Posts from August 2006

I visited Mozilla HQ this afternoon to discuss product strategy and positioning with a few full-time staffers. My visit happened to coincide with the release of Firefox 2 beta 2, giving me a brief glimpse into a world where your every move is both public and frequently reported (accurately and inaccurately) to a tech news hungry audience. A few news sources read the Firefox 2 status meeting notes from Tuesday and noticed beta 2 should go live today, August 31. Each release includes internationalization into 40+ languages, so rollouts are handled in stages as each piece is integrated and...

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt is now an Apple Computer board member. He joins Fred Anderson of Elevation Partners, Bill Campbell of Intuit, Millard Drexler of J. Crew, Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson, politician Al Gore, and Jerry York of Harwinton Capital. The group was already interconnected outside of the Apple boardroom. Al Gore is a Google advisor and Google invested in Current TV, Gore's television station. Bill Campbell was an early management advisor to Larry Page and Sergey Brin and helped hire Eric Schmidt. Arthur Levinson is on Google's Board of Directors. Are closer times ahead for these two powerful brands?...

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Search industry pundit Danny Sullivan is leaving his popular Search Engine Watch website and Search Engine Strategies conferences at the end of this year. Danny is viewed by the community as synonymous with both brands, and an independent expert in all things search since he's been following the industry for over 10 years. I'm sure lots of search companies are contacting Danny right now to apply his specialized knowledge within their walls. I hope he does his own thing and takes full ownership stakes, but I have a feeling a big company might snatch him up. Yahoo! took Danny to...

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I spent last weekend at Foo Camp hosted at O'Reilly's headquarters in Sebastopol, about 60 miles north of San Francisco. The 200-person event was 3 days of non-stop conversations, sessions, and planning with the occasional break for food or a few hours sleep under a cubicle desk. I was blown away by the quality of conversations and intellectually challenging ideas and formulations each day. A few things stood out, and I'll summarize a bit here before I forget Friday, Day 1 On Friday evening I discussed oil futures and web-scale micropayments with economist Hal Varian. Hal wrote Information Rules,...

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The Flickr team introduced new features today allowing its users to easily associate an uploaded photo with location and event information. The geolocation drag-and-drop interface and search (shown above) is powered by the Yahoo! Maps AJAX API. Event integration is handled through a special event tag generated by sister Yahoo! site Upcoming.org. The Organize interface is heavily influenced by Aqua Dock on Mac OS X. Photos dragged off the map disappear in a poof and the currently selected picture within an info is magnified relative to objects surrounding it. You can drag-and-drop images onto the map within Flickr's interface...

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NewsGator released version 1.4.1 of its enterprise feed management server yesterday afternoon. Users of the new version can now use NewsGator desktop clients FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, or Inbox to interact with their feeds. Much better than a corporate intranet page in my opinion, but it's good to give people choices. The new version also has better support for detecting and highlighting enclosures, placing files into special folders such as "My Podcasts." Hopefully new products and updates to enterprise feed readers will create a new market of viewers for the blogosphere, connecting a larger population with automated news delivery....

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SF Tech Sessions meets this Wednesday evening in San Francisco to learn about the latest trends in distributing large media files. Local technologists, podcasters, videobloggers, and anyone else doing their part to clog the tubes should come by CNET headquarters starting at 7 p.m. this Wednesday to learn more about the latest distribution technologies. Media producers should have as many choices as possible when publishing their work and not rule out high-quality, high-definition content. San Francisco companies GUBA and Red Swoosh are two examples of newly launched products alleviating the bandwidth and distribution strain while delivering more content choices to...

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Jason Goldman, product manager of Google Blog Search and Blogger, is leaving Google at the end of this week. No more commutes from San Francisco, but he'll instead be on a jet plane traveling the world for a bit before starting somewhere a bit smaller. I could have taken time off or switched to a different project, but I feel that after I'm finished doing the nothing I've got planned, I'm going to want to do something somewhere small. And, to be honest, I can't really imagine being at Google but not being involved in Blogger. Jason's departure comes shortly...

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DeWitt Clinton changed the way you search through your browser in the past few years. The OpenSearch format powers search in Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 and helps you discover new sources of information with easy to aggregate data whether you're looking for a CPAN library or searching my weblog. DeWitt is stepping down as software development lead for Amazon's A9 search engine today to pursue new projects. One new project in the works is the completion of the OpenSearch 1.1 spec and launching a new independent community-oriented home for OpenSearch on the web. I've been a beta tester...

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A few members of the Yahoo! Autos team created a new feedback and suggestion system during a recent company Hack Day incorporating some of the bubble-up recommendation system to their own support and feedback loops. Instead of submitting yet another request for motorcycle coverage on the site, the existing request is shown on the Yahoo! Autos feedback page allowing anyone on the Internet to +1 the recommendation. (via Y! Cool Thing of the Day) I like the idea of the public-facing repository in an easy to browse and understand format. The multiple votes cast into a particular feature bucket should...

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