Did my first post over on the MyBlogLog blog (that’s a mouthful!). I’ll be posting over there when it comes to product news but I’ll continue to provide pointers from here when it makes sense. Lots of great work going on that should see the light of day in the very near future – the team works at lightspeed!
Year: 2007
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Things to do while your friends are playing with their new iPhones
While the rest of Silicon Valley is going to be blogging about their new iPhone, I figured I might as well point you to a few things you could be doing instead. You know, productive things:1. Make your own Simpson’s Avatar (right). Be sure to turn the sound on because the sound effects are an important part of the experience.
2. Reserve your tickets to Ratatouille because that’s going to be the first thing everyone’s going to do to impress their friends with their new iPhone.
3. If you charged anything to Visa or Mastercard while overseas anytime between 1996 and 2006, you may have some money coming to you. Total up your overseas charges and you may get 3% of it back. I’ve got almost enough for my own iPhone.
4. Download your own iPhone ringtone and fake out your friends.
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The Power of Suggestion
Now that we’ve got shiny new servers we can start to tick things off the list that have been queued up while folks have been busy stringing cables and spinning up new disks. Earlier this week we re-worked the universal footer on the site and launched the MyBlogLog Suggestion Board.
The Suggestion Board was born out of one of Yahoo’s internal hack days where the folks over in Yahoo Autos wanted a quick and easy way for their users to tell them which new features they thought were the most important. Combining simple forum features with a simple thumbs up, thumbs down voting mechanism (all the rage these days) the team polished up their hack and now provide it as a platform service for any Yahoo property.
Suggestion Boards have been popping up all over the place and we’re pleased to have one for our community as well. Robyn’s got a great write up on how it works. If you’re a MyBlogLog user (if you’re not, sign up!) and have an idea for a new feature or just want to poke around and see what others have suggested and add your vote to their ideas, jump on in. The team loves to get feedback.
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Now working at MyBlogLog
Some of you already know but to bring the far flung readers up to date, as of a few weeks ago, I transferred to a new team at Yahoo. I’ve been holding off on writing about my job with MyBlogLog (they’re an acquisition we made back in January) as I’ve been taking it all in, getting settled, and getting a sense of how things work. Check out the “Recent Readers” box in the sidebar of this blog and sign up. It’s a pretty cool service (and is going to get even better!)
Now a few weeks in and I’m happy to say that this is the right place for me. The team here is amazing and they’re working on things right in line with my interests, a people-centric view of the web. So what is the team behind this people-driven service like?Eric & Todd have known each other since 5th grade and work together as you would imagine two longtime friends would. Mostly a lot of good-natured ribbing with an occasional heated debate but in the end, a shared passion for turning out something amazing. Hanging out with them each day makes me wonder what my old friends from Essex, Connecticut are up to these days.
John & Steve have been working together for many years as well and because they sit back to back they piratically complete each other’s sentences when they’re collaborating over something. They built the latest tags release from conception to release in something like a week. Friggin’ rockstars.
Robyn was brought on as the community manager and has that rare talent for striking the right balance that helps the community thrive. Read her latest post on the MyBlogLog blog and you’ll see what I mean. She’s from Georgia so her accent immediately puts you at ease.
Chris just joined the team but has already re-jiggered our memcache and drafted an API which is looking real solid. If it’s fast, Chris is happy. He’s already made an impact and I can see he’s going to be a huge help as we scale and optimize.
We’re actively hiring kick-ass engineers who want to see their work used and recognized by millions. If you’d like to work with this crew and think you’re up to it, drop me a line in the comments.
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Robots!
At the Robogames in San Francisco I got to see Zou Ren Tii’s Body Double robot. Can you tell which one is the robot?More photos from the day here.
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Turning off Feedburner Link Splicer
Nothing worse than looking at the last five posts for your blog and seeing a bunch of Links for 2007-06-08 [del.icio.us] which is just a sorry excuse for saying that your blog still has a pulse. I’m working dammit – if I have something to share I’ll blog about it and, if you subscribe, than you’ll know. No more random links to clog up your feeder’s inbox.
From today I’m turning off the daily delicious links that have been carried in the feed of this blog using Feedburner’s Link Splicer. I’ll continue to gather links into my delicious feed so if you want to continue to get a daily dose of what I’m reading, feel free to subscribe to that linkroll’s RSS feed.
For those interested in a more nuanced highlight of my thoughtstream, I’ll take the best links of the week and roll them up into a Friday post on this blog.
Sound good?
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Microsoft Surface, Minority Report realized
I saw and blogged about an early prototype of this device back when I saw it demoed at eTech last year. It blew people away back then and is even more impressive today. The video below shows some new enhancements such as the ability to drag photos from a digital camera to the table for preview and then again to your Windows Mobile device.
Combine this UI with Sony’s recently announced flexible OLED displays and one can only imagine the possibilities – a multi-touch jacket which animates itself based on RFID and Bluetooth signals around it, call it a high tech chameleon.
Very, very cool.
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Way to go WallStrip!
Techcrunch confirms that CBS has purchased Wallstrip. Lindsay Campbell, the host, drops by CBS headquarters to meet her new colleagues. [Watch]
