Things I come across in my free time

Hulu and Arrested Development

I saw Jason Killar, CEO of Hulu, speak at the Federated Media, Conversational Media Summit in NY last month. While the meat of the conference was the panel discussions, the company and product demos were pretty impressive. In addition to Hulu, I saw a short demo of the Spore Creature Generator. Not going to lie, I really want to play Spore, but am frightened by the amount of time I see myself spending playing, so may resist. We'll see

Anyway, Hulu is slick, and Jason was great. I liked the fact that he has a concise view of their value proposition, what he calls their "rallying cry" and their guiding design principles. I see all well represented in their product development, which i can't say for all companies. Here is a link to the video of his demo at the conference, as well as a Hulu embed of one of my favorite Arrested Development episodes. Love the search features in the embedded video player

"The Regulars" - Social or Anti Social?

I happened to be in Philadelphia for a couple days because I was speaking on a panel at the Wharton Technology Conference, discussing Amatuer Content: Boom or Bust? A very interesting discussion, but not exactly what I want to write about in this post (I will write about the panel in a separate post). After the conference I caught up with a couple old friends and we stopped by McGlinchy's, which is probably the definition of a no-frills bar. That's what my group of friends likes. A place where its easy to get a drink, easy to hear yourself think and have a conversation, and there is by no means any shoulder to shoulder bumping going on while you are trying to move around the bar or someone standing in the way of the TV while the Eagles are playing. We also really like that 2 beers and 2 shots of whiskey is $8.45. I am off track.

Anyway, we were discussing whether web technologies and social networking are making people more or less socially adept. Are they increasing our ability to interact in person, or decreasing it? I believe that they are increasing it. An online profile is an extension of a person's offline profile. We build reputation online, based on implicit and explicit feedback to our web profile, which could give us more confidence in face to face interactions, or at a minimum information about what resonates with others and what doesn't.

But I understand the argument that says otherwise, and think that Sarah Stolfa tried to capture some proof of this social dynamic through photos from, coincidientally, McGlinchy's, which made me think back to her work. Her photography piece, "The Regulars",  won an award from New York Times Magazine in the "Capturing The Times" contest. She was a bartender at McGlinchy's and a photography student at Drexel when she submitted her photos in the contest. Having bartended myself for a couple years, I have a pretty good understanding of the types of people that frequent watering holes. Being behind the bar gives you a different perspective on how people interact, flirt, boast, learn, spectate, celebrate or just simply escape. Some people are social, some are not; some come with a group, some come trying to find a new group; some want to get a little out of control, some are too reserved to even feel comfortable in a bar environment. But they all come. At one point or another, almost everyone spends a little time in a bar. We can comprehend that. Its not a stretch to believe that people will seek out a social environment to satisfy one of many personal needs. But Sarah's photos tried to point to a specific type of bar-goer that I am sure exists at every bar. The bar-goer that just wants to be alone, but wants to be alone around others. By going to a social environment, they feel more comfortable being silent, or anti-social, than if they just stayed home. So the question is, will online social networks have a similar or greater proportion of these participants? Will some people use their online profiles and activities to satisfy all of their social needs and then have no desire to interact offline? I don't believe that they will. I believe that the new developments in technology allow people to find new ways to connect with others in the offline world. Its a discovery and connection mechanism and it will increase the ability for people to build relationships that otherwise may not have been found because of the limitations of finding like minded people offline. The online extension of a person's life will cause the opposite to occur - it will decrease anti-social tendencies. But I consistently hear the counterargument from people outside of Silicon Valley and wonder if there is something that we see that they don't, or vice versa.  Thoughts?

Testing out kyte

I am testing out Kyte. I stumbled across it on a myspace page and wanted to see how it worked. I have set up a separate page to keep it on the top of my blog, but embedded here today. Its awesome so far. Going to test out the mobile features tomorrow, so stay tuned..

MyBlogLog and Yahoo!

Honestly, I can't blog about the majority of the things that I do at Yahoo! - that's part of the fun of being in Corporate Development! Even when I can blog about it, I am pretty limited in what I can say. But given that my blogging history is short, and a non-trivial portion of my readership is Yahoo! employees, blogging about work is not quite as risky right now. Blah, blah, blah...anyway...

Yesterday, one of my projects reached the main stage. I had the pleasure of helping bring Scott, Todd, Eric, John and Steve along with the awesome products and communities of MyBlogLog into Yahoo!. This deal rocks! MyBlogLog has caught onto something that I believe can transform how internet users and publishers participate in social media and the networks and content that they are passionate about. Reducing the barriers to participating in media, connecting people implicitly and explicitly to content and communities, and providing publishers with an avenue to building and interacting with a community of followers has the opportunity to open a significant number of doors for Yahoo!. But more importantly, combining these five guys with Bradley, Chad and Jeremy, plus our infrastructure and development capabilities, will result in nothing but awesome products for our users.

From my first conversation with Scott, during every minute I spent getting to know the guys and the product, and up to the point that Scott broke a smile while he was most likely responding to my email during a dinner, I never had a doubt that this product and this team are vital to evolving social activity online and we needed to bring them into Yahoo!

So congrats to the MyBlogLog team!  I'm proud to have helped bring you onboard.

Speeding up Firefox

Came across this post today that has a video with instructions for improving load times in Firefox and IE. There are couple reasons why I am posting about it. First, when you view the video within that post, there is an overlay that shows you how much the video has made for the producer in the Metacafe Producer Rewards program. I like that - the overlay and the Rewards program.

Second, I actually went to Metacafe and searched for the video, but came across a slightly different one with another step. I used this one as a guide to adjusting FF. It has definitely increased performance for me. This video made more of a difference for me than the first one, but I recommend checking out either one to see if it helps. I don't see how it can hurt. Here is the video I used.

Make Your Firefox Faster! - video powered by Metacafe

Yahoo! IM and Mail Integration

With all of the ranting and raving (bravo to Strauss, btw) going on over the past week and half, this morning I was pleasantly surprised when I logged into my Yahoo! Mail account and was notified that my Yahoo! IM would now be available from within my email window, and was reassured that our product development teams are full steam ahead. Ethan had previewed this functionality at Web 2.0 this year (so i am not letting the cat out of the bag), and now I believe that accounts on some of our internal server farms have been added the internal beta.

I have been playing with it for a while this morning and am happy to report that I think the integration is pretty sweet. There are some navigational challenges that I have had to overcome, but nothing monumental - e.g. getting used to using AJAX for IM and not being able to save chats in frame impressions. Actually, the navigation points I have flagged only resulted in me being more deliberate in working in the browser...I love being deliberate. I believe that this integration makes perfect sense. I am sure that Email and IM account for more than 95% of my communication during a day and love the idea of not having to flip between two clients in order to use both methods.

Some of the greatest integration points that I have noticed so far (and i will update this list as i go)

• Presence into the editing window: If you are composing a message to someone who is online, you will be notified and asked if you want to start an IM chat. Awesome! If you don't need to create a *paper trail" with an email, why would you. The reverse situation is true as well. If you are typing an IM message and the person goes offline, you are prompted to send an email. Awesome.
• Avatars and timestamps: Brings some of the life that IM clients give you and adds it to more boring email
• Status messages while people are typing: getting away from the mundane and using randomly generated phrases such as "stand by for another ingenious dispatch from [person x]"

One integration negative so far:

• If a person is using YMJ (Yahoo! Music Jukebox) and they have elected to display the current song in their status window, the status is updated in the IM/Mail integrated view, but only says "[person x] is available". I guess they haven't finished integrating all three yet.
• Message history isn't being saved (or at least i can't figure out where it is being saved): not that much of a pain, but its a huge call out to difference of IM and email. I doubt we will ever fully move away from email for IM, even though that is the trend, just because people use email messages, which are usually longer,  for reference

I like the idea of making communication more enjoyable. Companies continue to innovate around new ways for us to communicate with each other, and will continue down that path. But it is nice to know that certain of these historical innovations have disparate paths that can eventually merge and make our lives simpler.

I will keep playing around, trying things out and seeing if i can get some insight into other features and functionality, but in the meantime, let me know if you have any features that you would like to see in and IM/Email client and keep the conversation going. I haven't tried out the Gmail/IM integration (given that there are probably 10x more people on the Y! mail and IM clients and I work at Y!, why would I) so let me know if you have had a chance to compare the two, objectively of course ;)

Hope you get to use the Y! beta soon!

Consumer financial services mashups, that a'boy!

Business Week Online published an interview with E*TRADE CIO Greg Framke earlier this week that focused on the usage of mashups to deliver better services. I am a strong believer in mashups continuing to put the power of the internet into the hands of users and letting them control their usage and interaction with content. We have widgets on the desktop, widgets within publisher sites or blogs, open APIs that provide access to core platforms and capabilities, all isolating aspects of web services that allow users and developers to extract functionality in order to deliver a tailored product or experience. It is very exciting, at the same time relieving, that a company like E*TRADE is embracing mashups to strengthen its relationships with customers.

Framke does a good job explaining some of the nuances and logic:

An application composite is two or more applications that are put together without a lot of new code, to present something very new and different to a customer. Mashups are something really different and something that's pretty exciting.

The idea is that you're taking your information and your presentation and you're breaking it down into components and giving it to people to reassemble in any shape or form that they want to reassemble it. Someone could take a component from E*Trade and mash it up with something from Quicken or Yahoo! or Google  or anywhere they wanted, to form something that is new and interesting.

We think that the concept of mashups is going to be the way people will want to interact with the Internet. They want to be able to deal with it in the way they want to and not necessarily going to a destination Web site to do things. It's a little different than an application composite. But you need a common set of services in order to make both work.

This isn't a new spin on mashups, but it is yet another industry that leverages web services in its core offerings,  acknowledging the power of user control. Internet companies, enterprise software companies, financial services companies. This is where things are going.

In a conversation I had with one of my closest friends, Jonathan (his blog may not be public), he said it best (paraphrasing, which is dangerous with Jonathan), "Companies need to stop thinking about customer lockin and need to start thinking about sustainable competitive differentiation. If a company allows a customer to leverage that company's, potentially with another companies', core platforms and capabilities to create a unique, personalized experience, a much stronger and sustainable relationship with the user is formed."

I agree and I like what is happening with the internet industry, although Jonathan has a good point about the term "Web 3.0" being a bit frightening. Kudos to E*TRADE and also to the team (and my co-workers) at Yahoo! for taking widgets, mashups and hacking to the masses and letting the community define its own product specs. Keep it up.