a blog by Ian Kennedy
A panel discussion at O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns conference with myself, Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Kevin Marks (Google) and David Recordon (Six Apart) on the rollout of shared activity streams as part of the latest revolution in social network. Moderating was Sean Ammirati of ReadWriteWeb.
Photo by Pinar Ozger
A quick note to let folks know that the MyBlogLog team made it through the staff reductions at Yahoo intact. Heads down is a common expression around here and it’s apt because we’ve been hammer and tongs on getting things built that we’ve been thinking about for a long time. It’s great to be shipping again!So far, our About Me widget has been getting rave reviews. We also have an API that’s in beta and spinning off some really interesting applications. Finally, yesterday we’ve got our updated Recent Reader widget into the wild and that’s getting great reviews. Congrats to the entire MyBlogLog team, especially Manny Miller who’s been in the weeds with the widget code from the start.
We’ve got more up our sleeves and I’m looking forward to meeting folks at Graphing Social Patterns, eTech, and South by Southwest to talk about it.
There’s some cool blogging going on over at next.yahoo.net, a relaunched corporate blog that highlights the hacker culture at Yahoo.
Sure, they just posted a short video of sound bites spliced together from interviews (Ricky Montalvo is a master) I did at a recent all-night hackathon. But there’s also other great posts including Havi’s summary of a thread on implicit & explicit which includes the complete video of David Weinberger‘s opening keynote from the first Defrag Conference held in Denver earlier this year which is well worth seeing.
Flickr released it’s stats feature for Pro members today and while your stats are being crunched, they show the classic “under construction” animated .gifs. What people may not know is that there are three versions that you get in somewhat random order.
There’s more where these came from. . .
When I write a blog post I make heavy use of the tabs in my browser so that I can switch back and forth between the blog compose screen and other screens where I do my research. I usually have my trusty image editor running as well so I can crop an edit any images that I use in my posts.
For the past few weeks I’ve been playing around with a new WordPress plug-in (Yahoo Shortcuts) that will cut back on the copy-paste, rightclick-save, and other context switching by bringing content and references directly into the WordPress compose area. With this plug-in running, it scans your post for potential annotations that can turn a drab bit of hypertexed links into a gloriously illustrated work of art.
For example, if I wanted to do a story about my hotel in where I recently stayed, all I need to do is include the address (3000 Paradise Road, Las Vegas, NV 89109) and Shortcuts will look for suitable information such as the map you see on this post and add it complete with text wrapping. All it took was a single click. Not only will Shortcuts search across shopping for product information, it can also pull in stock charts for companies, and Creative Commons images from flickr. The embeded graphics are beautiful so the temptation is to go overboard and embed the Shortcut “badges” willy-nilly. An alternative is to chose the “link” option which is a great way to add context to your post while keeping your viewers on your site.
Some other examples where Shortcuts does the right thing. Hover over the link to view the contextual badge:
Once you’re done with your post, click the Review this Post button and you get a preview window where you can choose which links you want to embed, which you want to just enable with a popup, and which ones you want to ignore. This is key. Other products that automatically provide contextual links are an all or nothing affair. It’s vital to retain editorial control so you can choose which words or phrases you want to recognize. Yahoo Shortcuts does this. To get a sense of the how the plug-in works, check out the screencast.
No more tabbing over to another window or fiddling around with HTML or CSS code, Yahoo Shortcuts just brings it all in so you can work with it right there and then, all on one page.
Yahoo! Shortcuts plug-in for WordPress
Yahoo has joined up with the folks at the New York Times crosswords to promote the new Search Assist feature with a contest. The idea is that you fill the puzzle out successfully and you too can be entered into a drawing for one of five trips to Hawaii. Thing is, this thing is a gimme. Next to each clue is a link to a “Hint” which runs a search in the pane below against Yahoo’s Search Assist which will serve things up for you right there and then. It’s a great way to show off the new Search Assist and may give you a new reason to work on your crosswords with the browser handy.
I found out about this via a new group on Facebook. Join Yahoo! Pilot if you want to find out about the latest stuff going on at Yahoo! I can’t believe I found something not written up by the folks over at Yahoo! Cool thing of the Day, my usual source for tweaks and trivia about Yahoo – must have caught them asleep at the switch!
If you haven’t checked out the new Yahoo Search Assist, by all means do. Someone’s finally got the clustered search and suggestive results thing right. Type something into search.yahoo.com and hesitate just a bit and the pane will come rushing out with suggestions.
On a lighter, Ryan Grove, one of the engineers who worked on the enhancements, points out that our search results now go to “11”
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.
I’m not a programmer but I love to tinker. Much to the chagrin of my parents, I liked nothing better than taking things apart and seeing how they worked. The thing that made the early web so much fun was the View > Page Source command in the browser which allowed me to take apart any website and figure out how it was put together.
APIs and XML pushed that all into the background for weekend duffers like me. All the parameters that went into building an interactive page were hidden from me. Many sites would expose bits of what was going on in the URL field and I could still play around by swapping out variables that I could see in plain text but the ability to parse out the results and display them in format that I wanted was beyond my basic skills and I could only work on one page at a time, unable to string the output of one page to the input of another.
Today’s release of Yahoo! Pipes is just the product I need to begin to muck around again. Choose any RSS feed as a data source and break down the URL into it’s basic components. Drag in any of the various modules to substitute parameters, filter, join, sort, or otherwise transform the results and harness the output as an RSS feed which you can easily subscribe or embed into your site.
Pipes has embraced the View Source culture. Every published Pipe on the system can be cloned, stripped apart and repurposed for your own use. You can nest pipes inside one another or string them together so that early pipes become the building blocks for more complex routines.
Want to read a mashed up feed of the top autoblogs filtered to specific luxury European autos? No problem.
Looking for the latest flickr photos and weather conditions at Whistler? You got it.
My own itch was trying to figure out if I should buy something off of my local Craigslist, bid for it on eBay, or just buy it outright. Instead of daily searches on a series of sites, I now have one place to go.
Big ol’ caveat. This is not a finished product! Edward, Daniel, Jonathan, Pasha, and Kevin have created a beautiful platform but this is just the first step in an exciting direction which is already generating lots of debate. Pipes levels the playing field and invites the masses into the sandbox. Let’s all play nice together and bend those tubes around and make something wonderful.
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