Wow. This is absolutely fantastic. I can only hope that one day I’ll be in a position to resign from a company, knowing full well my resignation will be leaked onto the interwebs, and I have enough wits about me to compose a letter even half as amusing as this one. If that day ever comes, I’ll know I’ve made it. Kudos, Stewart Butterfield. Visit site »
Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, the husband/wife team who founded Flickr in back 2004 and then sold the site to Yahoo in 2005, are leaving Y!. Can’t blame them, what with the uncertainty around the company right now. Sounds like Flickr is still very well staffed with good people, so there’s probably no reason to worry about the site’s future. Good luck to Caterina and Stewart in their future endeavors! Visit site »
Marc Andreessen in plain English on the various possible outcomes of the MS/Yahoo situation. Visit site »
March 12th, 2006, 5 PM in Austin, TX
Khoi is a believer in the logic that great design is an important asset to any company, and wonders why Yahoo — a company he feels had a great design sense — ultimately has failed. A great discussion follows as to whether or not Yahoo is actually a great design company.
My take? Yahoo has some real shining examples of great design (see Y! Mail and Flickr for the most obvious examples), but that great design sense never managed to make it’s way to Yahoo’s core product: their homepage and search engine. So, even though Yahoo is capable of great design, it may be that poor design was actually a flaw that ultimately hurt them. Visit site »
March 12th, 2007, 6:30 PM in Austin, TX
As rumored, Yahoo goes OpenID. This is huge. Visit site »
It seems as though Yahoo! and Flickr are set to start providing OpenID services. This is huge. Visit site »
Tons of new stuff in the latest release of YUI. I’m particularly stoked about CSS selectors. Awesome. Can’t wait to play with it. Visit site »
According to this, Yahoo! has a 40% investment in a shark finning company. The two of you out there who are as interesting in sharks as I am will know that this is one of the most deplorable acts committed upon mother nature by humankind — one in which sharks are fished, de-finned alive (i.e. their fins are sliced off with a big ass knife), and dumped back into the ocean, where they will die a slow, agonizing death because they are unable to swim (and therefore, unable to breath).
Why? Because the fins are used to make shark-fin soup, a delicacy in many foreign countries — and because the fisherman in question are often third-worlders who get paid pennies for going shark fishing on tiny canoes which simply can’t hold the whole shark, so they are forced to dump the fish back into the water. If they were harvesting the whole shark, the practice wouldn’t be so bad. Upwards of 100 million sharks are slaughtered each year for their fins.
100 million. How many sharks kill humans every year? Now who’s the monster of the sea? Visit site »
Couldn’t agree more with 37signals on this one: the Yahoo! Photos shutdown has been extremely well-handled. Well done, Yahoo! Visit site »
“Umbrella” is, in my opinion, the best pop song to hit the airwaves in quite a while — and this cover of it by Mandy Moore lends credibility to my theory that nearly every song can benefit by being dropped about 15bpm. It’s a really cool take on the song, and I love the way Yahoo’s synced up Rihanna’s original music video in the background. Visit site »
Yahoo’s new celeb gossip site. Although I am not much a celeb gossip guy, I definitely think this kind of niche site is the right move for yahoo, and is probably the right move for a lot of newspapers and other traditional media companies, as well. THere are a million niches to be served!
On a side note, I’m almost embarrassed to admit how much I like the design. It’s a bit over the top and very gaudy — both of which are totally appropriate for the subject matter — but it’s also engaging, well-structured, and downright effective. Visit site »
I’m a bit surprised at this, but I absolutely think it’s the right decision. Visit site »
Khoi and Mark’s Yahoo redux for their “Grids are Good” power session, which was the best 25 minutes of SXSW thus far. Visit site »
It is so completely lame to whine about having to use your Yahoo ID for Flickr. You knew this was coming a year ago. If you avoided it this long, it’s your own fault. No one is forcing you to use Flickr. If you don’t like their policies, leave. You’ve had a year to let your pro account expire. Bunch of whiners. Visit site »
If ever there was a man on a mission to see a technology take off, it’s Simon Willison. His latest project lets you use your Y! username and password as an OpenID. Badass. And yes, it’s Django-powered. :) Visit site »
A short, but interesting, piece on the lengths Apple went to to keep the iPhone’s details on the DL, even while working with Cingular, Google, and Yahoo. Visit site »
Nate Koechley from Yahoo gives you a sweet rundown of how the YUI CSS grid framework works. It really is very, very nice in those cases where you want a symmetrical column grid. Visit site »