Missing The Photo Op

31 Jan ’11 • Internet • by
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Very interesting article in the NY Times about Flickr and the swirling rumors about its demise, which from their POV, have been grossly exaggerated. What is crystal clear from the article is that Yahoo severely under-invested in this great service:

“We just missed some opportunities that we could have tried if we were independent and raised our own money,” Stuart Butterfield [a co-founder] said. “Who knows what would have happened?”Giving more visibility to photos of breaking news events — like riots in Paris or minor car crashes — was one idea that never got off the ground. International expansion could also have happened more quickly, Mr. Butterfield said.

At least Yahoo had the decency to shut down its Yahoo Photos property in favor of Flickr, which is not something they can say about Delicious

Article via NYTimes.com
Image via The Oatmeal

Yahoo To Shut Down Delicious

16 Dec ’10 • Internet • by
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I can’t tell you how upset this makes me. Delicious has been my go to site for years, since it first was released, to find great links and information, as well as to keep track of links that are important to me or need to get back to later on. I have been a loyal user of the service for years. It has been my database of links in the cloud…when I needed to find that demo on a random blog for JQuery scripts, or a tutorial on how to use CSS. Hell, I taught myself HTML, CSS, and to a lesser degree, PHP, using sites I had bookmarked on Delicious. I could not have done that without Delicious. There is no way. With Delicious, if I stumbled on a site but didn’t have the time to go deep (which happened more times than not), I could save it and get back to it. Otherwise, I would have been searching all over the place. In many ways for me, Delicious was the precursor to Instapaper and Evernote.

From Andy Baio:

Just leaked: Yahoo! is closing or merging Del.icio.us, Upcoming, Fire Eagle, MyBlogLog, and many more. http://yfrog.com/h3z89p
12.16.2010 via @waxpancake

As John Gruber just said, it was only a few short years ago when Yahoo was the place to go for start ups such as Upcoming, Delicious, and Flickr to name a few. And with Tomas Hawk’s recent flame of Yahoo!’s Carol Bartz, where he begs and pleads for her to put some attention into sites like Flickr, you have to really be concerned that some of the most iconic properties on the internet, Yahoo included, are on the chopping block or at least life support.

But it goes beyond this. When Delicious launched, they brought to the masses one of the most significant and innovative elements of the web – they readily and in a dead simple way, enabled users to use “tags” to describe the links they saved. The implications of this were staggering. And what was more, they did so in a semantic manner. If you used Delicious twice or more, you pretty easily figured out that if you typed delicious / tag / [any word here] into your browser, you would get all the links relative to that keyword or tag. That combination was a game changer in my mind. Others may have done bits and pieces of that, but Delicious pulled it all together.

RIP Delicious. I am pissed. I think Yahoo may have just lost me for good. This is a sad, sad day.

You can click here to Export your years and years of links up at Delicious. Thankfully they are an open platform and freely let you export your data.

Googleheim Museum

24 Aug ’10 • Culture • by
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Google is taking its popular site YouTube to NYC’s Guggenheim Museum.  The search company will set up shop in the Guggenheim’s main atrium with all sorts of TV and video displays promoting the finalists from a recent promotion they ran.

The exhibition, set for October, will showcase videos from as many as 20 finalists of YouTube Play, a contest for graphic artists and users of Googles GOOG video site. A celebrity jury that includes Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami and The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky will wade through about 200 videos whittled down from thousands submitted in July.

The goal of this initiative is to try to re-position YouTube as a site/service that can cater to a more upscale, arts driven clientele and move it beyond the perception that its content is, er, lowbrow.

Star Wars Uncut

13 Apr ’10 • Entertainment • by
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Star Wars: Uncut is an online project where the original Star Wars movie has been broken down into :15 increments. From there, folks from around the Web and world then submit their own video depicting that scene. The final product is a mash up of all the best submissions for each scene edited together to create the full length depiction of the movie. Just brilliant and awesome!! Here is a clip of a preview of the movie, which will be premiered at a film festival in Copenhagen.

Internet Roadkill

16 Sep ’09 • Pop Culture • by
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Here is an interesting article from the Telegraph of London detailing 50 things that the Internet is killing off. A few to consider:

3) Listening to an album all the way through The single is one of the unlikely beneficiaries of the internet – a development which can be looked at in two ways. There’s no longer any need to endure eight tracks of filler for a couple of decent tunes, but will “album albums” like Radiohead’s Amnesiac get the widespread hearing they deserve?
10) Watches - Scrabbling around in your pocket to dig out a phone may not be as elegant as glancing at a watch, but it saves splashing out on two gadgets.
14) Dead time – When was the last time you spent an hour mulling the world out a window, or rereading a favourite book? The internet’s draw on our attention is relentless and increasingly difficult to resist.
21) Delayed knowledge of sporting results – When was the last time you bought a newspaper to find out who won the match, rather than for comment and analysis? There’s no need to fall silent for James Alexander Gordon on the way home from the game when everyone in the car has an iPhone.

ESPN Chicago

13 Apr ’09 • Sports • by
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Another nail in the coffin of newspapers and local media. Today, ESPN launched ESPN Chicago, a version of ESPN.com specific to Chicago sports. Basically, they are going to try to leverage their scale to deliver localized content to Chicago. But its not just Chicago, this is going to scale to the major markets across the US and Canada. The incremental cost to develop this site was probably relatively minimal, but they will now be able to charge a premium to advertisers who want to market online to a predominantly Chicagoland audience. I’m sure NYC, Boston, LA, Dallas and others are not far behind. And just think, with ESPNZone in Chicago, they can have some serious multi media, multi channel promotions to dream up. It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to this – wether they will gravitate to this offering or if they will continue to stick with their trusted sources like the Tribune, the Chicago Sun Times and the bartender at Harry Caray’s.

Interesting Move At AOL

12 Mar ’09 • Internet • by
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Interesting. Google’s Tim Armstrong was named AOL CEO today. I guess there is still life over at AOL. This will be very interesting to see how this plays out not only at AOL but within the overall online advertising/portal marketplace.

We’re Not Dead Yet

13 Jan ’09 • Business • by
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There is a little contentious battle brewing between The Atlantic and the NY Times. The NY Times says it is not going away in May, as was suggested by The Atlantic’s Michael Hirschorn. Yet while its not going away anytime soon, it is an institution that has seen its better days. Be sure to read John Battelle’s post on the future of publishing, which was prompted by the same article.

One…Trillion Pages…Moah, Ha, Ha

25 Jul ’08 • Internet • by
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Google announced that it has indexed one trillion pages. Dr. Evil would be proud. Oh, wait…they don’t do Evil.

You’ve Got Micro-mail

16 Jul ’08 • Internet • by
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Here’s an interesting rumor. AOL execs are pursuing merger talks with Microsoft. What an amazing turn of events this would be for Microsoft…to go from courting Yahoo to being courted by AOL.

Now AOL is not anything close to what it used to be. Its transformation into an advertising supported business appears to be flat-lining. Its one “800 lb gorilla” – AOL Instant Messenger appears to have lost about 400 of those pounds with new social networking services like Twitter, Plurk, et al.

Could be an interesting combo. More to come.

I’m Not Dead Yet

7 Apr ’08 • Internet • by
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I just read the Fast Company article Dead Man Walking, depicting AOL’s recent troubles and missteps. With a tip of the cap to Monty Python, I wonder if a king, queen, or pauper will be riding in to pick up the dead as speculated in the article? Not a pretty picture.

Yahoo Sports Beta?

10 Sep ’06 • Internet, Sports • by
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Looks as though there may be a Beta release happening at Yahoo Sports. I was on the site checking out my fantasy football and baseball teams (I think their Fantasy sports suite is just fantastic. And my football teams were actually doing pretty well. Thanks for asking. :-) and saw this yellow banner just above the blue “Today in Sports” headline. The two links on the top right read “Beta Feature Index” and “Send Feedback”. When I clicked through the “Beta Feature Index” link, it went to a Yahoo branded error page. When I clicked thorugh the “Send Feedback” link, it went to a feedback form. In navigating the site, I did not see any BETA features. I’ll be interested to see what they plan on doing on the site and to see if its going to compete more directly with ESPN in look, feel and volume of information. No matter what they do, the site definitely needs an upgrade.

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