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DeWitt Clinton

Robert Scoble

Dare Obasanjo

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posted a message on Twitter

“Line Rider now requires Silverlight (Beta 2) - http://tinyurl.com/23rmjs”

8 hours ago - Link

Jordan Hofker liked this

A beta version no less. - Bjorn Tipling

posted a message on Twitter

“One of Yahoo's problems was that being a primary purchaser of Silicon Valley startups is not a strategy nor is it a business plan.”

yesterday at 8:15 am - Link

Mitchell Tsai, David Gutelius, Bjorn Tipling, Hutch Carpenter and 7 other people liked this

Dare, let's argue out your Yahoo startup point here, cause you're wrong: http://tinyurl.com/scobleizer - Robert Scoble

Dare is wrong because Yahoo didn't pay very much for the startups it bought. Flickr went for about $30 million. That's a rounding error on its books. And Yahoo got a LOT of value out of owning these small companies like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Upcoming. The problem with Yahoo is it lost its leadership in search. If it still had that leadership it would have no sin. - Robert Scoble

Show 5 more comments

@scobleizer Yahoo! lost search because they employed a portal and online media company strategy under Semel. - Lou Paglia

@Dare the problem with Yahoo's acquisition strategy is that they did nothing more than integrate their login service and didn't integrate them into a larger strategy - Lou Paglia

Yahoo! has three broad categories of Internet businesses; search, content and social applications. My tweet was specifically about the third. Buying MyBlogLog, Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming, etc didn't really move the needle on their social application strategy. Flickr has been a massive success purchased at a bargain but it's success hasn't been leveraged by the rest of Yahoo! except as an excuse to shut down Yahoo! Photos. The rest of the acquisitions have been a waste of time. - Dare Obasanjo

Dare, I agree with Scoble that they were smart purchases (for the value of each entity) but I agree with you more based on how they leveraged them for synergy with their social media strategy - Lou Paglia

I do think there is value in building all web properties in-house and I once said so. Here: http://tinyurl.com/6zak39 - Jamie

delicious could have been massively important to search. they just bungled it. - Kevin

Jamie, I'm not sure where build vs. buy comes in. Some of the most successful products at Microsoft and Google came through acquisition. However given the amount of purchases Y! made during the height of it's startup buying binge it is somewhat sad that Flickr is the only real success story and they couldn't leverage it across all of Y! - Dare Obasanjo

Sure. But I do think there is value in rolling your own as opposed to attempting to munge 2 disparate things together. Its useful to have a common code base if nothing else. Granted there are of course times when aquisition is the best way forward. Ouch these fence posts hurt. - Jamie

posted a message on Twitter

“In the middle of wathcing Lost World: Jurassic Park my wife blurts out "Does that gas station say $1.05 a gallon?". Ah, the nineties.”

yesterday at 5:16 pm - Link

Scott Bauer, Scott Koon and Robert Banghart liked this

commented on a story on Reddit

Carnage4Life on Answer the eternal question: Is the site down for everyone, or just me?

24 hours ago - Link

"I'm confused. What the heck is noteworthy about this? Isn't this just slightly more complex putting a Web front end on top of a "Hello World" app?" - Dare Obasanjo

posted a message on Twitter

“The NY Times jumps on the Google isn't a great employer for adults meme by exposing their daycare situation at http://tinyurl.com/5pt5yy”

yesterday at 1:04 pm - Link

posted a message on Twitter

“Took a look at Gnip. At 1st look it seemed ambitious but on second look it actually seems even worse. Just bloody useless. Blog 2 follow.”

yesterday at 7:50 am - Link

scott anderson and Adewale Oshineye liked this

posted a message on Twitter

“@russnem Firefox 3”

yesterday at 10:33 am - Link

posted a message on Twitter

“@russnem Vista”

yesterday at 9:29 am - Link

posted a message on Twitter

“Clicking http://www.weblogs.com/changes... in Firefox 3 is bringing down my entire laptop. Damn it captain, she canna take the pressure!!”

yesterday at 8:00 am - Link

Dennis E. Hamilton liked this

In IE7 (XP SP3) I get a cannot format XML refusal: - Dennis E. Hamilton via twhirl

Clicking on that link in FF3 under OS X (PPC) w/1.5GB of RAM just brings down FF3, not my OS. Need a better OS? ;) - Scott Koon

Flock balked at it, too. - Jack Carlson

Second time I found myself at rpc.weblogs.com/changes.xml, IE7 presented the XML and then went down hard. It was sucking CPU cycles so hard I wasn't sure that I could get the task manager up to kill it. Took two tries. My machine seems to have quieted down now. - Dennis E. Hamilton

posted a message on Twitter

“Encylopedia Britannica moves to powering entire site with Flash. See http://britannica.com , EPIC FAIL!!!”

Friday at 5:28 pm - Link

Adewale Oshineye liked this

Really? It doesn't seem that the entire site is powered with Flash. I clicked through to view some content pages and they weren't in Flash. Apart of the fuzzy homepage, they seem to have used Flash quite well and with good reason. I'm no fan of all-Flash sites, but this one is not that bad. - IRWebReport.com

Still seems to make the site not very responsive - a lot of time waiting for flash downloads - not sure what it was like before though. Not sure I agree with the fail but a C- might be order. - Brian Sullivan

@Brian Yeah, it was unresponsive on my second visit. The graphics on the homepage look crap, but when you dig into the content (most of which is not in Flash), it's actually rather good. - IRWebReport.com

posted a message on Twitter

“how does kevin costner continue to get movie roles? has he had a hit movie in the last 15 years?”

Friday at 4:22 pm - Link

posted a message on Twitter

“Russell Beattie analyzes identi.ca's code and comes to the conclusion that it might be crappier than Twitter's at http://tinyurl.com/6jsjj7”

Friday at 10:39 am - Link

Adewale Oshineye, Jon Galloway, Otto R. Radke, Roger Benningfield and 2 other people liked this

posted a message on Twitter

“How do Amazon search result pages with no hits for the search term end up in the top 5 results for a Google query?”

Friday at 8:22 am - Link

Example? - Matt Cutts

"amazon Pleasure P ft. Lil Wayne Rock Bottom" - Dare Obasanjo

Try just that: Pleasure P ft. Lil Wayne Rock Bottom no amazon site in the results - Dan

I was looking for the page for the song on Amazon. I was just surprised to not only see a search results page show up in Google results but one with no matches on it. - Dare Obasanjo

Guess then, it is a site just too "important" to be "ignored"... - Dan

posted a message on Twitter

“The YouTube Paradox: How are they so good at keeping pr0n off the site but can't seem to do the same for copyrighted content?”

Friday at 10:12 am - Link

posted a message on Twitter

“SourceForge won't be able to provide statistics to services until August? That's a two month service outage. *sigh* You get what u pay for”

Thursday at 5:39 am - Link

Adewale Oshineye liked this

commented on a story on Reddit

Carnage4Life on The GOOG->MSFT Exodus: Working at Google vs. Working at Microsoft

June 29 at 11:31 am - Link

Scott Bauer, Bruce Williams, accesine, Jordan Hofker and 3 other people liked this

"Sorry to contradict your stereotype of MSFT employees. I'm at the stage in my career (6 years working at Microsoft) and my life (newly married with a baby on the way) where I'm not impressed by free lunches and unfocused usage of my precious time. Things I think about now include 1.) I have experience with the software development process that I'd like to share with other so they don't make the same mistakes I made. Microsoft has lots of formal mechanisms to support this including becoming a mentor (I've mentored interns) and a software management career path. 2.) I don't like fire drills because it means someone fucked up and it often means it eats into my personal time (evenings and/or weekends). As lame as it sounds, lots of the process at big companies like Microsoft is to reduce fire drills. How many XSS and XSRF security issues are reported for Google services on proggit versus MSN/Windows Live properties? 3.) Culture. Despite what you read on Slashdot, Microsoft has been..." - Dare Obasanjo

I started at Microsoft many years ago when it was 'the' place to work for a software developer. It was great. I still work here, because its still great. The fact that I now have a family, and Microsoft supports me in that, is a wonderful thing. I'm probably being too thin-skinned, but I always find it painful when my peers out in the world say and assume really nasty things about Microsoft, its people, and its products. - Bruce Williams

posted a message on Twitter

“Google claims IP addresses aren't PII so judge says "in that case it is OK to hand them over to Viacom". Check. Your move GOOG.”

Thursday at 10:24 am - Link

David Recordon and Carlos Duarte liked this

posted a message on Twitter

“I'm amused by the hypocrisy of GOOG employees criticizing MSFT for unilaterally proposing Web standards at http://tinyurl.com/64gbsy”

Thursday at 8:11 am - Link

Manish Patil, Atul Arora, PK2004 and Adewale Oshineye liked this

Huh? We've been making a very conscious cross-company effort *avoid* unilaterally proposing standards for the past few years. See our approach to HTML5, to OpenSocial, to Gears, to Atom Pub, Sitemaps, OAuth, OpenID, etc., where we're either taking our proposals to public forums, industry foundations, or formal standards bodies. In fact, we work with closely with Microsoft on a number of these initiatives. Are there some specific examples you can cite? I consider a big part of what I get paid to do to look into places we could do better at this, so I'm keen to hear more about your concerns. - DeWitt Clinton

@Dewitt: Don't forget KML in your list, now OGC Standard. - nadim

Show 4 more comments

Google has been pulling unilateral moves with far reaching impact for years from rel=nofollow to OpenSocial. What Google has become savvy at is finding some partners/stooges to stand behind them shortly after their unilateral announcements and call it a "standard". I'm still waiting for the details on which standards body ratified OAuth and OpenSocial. - Dare Obasanjo

@Dare OAuth was actually first started by a group of individuals from Twitter and Magnolia and then Chris Messina and myself (I was at VeriSign at that point but then moved to Six Apart) got involved. From there it grew certainly with the support of Google, but not the other way around. - David Recordon

Exactly what David said re: OAuth -- OAuth is 100% a community-run initiative that we're rapidly transitioning to use over our own legacy proprietary auth formats. And OpenSocial is run entirely in the open by a very wide-ranging group of companies (Yahoo, MySpace, Hi5, Ning, Plaxo, LinkedIn, etc., etc), and the intellectual property has been entirely transfered to the OpenSocial Foundation, out of Google's control. - DeWitt Clinton

And rel="nofollow" is now being "standardized" outside of Google by the microformats community. See http://microformats.org/wiki/r.... - DeWitt Clinton

I'm not saying Google doesn't have more work to do. Of course it does, but please, let's be accurate. I'd like to hear examples of places I can focus my attention. - DeWitt Clinton

And not cool calling those companies "stooges", Dare. - DeWitt Clinton

Though for the record, I actively push back, even internally, against calling anything a "standard" until it has gone through a formal standards body, such as IETF, OASIS, ISO, etc. "De facto standard" is okay, but I prefer the term "specification" for things that haven't been formally ratified. - DeWitt Clinton

posted a message on Twitter

“@robmen these days it seems the best way to propose "Web standards" is to find a bunch of likeminded competitors and co-author a spec.”

Thursday at 10:22 am - Link

posted a message on Twitter

“How many Twitter knock off services do you have accounts on? This includes Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku, Identi.ca, and even FriendFeed.”

Thursday at 5:23 am - Link

someone should make a twitter-n-knockoffs contact manager, to make it easy to switch to knockoffs as they come and go. _sigh_ - Ruben Llibre

I got one on Jaiku a long time ago but never really used it. But I have some BrightKite friends - Ben Fulton via twhirl

posted a message on Twitter

“It's interesting to see bloggers now use the same kind of scary headlines you see on the 9 o'clock news "Is Email Dead?","The VC Crisis",etc”

Wednesday at 9:27 am - Link

Roger Benningfield, Alan Le, Ryan Farley, Jon Galloway and 2 other people liked this

I blame Copyblogger. - Dave Ward

posted an entry on Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life

In Defense of XML

Wednesday at 5:56 am - Link

Dave Walker, John Bush and Brian Sullivan liked this

Dave Megginson nailed it when he said that all sufficiently expressive serializations in JSON, or any format, starts looking like XML in the end. When you start adding node labels and attributes and type information to JSON the output looks suspiciously like XML, just with curly braces instead of angle brackets. The problem being that those constructs aren't standardized in JSON. Read: http://www.megginson.com/blogs... - DeWitt Clinton

That said, for scenarios in which node metadata is unnecessary, and there are some, then JSON is the serialization format of choice for communication with unknown clients. - DeWitt Clinton

posted an entry on Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life

Some Thoughts on Google Adopting OAuth for GData APIs

Wednesday at 5:52 am - Link

DeWitt Clinton liked this

posted a message on Twitter

“It's official, Microsoft is acquiring PowerSet. Blog at http://tinyurl.com/5l2mfy”

July 1 at 1:57 pm - Link

posted a message on Twitter

“You know what's hot? Writing the most popular post in the history of my blog and having my free analytics service lose data for those days”

July 1 at 12:38 pm - Link

Adewale Oshineye liked this

damn :-( my sympathies, fella - that truly sucks - Liam Cassidy

posted a message on Twitter

“"There is no crisis. Keep making useless profitless companies. Don’t listen to these people."- Best comment on http://tinyurl.com/5t6b96”

July 1 at 9:49 am - Link

posted a message on Twitter

“Another example of the awesomeness of the GOOG recruiting process at http://tinyurl.com/5k2dl5. My weekend post is screaming for a followup”

July 1 at 5:25 am - Link

John Bush liked this

posted a message on Twitter

“My GOOG->MSFT post from the weekend has taken on a life of its own. Over 450 comments on Slashdot and over 300 comments on reddit.”

July 1 at 3:42 am - Link

Isaac Hepworth and Adewale Oshineye liked this

posted a message on Twitter

“ZDNet post at http://tinyurl.com/5malw2 suggests Feedburner has been Dodgeballed by GOOG. I wonder if Eric Lunt has left”

June 30 at 10:19 am - Link

Eric's still here. I'm sure the team will be thrilled to know that you and ZDNet care. - Adewale Oshineye

Chicken little is still alive and well. - Erica Baker

Erica, what are we expected to think when a 3 day outage goes without comment from the product team? - Dare Obasanjo

Well a reasonable person might assume that they're too busy fixing the problem to manage the media. At times like this I'm glad that I don't work on much that is public facing. - Adewale Oshineye

Dare: If you look at that known issues page or on the Google Group for Feedburner you'll see that there's been an update. - Adewale Oshineye

dugg a story on Digg

Things No One Gives Microsoft Credit For (But Should)

June 30 at 12:54 pm - Link

TDavid, Soulhuntre, Roberto Bonini, Sprague D and 5 other people liked this

Sadly Gizmodo is blocked at work ... - LPH

I'd add to the list by saying that when Microsoft made Visual Studio Express Editions free to the general public, they opened the gates to a flood of developers. More devs= more innovation= better for everyone. - Roberto Bonini

Visual Studio Express is a great thing - as is the XNA platform. You can now have a full game and high performance graphics development toolkit for free that runs on PC's and Zune's for free and it is only $99 a year to develop for the Xbox360 which is an unheard of ability on a top shelf console. People complain about MS all the time - but they do a lot of really, really good stuff. - Soulhuntre