifying the efficiency of the currency conversion. And interestingness in other online media (like blogs) is rewarded by cash in a pretty straightforward way; I can sign up for TypePad, check a box to enable text ads, and pay for my account or point the proceeds to my PayPal account when I start getting lots of visitors.

But interestingness in Flickr doesn't pay. At least not yet. Non-pro users are seeing ads around my photos, but Yahoo's not sharing the wealth with me, even though I've created a draw. Flickr's plenty open, they're doing the right thing by any measure of the web as we saw it a year ago, or two years ago. Today, though, openness around value exchange is as important as openness around data exchange.

So does that mean the right answer for cashing in on my interesting work is to ask for a penny from Yahoo? Or does it mean I should just make an automated script that grabs my interesting photos and posts them to my TypePad blog so that I can put ads on them?

Or, "Yahoo bought everyone on my buddy list, and all I got was this t-shirt".

Following up on the discussion about Web 2.0 from last week, the only thing as glaring as who was missing from the room was the talk of a new bubble. I can't even count how many blog posts and skeptical articles I read referring to Bubble 2.0.

I don't really have an opinion either way if there's another bubble inflating right now, but I think it's interesting to take a look at the companies that have already flipped and to compare them to the acquisitions after the deflation of the Web 1.0 bubble. Keep in mind, during the pre-Y2K bubble, the goal was to IPO and become fabulously wealthy; Indeed, being "built to flip" was a near-epithet five years ago. (Whatever happened to that Pyra company, anyway?)