99.999% of what I listen to on Spotify is older than a few weeks, so for listeners like me, no.
1,126 karma · joined February 3, 2010
Possibly. But it does mean he's more qualified to view the App Store from a user's perspective, instead of a developer's. The App Store is designed for users, not for developers, which was his whole point.
And there are quite a few teams at Y! working on meaningful and innovative projects. I work on one that I'd personally consider is both of those.
Digg created social news. The company ultimately failed because of some missteps, but the concept is still thriving on the Web today and can be seen with Likes, Retweets, Upvotes, and others. Digg Labs was cool, they had a great API, and while I'm not going to claim it was the first website to feature this, it was at least the first time I'd ever seen a website with an RSS feed of search result pages. Getting an RSS feed (when feed readers were cool) for any search query you wanted to amazing as it allowed you to follow any topic you wanted to.
Overall, the early execution of Digg was brilliant. They just thought too big.
Work on that has resumed and "YQL: The Definitive Guide" is due out next year.
> So I am pretty sure it going very strong.
Very much so. 100+ billion queries per month.
I've always said that was Carol's job at Yahoo. If she didn't make tough choices to cut costs and trim products, Y! may very well have face-planted, hard. She did very little to create growth, but she did a good job to realign & reorg the company to a position where someone like Marissa can come in and create growth.
At Facebook, no, it hasn't been. What parent is saying is that he hopes FB did some research on whether this will actually help or hurt productivity before risking the lifeblood of the company (engineer productivity).
I'll reserve final judgement until it's built and we can see pictures/video.
> "Why would someone want to go into that environment?"
Good question. Like all companies, you should choose the one that most fits your ideals and career objectives, so I can only answer your question from my perspective. For me, that is working for a large Web company, who values open-source and front-end engineering, and provides unique challenges and problems to solve at a massive scale. All other issues or perks are secondary to me as long as I get to spend my workday doing what I'm passionate about, and my company supports my interests. There are few, if any other companies I can work with that match what Yahoo can in that regard. In fact, in 2008 there were only two companies on my list when I was looking to make the move from the startup-world, I interviewed at both, one was warm and welcoming (Y!), the other not as much. Really happy with the way things worked out.
It's tough (impossible?) to get everything you want in a work environment. Remember, happiness is entirely relative [1]. You can find dozens of blog posts about people being unhappy at Google, Facebook, Yahoo, startups, etc. just as you can find people who are extremely happy. Everyone values different things, but I think the interest most people share is that their company values them. Oddly enough, last year I referenced a Marissa Mayer quote in a short blog post [2] about finding happiness in your career, and why I like Yahoo. Glad to see she also realized Yahoo is an awesome place to be.
You just have to prioritize which aspects are important to you, and ensure those are important to your employer as well. If someone is choosing their employer based off reasons other than how they spend 95% of their workday, they should reevaluate their situation. That's at least my philosophy.
Sorry that probably doesn't answer your product questions, but I felt your underlying question was "Why Yahoo?", so I tried to best answer that.
[1] Interesting study which you can find references to it all over the Web. "Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?" http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1... Related TED talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.h...
[2] "The Best Career Advice You’ll Ever Get" http://derek.io/blog/2011/the-best-career-advice-youll-ever-...
The difference (to me) is pretty dramatic, and the confidence of being able to get stuff done is night & day. It still boggles my mind to think about how much has changed in just 1 month since she started. Fun times at Yahoo, that's for sure.
That's actually the public stock market. Private equity investors can vary anywhere from extremely patient, to being as impatient as public share holders. In Twitter's case, it's a 6-year old service that is peaking in valuation ($10 billion) unless it can find some new source of revenue growth, so I'd imagine the investors are getting a little ancy.
That's the thing, they just need to make the UX so badass that users will want to use your products instead of a 3rd party. Problem solved. Instead, they are just being lazy and squashing anyone who tries to innovate on their platform. Considering every feature on Twitter.com started on 3rd party clients, they're just shooting themselves in the foot.
But then again, that's assuming you believe it is about "consistent user experience", which I think it likely 5% of the real answer.
But, I feel like they've given up on being anything other than an SEO / blogging / display advertising sweat-shop. Although it seems to be working for them.
Ironic? Yes. Damages credibility? Nope.
We've been talking a lot lately about the decline of quality commentary on HN, and the increase of negativity and snarkiness. Parent is a great example.
OP, I enjoyed the post and forwarded it on to some friends. Nice work!
Still, a good story though. Had he ended there, the letter would lack any real substance to argue his point.
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So yes, if someone gets my phone, they can then gain access to my Google account. Grrrrr...
Correct that there is no direct return on investment. However, some experts have claimed for every dollar spent on the Apollo program, we got $10 back in public benefit. It's really difficult to measure this stuff accurately, but the point to take away is that there is quite a lot to gained in technology, PR, and cash by doing inspiring & challenging science.