Recent Posts on "Yahoo" (Jeremy Zawodny's blog)

Yahoo! Search Taste Test

In today's coverage of the new Yahoo! Search radio advertisements, Erick Schonfeld at TechCruch says:

So can an advertising campaign change any of that? Search is not like a soft drink. People use the search engine that they think can do the best job in helping them find things. Now, maybe Google has brainwashed all of us to believe that it does indeed produce more relevant results. And in a blind taste-test more people might choose Yahoo's results. But if that is the case, I'd rather take an interactive quiz that puts each search engine to the test and make my own decision. That would go much farther to convince me to switch than Yahoo's current creative.

Funny he suggests that. I remember suggesting exactly that a few years back when I worked in the marketing group for Yahoo! Search. I suggested we do something inspired by Twingine but which hid the engine identity and let users judge for themselves.

Why didn't it happen? Because some of the same people who were convinced that Yahoo! Search was "just as good as" Google (and better in some cases, they said) were afraid that people would realize that this was not the case.

The cognitive dissonance was amusing, but it was also frustrating and stupid. "Either we believe we're better or we don't... Which is it?" is the sort of argument I tried to make.

I guess that question eventually answered itself.

Oh, well...

Congrats to Chad Dickerson on his new gig!

News is out today that Chad Dickerson is leaving Yahoo! to become the CTO of Etsy in New York. That's fantasic news and I wish him the best of luck. Having made a similar decision myself, I know it's not easy.

How time flies. I still remember interviewing Chad on the phone a few years back and talking about some experiences we had in common: using Perl to wrangle news and content feeds from varous partners and so on. It didn't take long to realize he'd be a great addition to Yahoo. That turned out to be quite the understatement. :-)

Chad and I worked together in various capacities for a few years at Yahoo! and he truly made a mark there, kicking off Hack Days, helping put the Yahoo! Developer Network on the right track, and generally kicking ass. Seriously. Ask anyone who worked with Chad.

I know this will be a big loss for Yahoo! and Brickhouse but it will be an even bigger gain for Chad and Etsy.

My only regret is that we didn't get to work together longer.

Good luck, Chad! And welcome to the ex-Yahoo! club.

Congrats to Yahoo! on the BOSS Launch

One of the more ambitious projects in the works when I left Yahoo was BOSS, a more open Yahoo! Search for developers and publishers. I see that BOSS launched today and wanted to say congrats to my friends in the Yahoo! Developer Network and Yahoo! Search.

Marshall Kirkpatrick said it well in his ReadWrite Web post today:

It is clear, though, that BOSS falls well within the company's overall technical strategy of openness. When it comes to web standards, openness and support for the ecosystem of innovation - there may be no other major vendor online as strong as Yahoo! is today. These are times of openness, where some believe that no single vendor's technology and genius alone can match the creativity of an empowered open market of developers. Yahoo! is positioning itself as leader of this movement.

Well done.

Keep on pushing...

The Aftermath

Wow.

That's all I can say. After yesterday's announcement, I'm rather overwhelmed with all the congratulatory notes, comments, LinkedIn invites, and pitches to work at promising startups. It almost makes me wonder if I shouldn't have decided to leave Yahoo before deciding where to go next.

Nah. I needed "something next" to get myself in that mindset in the first place, I think.

If you emailed me personally and haven't seen a response yet, don't worry. I have a bunch of replies to send off, lunches to schedule, and so on.

Meanwhile, I'm off today (Friday) and Monday and then back at work for another week and a half or so. If you have unfinished business with me, please get in touch before my work email address no longer belongs to me.

Here's an interesting bit of trivia: back when I was first at Yahoo, it was pretty easy to nab yourself an alternate email address. So I picked up z@yahoo-inc.com just because. It turned out to be far easier to spell to folks on the phone and got a fair amount of use. But it also got some decidedly weird spam and email for people who treated it as a disposable address when signing up for various services.

I wonder if there'd be interest in a Xooglers type blog written by ex-Yahoo folks...

Anyway, have a good weekend. We're off to hang out with family for a few days and enjoy the California weather.

Leaving Yahoo!

It seems that word has started to leak out, so I might as well remove any speculation or ambiguity. In the next few weeks, I'll walk the halls at Yahoo! as an employee one last time and turn in my purple badge. After 8.5 years of service and a better experience than I could have possibly imaged back in 1999, the time for me to move on has arrived.

It's always hard to make a decision like this. It took several months to finally decide. I've really enjoyed my time at Yahoo and have a lot of people to thank--people who took a risk on me, believed in me, encouraged me, and even defended me over the years. There are literally too many to name, but some of them are: David Filo, Jerry Yang, Jeff Weiner, Phu Hoang, Ash Patel, Jeffrey Friedl, Mike Bennett, Anil Pal, Bradley Horowitz, Allen Wang, Chad Dickerson, Matt McAlister, and Chris Yeh.

If any of you read this, I've learned a lot from all of you. Really.

I've enjoyed working with some amazingly talented coworkers (far too many to name) and have had the opportunity to help some acquired companies navigate the inner workings of Yahoo as they scale up their services. That includes people in engineering, marketing, public relations, product management, design, legal, and more. You guys rock.

I can definitely say that I've had the chance to contribute to the success of Yahoo as much as I could muster. Whether it was staying up all night working on the 9/11 memorial size, launching the Yahoo! Search blog, starting the Yahoo! Developer Network, debugging MySQL problems, pushing RSS and syndication, introducing startups to Yahoo, arguing for openness, or making sure that news releases appeared on Yahoo! Finance quickly.

I won't at all be surprised if some people think this is related to Microsoft or Carl Ichan and the uncertainty surrounding Yahoo's future. The reality is that there's nothing pushing me out the door at Yahoo. The reason I'm leaving is that something very compelling has come along to lure me away. Despite what the current press sentiment might be, Jerry and David have built a remarkable company.

Ever since I graduated from college in 1997, I've wanted to work for a smaller company. But my first job out of school was a ~40,000 person Oil Company and my second was Yahoo! Back then Yahoo was in the 2,000 people ballpark but it eventually grew to seven times that size, give or take a bit. I've experienced the ups and downs--the layoffs and the big victories. I'd do it all over again if given the chance.

It's been quite a ride, and I'm really going to miss Yahoo. I'll miss the parking debates and all the "random" stuff we're so fond of ranting about. Watching from the outside is going to be a very different experience. But the opportunity to work in a much smaller company recently presented itself and it was simply too interesting to pass up. I'll say more about that in the coming weeks.

To all the Yahoos I've worked with over the years, thanks and please stay in touch. My email address will always be Jeremy@Zawodny.com and I'm on LinkedIn here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jzawodn. And, well, you've found my blog already. :-)

As for the future of Yahoo, everyone working at Yahoo today knows in their gut what Yahoo should be and needs to be. My advice is to work on making that happen. Don't let anyone else (inside or outside the company) try to tell you what Yahoo is. Trust your gut. And, if you have the chance, re-read the farewell note that Ian Rogers sent out when he left a few months back. It's good stuff.

And, by all means, don't take the stuff you read in the press at face value. You're all smarter than that.

Now where's that Yahoo Alumni club I've heard so much about?

BTW, JR is leaving as well.

Reactions

• Prominent open-source developer bids Yahoo adieu CNet
• Yahoo's open-source search man to leave The Guardian
• Zawodny Leaves Yahoo; Weiner To Go? And Linsley Departs Ask Search Engine Land
• Yahoo Loses One Of Its Most Respected Employees Shoemoney
• Yahoo Loses Two More: Fayyad and Zawodny TechCrunch
• Bleeding purple Valleywag
• Jeremy Zawdony Leaves Yahoo: First Favorite Blogger Cartoon Barry
• Yahoo's Zawodny Announces Exit WebProNews
• More Top Yahoos Heading for the Exits New York Times Technology Bits
• Briefly: Key Yahoo Developer leaves The Industry Standard
• Yahoo Org Chart Likely To Be Redrawn—Again—With Weiner Departure; Other Major Departures Too paidContent.org
• Jeremy leaves Yahoo! Matt Cutts
• Yahoo's Jeff Weiner Leaves as Executive Ranks Thin Bloomberg
• Jeremy Zawodny Leaves Yahoo Aaron Brazell
• Yahoo! execs continue leaving in a single-file line BloggingStocks
• Yahoo Loses Another Exec--and Another and Another* BusinessWeek
• Voting with their feet? File this one under 'stampede' CNet News
• Yahoo! Loses Jeremy Zawodny! PageTraffic Blog

Yahoo! Developer Network Hiring a Technical Evangelist

If you happen to know someone who'd be interesting in joining the evangelism team on the Yahoo! Developer Network, please let me know.

The full job listing is here. To that, I'll add a few points of interest.

• you get to attend and speak at numerous industry conferences
• you can appear on YDN Theater as much as you'd like
• you will work with a cool team
• you get to be on the forefront of stuff like YOS (see: this video and this video too)
• you may build prototype applications, mashups, and demonstrations to showcaswe our technology and services

That's on top of all the other benefits of working at a company like Yahoo! :-)

Feel free to send me a resume (that's the most direct method) or use the "Submit Resume" button on the listing.

Tim O'Reilly on Search

Tim O'Reilly gives the following advice about Search...

So, my advice to Yahoo!: continue with your plan to outsource search to Google, just like you did before 2002, and plow those increased profits and reduced costs into your own innovation, strengthening the areas where you are #1, exploring new ideas that will make YOUR users insanely happy, and generally focusing on what makes Yahoo! great, rather than on what doesn't. That is, unless Microsoft makes you so good a deal for your search assets that you just can't say no. But either way, let yourself be quit of the destructive competition and focus on adding real value for your users.

In other words: play to your strengths.

Thoughts?

Monkeying with Search

A few weeks ago, at the Web 2.0 Expo, Matt Cutts dropped by the Yahoo! booth and we got to chatting a bit. He mentioned being impressed by Yahoo's willingness to monkey with our search results page--meaning Search Monkey, the tool that allows site owners (like me) and developers (like me) to, for lack of a better term, pimp their result.

I haven't had a chance to write up anything about Search Monkey yet, but luckily Rasmus dove in and wrote up a developer-centric summary. As he notes, there's a launch party later this week at Yahoo. Drop by for some food, drink, and more information about Search Monkey.

Why is it hard to work with big public companies?

People often ask questions like that. And from the inside it's clear that things aren't as easy as we wished they'd be. But I've never thought long enough about the issue to figure it out for myself, let alone try to explain it to others.

Luckily Greg Cohn has. Here's just a bit of what he says in Doing Business with the Semi-Permeable Corporation:

Today’s environment is transparent, open, and conversational - meaning almost anyone can get to anyone and communicate with them publicly, semi-publicly, or privately. This is great - when I need to find someone, it tends to be quite easy to reach them directly or with one degree of separation via my network. When someone needs to reach me, I am equally easy to find (and in fact have a public “contact me” email link that’s one click away from a search on my name). As conversations become substantive, companies are increasingly transparent about their objectives, plans, competition, and even finances, all of which materially increase effectiveness.

So much for the good stuff. The challenges are: a) that I’m still under the constraints of a public company, and can not in any way be “conversational” about material inside information; and b) that open doors like mine are magnets for everything from unrelated BU inquiries (from people who should know better) to “the Yahoo! suggestion box”, and the signal-to-noise ratio of inbound items can create a lot of distractions and confusion if I don’t filter aggressively.

I can definitely sympathize with the second bit. I don't know how many random inquiries I get each month, but it can be a lot to deal with. Help me with my research project. Introduce me to someone in My Yahoo! Tell me my Yahoo! password. Fix my email. Buy these pills. The list goes on!

And I digress...

Seriously, go read what Greg wrote. He did a good job of helping people to see the world from the other side.

Web Developer Needed

The Yahoo! Developer Network (otherwise known as "YDN", also known as "where I work") is looking for a skilled webdev to work full-time at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale, California.

Here's a bit of the boilerplate about the job. I've left out the "who is yahoo" stuff, since I assume your know what Yahoo is if you managed to work the Internet long enough to find this. :-)

The ideal candidate will have a strong command of JavaScript 1.0-1.5, DHTML, DOM Levels 0-2, CSS 1-2.1, HTML & XHTML, web standards, PHP, object-oriented programming, cross-browser compatibility issues, progressive enhancement, optimization techniques (both in file weight and perceived/actual rendering speed), accessibility, device-portability techniques, and internationalization issues.

Knowledge of XML, HTTP, Apache, MySQL, remote scripting, state management, working within a Unix environment, CVS, and bug tracking tools is highly desirable. A Computer Science degree with 5+ years of related work experience is required.

The environment is fast-paced with numerous user-centered iterative design & development cycles. You'll be responsible for building everything from proof-of-concepts and usability prototypes to deployment-quality code.

Interested?

Shoot me your resume and I'll get you hooked up with the hiring manager.

Dear Yahoo and Microsoft Management

Please do something.

Soon.

You know what I'm talking about.

There are a lot of people wondering what the future holds and it seems like we're in yet another indefinite holding pattern while you do whatever it is you're doing and cannot talk about.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world marches on.

While the public staring contest is great drama for the incessant technology news machine, the rest of us are rather sick of this. I say this as a concerned observer, fan of Yahoo, employee, and shareholder.

Your Friend,

Jeremy

Yahoo! is Hiring

It's hard not to get distracted by all the Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Google speculation that's been building, but I wanted to take a minute and point out that we're still hiring. That other stuff is only a distraction if you waste time focusing on it.

There are a variety of open technology positions from hard-core back end engineering, front end work, and everything in between. Even in the developer network, we're looking for at least one web developer and an evangelist.

Rather that list all the jobs we have open, shoot me your resume and tell me what sort of work you're looking for. I'll get it to the right people internally.

And if you know someone else who's looking (or should be), please pass the word.

The Yahoo! Developer Network's New Look

Hey, check it out. YDN got a redesign.

Send feedback here. More and more of the site will take on the new look as time goes on--assuming you like it.

Yahoo + Microsoft = Web Mail Dominance

I just ran across this graphic in Dave McClure's Flickr photostream and realized that I never considered what combining HotMail (that name still makes me giggle a bit) and Yahoo! Mail under the same company would mean.

"Web Mail Dominance" kind of jumped to mind.

Granted, I know nothing of the relative growth rates of the services included in that graphic, but even if Gmail does somehow come to rule the world one day, there's going to be a long run of One Really Big Player in the web mail space if the proposed acquisition happens.

Hey, I see that he blogged it too.

Food for thought... or at least a quick mental snack.

Openness is not a Poison Pill at Yahoo!

Mary Jo Foley asks Could Yahoo’s ‘openness’ be another anti-Microsoft poison pill?

Yahoo traditionally has been and continues to be a big open-source backer. It runs its datacenters on open-source software (something Microsoft officials have said they don’t intend to rip and replace immediately — while avoiding saying never).

But over the past couple of weeks, Yahoo has really been banging its “we’re more open than ever” drum.”

Yahoo announced in mid-February that it had implemented what it believed to be “the world’s largest commercial application of Apache Hadoop Java-based distributed-computing framework.” Yahoo is using Hadoop to process its Webmap, which is its “application which produces the index from the billions of pages crawled by Yahoo Search,” according to the Yahoos.

I can honestly say from my vantage point that openness at Yahoo! has nothing to do with Microsoft or any other would-be suitor.

We've been on the openness road for a long, long time at Yahoo. And we take it rather seriously. Some times it hasn't been as visible as others, but believe me, the trend is quite clear when you look at all the data. The Open Source adoption and work. The APIs. The way we communicate with users and partners. The Blogs. The RSS feeds.

I'll be speaking about a small bit of this at the Business of APIs Conference in New York on Monday. And also at the upcoming Open Source Business Conference. And, of course, the Hadoop Summit too.

You'll be reading more and hearing more about openness at Yahoo! from me and Yahoo's much higher up the food chain in the coming months.

Anyone who knows me knows that I come from open source roots and am a big proponent of opening things up more and more. I'd have left Yahoo! years ago if I didn't see it happening.

If you think the last few weeks are big, you haven't seen anything yet! :-)

Yahoo! FireEagle: Personal Location Service Platform for Developers

Today FireEagle launched as an invitation-only beta for developers to start testing. I think of it as a personal location service platform, but the more formal description comes from the announcement on the YDN blog:

Fire Eagle is an open location services platform offering web, mobile, and desktop developers a simple way to build new location-based applications while also ensuring that consumers have complete control over their data, including how, when and where their location is made available. Want to easily make your site responsive to a user's location? Or, maybe you've found a way to capture someone's location and you want to find cool apps to plug it into? By doing the heavy lifting and connecting you to a community of geo-developers, Fire Eagle makes it easier to build location-aware services.

Tom Coates was the ring leader for FireEagle and talks about it in this video shot earlier today at ETech 2008.

Don't be put off by the downer of a headline that TechCruch used ("Yahoo’s “Twitter For Location” Goes Into Private Beta With Near Zero Functionality"). I think that Mike Arrington either got the wrong message from someone or misunderstood what FireEagle really is today.

It's a location platform for developers to build on. It has an API that, among other things, lets you worry less about handling geo data and easily build in support for your web, desktop, or mobile application.

It's currently not aimed at end users or "consumers" (oh, how I hate that term). I'm sure the analogy to Twitter was intended to be a loose one.

Congrats to Tom and team for getting FireEagle out the door. :-)

VentureBeat has good coverage here: Yahoo’s FireEagle location service to launch publicly today

Oh, BTW... FireEagle uses OAuth for authentication!

Hadoop Reactions & Announcement of Hadoop Summit at Yahoo!

I have to say, I'm impressed at the coverage that news about our production Hadoop deployment in Yahoo! Search got yesterday (and today). Here's a quick list of the stories.

• Yahoo! Launches World's Largest Hadoop Production Application by Eric Baldeschwieler
• Yahoo! Search running Apache Hadoop on Large Scale by me
• Open source grid computing takes off by Matt McAlister
• Yahoo Search Wants to Be More Like Google, Embraces Hadoop on TechCrunch, complete with an Apples to Oranges comparison
• Yahoo Search Index Now Supported By Open-Source Hadoop Architecture on Search Engine Land
• Yahoo Gives Hadoop A Big Hug on WebProNews
• Meanwhile, Hadoop News by John Battelle
• Hadoop Now at the Heart of Every Yahoo! Search on the Yahoo! Search blog
• Do You Have an Internet Sized Problem? on More News
• Yahoo + Hadoop on 10k Cores on Kevin Burton's FeedBlog
• Yahoo Embraces Open Source Some More with Hadoop Inside Search Webmap on Search Engine Journal

I guess good technology makes for good news, huh?

Also, today we're opening up the invite list for the Hadoop Summit to be held on March 25th at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, California. For more on that, check out:

• Announcing the Hadoop Summit at Yahoo, March 25th, 2008 on the Yahoo! Developer Network Hadoop blog
• Hadoop Summit the event page on the Yahoo! Developer Network
• Hadoop Summit on Upcoming.org

As I've said before, this is gonna be quite a heard for Hadoop. :-)

Yahoo! Search running Apache Hadoop on Large Scale

Over on the Yahoo! Hadoop blog, you can read about how the webmap team in Yahoo! Search is using the Apache Hadoop distributed computing framework. They're using over 10,000 CPU cores to build the map and processing a ton of data to do so. They end up using over 5 petabytes of raw disk storage, eventually outputting over 300 terabytes of compressed data that's used to power every single search.

As part of that post, I got to interview Sameer and Arnab to learn more about the history of the webmap and why they moved from our proprietary infrastructure to using Hadoop.

One of the points I try to make during the interview is that this a huge milestone for Hadoop. Yahoo! is using Hadoop in a very large scale (and growing) production deployment. It's not just an experiment or research project. There's real money on the line. (It's too bad we had a technical glitch in the video right as we were discussing a Really Big Number.)

As Eric says in that post:

The Webmap launch demonstrates the power of Hadoop to solve truly Internet-sized problems and to function reliably in a large scale production setting. We can now say that the results generated by the billions of Web search queries run at Yahoo! every month depend to a large degree on data produced by Hadoop clusters.

It looks to me like 2008 and 2009 are going to be big growth years for the Hadoop project--and not just at Yahoo!

Stay tuned...

Update: You can get a Quicktime version of this video now.

Layoffs and Social Media

Boy, it's been quite a week so far.

I had not anticipated how quickly news of the layoffs (specific people leaving or being asked to leave) would spread on-line. But with blogs, Twitter, TechMeme, Facebook, LinkedIn, IM, Valleywag (sigh), and TechCrunch it's remarkably easy to find out who is affected.

I have to say, it's rather spooky. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "public company."

Had I thought about it in advance, I would have seen this coming. But watching the situation evolve in real-time has been a little disconcerting. And having it all happen against the backdrop of a $150 million acquisition and a corporate takeover bid makes it all the more surreal.

To any former Yahoo folks looking for work: feel free to ping me (LinkedIn, email) if you'd like a hand. I've already heard from a few companies looking for good ex-Yahoos. And I may encourage some to post on my job board too. From what I've been seeing and hearing, there's a lot of good work out there, so take your time and enjoy a bit of a break before jumping right back into the fray.

Using YSlow to Grade the Presidential Candidate Web Sites

Nicole Sullivan and the Exceptional Performance Team at Yahoo used the popular YSlow Firefox/Firebug extension to grade the site performance of the 2008 presidential candidates.

How did they do? Overall, atrociously, all the candidates failed the YSlow exam except Mike Gravel who earned a "D". Page weight was a problem for Barack Obama, whose site weighed in at almost 700Kb. It was even worse for Mitt Romney, whose site weighed a whopping 1,531Kb. I hope he doesn't have supporters trying to make contributions on dialup modems!

Democrats got better grades in almost all performance subjects tested, in particular response times and page weight. They improved user experience for returning visitors by setting an Expires headers and improving the full cache user experience. This helped propel them to a performance GPA of "C" despite their failing YSlow grade. Republicans never managed to overcome the deficit and finished the semester with an "F".

I doubt that site performance will be a factor in the voting, but it'd be quite amusing if there turned out to be a relationship between the performance numbers and votes cast for each of them.

See Also:

• YSlow Screencast and Lessons Learned
• YSlow Released on YDN
• YSlow for Firebug
• Exceptional Performance on YDN

More on the Yahoo buyout offer from Microsoft

It's been about a day since I first started reading and talking about Microsoft's $44 billion buyout offer for Yahoo (my current employer). And I have to say, it's been quite fascinating so far.

In all the reading I've done and discussions I've had, numerous scenarios have emerged. I don't claim (beyond a gut feel) to know how likely any of them are, but I figured I'd list them here for the sake of discussion. Bear in mind that, while I work at Yahoo, I have no inside info on this and am only posting my thoughts and ideas that I've heard from friends and others on-line. Jerry is probably too busy to answer my email anyway. :-)

Oh, and if you're one of the reporters who has called or emailed, you'll understand that I really can't go on record or talk to you about what's going on at work.

Anyway, here's the list...

1. Microsoft actually does buy Yahoo for $31/share (or something in that ballpark). This is the default case in the minds of many people.
2. Another large company (or group of companies, possibly including private equity funds) makes a counter offer. This will ultimately only serve to drive the price up. Microsoft will outbid.
3. The Yahoo Board of Directors decides to outsource Yahoo's search advertising (and possibly search) business to rival Google. This entails a long-term partnership for a number of years and is sufficient to send Microsoft back to Redmond to continue working on its own search and search advertising business. I imagine this would be a very tough call to make.
4. As a variation of #3, Yahoo may look to strengthen its display advertising (graphical ads) business and take some significant share of the DoubeClick acquisition as part of the deal. That makes Google the dominant contextual text advertising company and Yahoo the dominant display/banner and behavioral advertising company.
5. The board simply rejects the offer and decides to continue as is. This seems quite unlikely to me. Shareholders will insist that something big happen.

No matter what happens, it's clear that this will likely be going on for quite some time. Corporate events of this magnitude take quite a bit of time to execute. I suspect that the Yahoo board of directors is considering several options that may or may not be included in the list above. Time will tell.

As an amusing side note, yesterday was one of the few days that page views to my blog home page were dramatically higher than to any of my individual posts. Apparently a lot of folks came over here to see if I had anything to say about the news. I didn't quite expect that.

Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo

That's one way to make the news, huh?

This should be interesting. I predict that today will be one of our least productive days since 9/11 at work. Just guessing.

Discuss...

See Also:

• What if Microsoft Bought Yahoo?
• More on the Yahoo buyout offer from Microsoft [newer]

YUI Grid CSS and Grid Builder Kick Ass!

Okay, I'm not a front-end web guy. Not by any stretch of the imagination. So I tend to ignore a lot of Javascript and CSS stuff unless it's clearly and obviously useful to me. And while I've heard tons of praise for YUI, the Yahoo User Interface library, I'd mostly assumed it was stuff for other people--you know, the ones who understand all that stuff.

But I recently came across a link to the YUI Grids Builder and started playing with it. In about 20 seconds, I realized that I could use that as the framework to finally redo the horrible hack that is my blog layout.

So I did. (that link is temporary and will vanish soon)

It's not done yet, but it's faster, uses less code, looks good (and more consistent) on more browsers, and requires less of my mental energy to maintain. I get to take advantage of the YUI team's expertise and focus a bit more on the stuff I care about.

Anyway, I have a bit of template editing and tweaking of fonts and pruning and stuff to do, but I'm looking forward to throwing away the old and using the new. More on that later.

In the meantime, if you haven't played with the builder or at least read about YUI Grid CSS, take a few minutes and do so. It's really useful stuff and very well documented.

If you end up using it for your site, you'll also likely find yourself reading about YUI Reset CSS as well. And it may sort of freak you our or annoy you at first, but it's really a good thing in the long run if consistency is what you're after.

Anyway, enough of this commercial. I just wish YUI had existed a few years ago when I spent many, many hours tripping over my own lack of CSS knowledge. They've made this stuff so damned easy.

OpenID at Yahoo!

It feels good to be able to talk publicly about Yahoo's OpenID support (developer info). :-)

It's been in the works for a while and I was one of the early squeaky wheels poking people to see if we could get on board. You can see the official press release or the story on TechCrunch. But no matter where you read it, this is big news.

Both yahoo.com and flickr.com will act as OpenID 2.0 providers. That means starting soon any Yahoo! or Flickr user can sign in to an OpenID 2.0 enabled site simply using a reference to yahoo.com or flickr.com.

I've been a fan of OpenID for a long time--not just because of it's simplicity but because of the philosophy behind it. It puts more control in the hands of us: the end users. And it's another milestone in Yahoo! opening up more and more. In fact, I wrote about it almost exactly one year ago in The Tipping Point for OpenID.

Who knows. Maybe OAuth support isn't far off?

Oh, and before anyone jumps on me about this not being "full" (meaning bi-directional) OpenID support, I'm quite aware of that. Consuming OpenID is a different beast that can't happen overnight. Give it some time. I'm optimistic that we'll get there.

Defrag and Fragmented Services: My Defrag 2007 Talk & Some Videos

Last week, in At Defrag Conference, I wondered a bit about what I'd discuss in my presentation.

And I think that from there I can talk about the socialization of the Internet and tools/sites we use every day. But I can also go in a slightly different way, talking about the "internet-based tools" and "transform loads of information into knowledge", and how we (Yahoo) can be suppliers of technology and services at many points in that chain.

It turns out that I ended up doing something closer to the later of those two. The video from my talk is now available via YDN Theather and I'm pretty happy with how it came out--especially when you consider the uncertainty over what people at the conference would want to hear, the fact that I was right before lunch, and the fact that I'd never done this talk before.

download (m4v)

I even managed to mostly stay within the alloted time.

There really isn't a strong message or conclusion other than "things are still in progress and not all sorted out yet", but that's pretty consistent with the discussions at the conference.

We shot a few other videos at Defrag too.

• Dick Hardt of Sxip on Perl, Mozilla, Open Source, Identity, and more...
• Phil Windley on government, information technology, on-line marketing, identity, and more...

A couple more will be online soon.

Announcing the YDN Hadoop & Distributed Computing blog

Ever sine I wrote Open Source Distributed Computing: Yahoo's Hadoop Support back in July, interest in Hadoop and Yahoo's work has been on the rise. So I started to get to know the Hadoop team at Yahoo a bit better and help them figure out how to tell more of the story.

We decided that it'd make sense to have a new blog on the Yahoo! Developer Network where we can collect & post news, tips, announcements, videos, and anything else related to Hadoop and distributed computing work.

To kick off the blog, which we're calling Hadoop and Distributed Computing at Yahoo!, I sat down with Eric Baldeschwieler ("Eric14") to do a video interview about Hadoop and Yahoo's involvement.

download video

The more I dig into Hadoop the other projects emerging around it, the more I'm reminded of the early days of MySQL and the maturing of the LAMP stack. It's an exciting time to get involved. You can expect to hear more from me on this topic, both here and on the YDN Hadoop blog.

Yahoo! Developer Network Theater Launched

One of the projects I've been part of has launched this week. We're calling it YDN Theater, and it's a blog that collects all the videos we're filming for the Yahoo! Developer Network. We're creating videos of stuff that we hope is interesting to a wide audience of developers and technologists and making it available in Quicktime, Flash (via Yahoo! Video), and on iTunes.

Some of the videos are of people who present at Yahoo and another set is video of talks that Yahoos give at technical conferences around the world. I'm also making an effort to grab famous folks at conferences and get them to talk about things too. We shot a few at Defrag in Denver this week.

We're also introducing a few shows to the lineup. I'm doing one called Experts@Work that came out of the realization that we have a ton of experts in a wide variety of technical fields at Yahoo! If only someone could get them on camera for a 15-45 minute discussion, we could probably uncover some very interesting stuff...

Well, that's what I'm doing. :-)

Here's the first video in the series. I sat down with Steve Souders (author of High Performance Web Sites and co-creator of YSlow) as a sort of follow-up to the YSlow screencast and interview that I made with him a few month back.

Needless to say, there's a growing list of folks on our interview wishlist. If you know of a Yahoo you'd like to see on camera talking about what they know best, drop me a line. (And if you're a Yahoo reading this, feel free to nominate yourself or a coworker.)

None of this would be possible without the expertise and skill of Ricky Montalvo (our video producer, editor, and guru) and Matt McAlister (our ring leader). Matt encouraged this at every step of the way and talks more about Investing in video at YDN on his blog as well.

I tell ya, this video stuff is kind of fun. Look for lots more from us in 2008. :-)

On The Platformization on Yahoo!

Over on Seeking Alpha, Jeff Jarvis (hi, Jeff!) writes Yahoo Edges Away From Portal Towards Platform, Finally, in which he wonders (in a skeptical tone of voice) whether Yahoo is really serious about going from a portal to a platform.

I think what we witnessed Tuesday night was the debate the company is having within: portal or platform? Even if platform has won at the top, we need to hear stronger confirmation of that and see strong action and the question remains whether it’s possible to change Yahoo’s culture to make the shift. It’s already big and old. But it’s not too late to change, and I think I finally saw the seeds of that change.

Well, Jeff... I have a few answers for you.

First of all, I think you're making a false dichotomy. Portals and platforms are not somehow mutually exclusive, though the tone of your article makes it seem like you think they are. There's nothing about being a portal (a starting point for millions and millions of people) that precludes also letting outside developers build content, services, modules, widgets, or media that the user could choose as part of their starting point. My Yahoo! has been doing some of this for years now.

But more importantly, I'm seeing movement on this (not just PowerPoint festivities) stuff becoming a reality at all levels in the company. I've been part of the planning and brainstorming around this work and have both seen and heard some of the reactions all the way up the chain of command. The company is quite serious about this. It's not just an experiment or a fad. It's part of our evolution. It is our future.

The seeds of change have, indeed, been planted. They won't sprout all at once. And they will require some extra watering and attention for a while. But once things start to grow, I think a lot of folks will start to understand what we're doing.

Oh, and about that "at a very early stage" comment. Do you not agree? Do you actually think the Internet is close to reaching maturity? I, for one, hope not. There's so much runway ahead of this technology yet.

Ian Rogers, A Yahoo! With Balls

Sorry for two Yahoo related posts in one day, but that's the way the cards fall sometimes. I'll put my pom poms down after this.

Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo! Music has posted Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context, a Presentation for Some Music Industry Friends, a presentation he gave to some music industry execs recently.

In that presentation, he does an excellent job of succiently using his own career in this business to explain the last 8 years of failed attempts to incorporate DRM into most online music offerings.

When you compare the experiences on Yahoo! Music, the order of magnitude difference in opportunity shouldn’t be a surprise: Want radio? No problem. Click play, get radio. Want video? Awesome. Click play, get video. Want a track on-demand? Oh have we got a deal for you! If you’re on Windows XP or Vista, and you’re in North America, just download this 20MB application, go through these seven install screens, reboot your computer, go through these five setup screens, these six credit card screens, give us $160 dollars and POW! Now you can hear that song you wanted to hear…if you’re still with us. Yahoo! didn’t want to go through all these steps. The licensing dictated it. It’s a slippery slope from “a little control” to consumer unfriendliness and non-Web-scale products and services.

Part way through, we get a sense of what Ian is made of:

I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

He's not willing to waste another 8 years before the situation gets to where we all know it should be.

If you're at all interested in DRM and music, I highly recommend checking it out.

It's people like Ian that make me proud to be part of this company and this industry.

Nice job, Ian!

On Yahoo! Answers, Facts, Opinions, and Discussions

Greg Linden recently wrote a post titled Revisiting Yahoo Answers in which he concluded the following:

Despite the name, Yahoo Answers is a discussion forum. People are using it like a newsgroup, chatting about various topics. They are not using Yahoo Answers as much to generate authoritative answers to questions.

Heh. :-)

Though I don't remember who to attribute it to, it's been said that all software is social and Yahoo! Answers is a great example of that.

The fact that Yahoo! Answers is being used for more than simple fact-based Q&A is no surprise. To me it's a good thing. It shows that (a) people want a[nother] place to talk, and (b) they feel comfortable on Yahoo! Answers. Some questions end up spawning discussions and collecting a lot of opinions (as well as facts), while others are pretty simple fact-based questions and responses.

The fact that the Yahoo! Answers team isn't trying to fight the community on this is also a good thing. A very good thing. Smart product managers don't fight their users in a situation like this. They've built a service that can do more than it was originally marketed for and people are making use of that.

While I've asked only a few questions on Yahoo! Answers, I've spent enough time on it to realize that you don't have to try very hard to figure out when someone is giving you facts vs. opinions. Often times the "extra" information that someone provides by going beyond a simple Wikipedia citation can be quite useful. They give you ideas for related ideas or additional background on the issue.

I've also been impressed by the speed at which questions get answered. Each time, I've had a dozen or so answers within the first hour or two of posting. That's pretty satisfying.

Greg doesn't clearly issue an opinion on whether or not he thinks this is a good thing or not. But I'm more positive now than I was a year or so ago.