I think a lot of bloggers take their writing seriously even if they aren’t professional journalists. Just like yellow journalism can hurt the reputation of the news industry, bloggers like Michael Arrington can also give bloggers a bad name by selling sensationalism as news.

Arrington posted another entry commenting on Yahoo and once again contradicts himself. He concludes his blog post (I wouldn’t go as far as crediting him with the term ‘article’) with

It took me about five minutes of watching Yahoo’s top two executives talk last month to realize that they had no fight left in them. The fact that they simply gave up wouldn’t matter so much if the only people hurt by their actions were their employees and stockholders. But that just isn’t the case, and now we all have to deal with the fallout.

I guess it’s safe for him that he doesn’t actually have to provide any facts to back up his statements. He’s basically saying that Jerry Yang and Sue Decker don’t have any fight left in them other then fighting off Microsot and Carl Icahn. If they had no fight in them, wouldn’t they just sold the company along with their principals? Arrington also implies that somehow Yahoo is hurting other people beyond employee and stockholders. Who is he talking about? Selling to Microsoft helps consumers? I can’t understand the purpose of Arrington’s ramblings other then him trying to make himself sound relevant and him thinking that if he can yell loud enough that people might think that he’s somehow a participant or insider. I guess without any journalistic integrity he has to rely on fame in one way or another ala Paris Hilton.

I think I’ll stop by a deli and ask the waiter on his thoughts about TechCrunch and quote it as fact that everyone in Silicon Valley feels what the “insider” feels.

The finance articles about shareholders and corporate raiders wanting MS to come back and buy Yahoo reminds me of those parents who has a favorite ex-boyfriend/girlfriend for their child and just can’t accept that they’ve broken up and don’t want to be together anymore.

The news has come out that Microsoft is withdrawing its bid for Yahoo. This is expected to lead to a big drop in Yahoo’s stock on Monday and bring about law suit against Yahoo and its board.

A lot of fingers will probably be pointed at Jerry Yang and that is unfortunate, but given how cynical the world is towards CEOs I’m not surprised. We live in a time where CEOs are viewed those who are there to make big bucks and companies are soulless entities. Jerry Yang could’ve approached his role in the same way. He got to be a CEO, broker a major internet deal, pocketed a lot of money and moved on, but people forget that Jerry founded Yahoo and he really wants it to succeed as a company and I believe that he defines success both for the company, its employees and its shareholders. Shareholders will sue him and Yahoo, though, but I believe he is looking out for share holders and also for the 13,000 people who make up Yahoo.

—–

I originally wrote the above post right after the news broke but didn’t actually publish it. With the latest news of billionaire Icahn trying to set up a proxy battle against Yahoo, it felt like a good real life example of what I said about people looking to make the big bucks but have no real interest in the company or its people. Basically Mr. Icahn is trying to replace the current Yahoo board for the sole purpose of selling off Yahoo. The problem is that if that is all it focuses on then this is a board that doesn’t have any reason to look out for the shareholders because it’s not looking out for the shareholder’s company. If a deal cannot be brokered with somebody quickly, this board has no interest is making sure that the company succeeds.

At the end of last year, I switched from Yahoo! Profiles (Profiles, 360, Mash) to a new team which I have not been able to tell anyone about other then to say that it was a “platforms team”. The past 5 months that I’ve been with the team has been fun, fast, and very exhausting. We are aiming to do something very different then what Yahoo has done in the past and doing something new that can effect a company the size of Yahoo is not easy especially when it involves steering it away from its traditional course.

After months of work, we’re finally able to let the world know the full extent of what we’ve up to. While we’ve already announced Yahoo’s adoption of Open Social and being a part of the Open Social Foundation, it is only one part of what my team is handling. At the Web 2.0 Summit today, our CTO announced Yahoo’s Open Strategy (YOS) which aims to open up Yahoo as a platform. At the heart of it, is the Yahoo Applications Platform (YAP) and that’s the group I’m a part of (shown in the above picture as simply APP). Needless to say, it’s been a pretty hard pushing 2008 tackling such an ambitious project, but it feel nice to finally be able to let my friends and family know what I work on.

For those interested in what I’m directly involved with from the chart… AppBin/Gallery API, End User Services, Core App API, End-user services, Publisher Services API, END POINTS, droplets, Dropzone DB, and Open Social which all part of the “APP” of the first picture.

And for the person who posted the comment saying that YAP is just vaporware, he should know that Search Monkey has gone into private beta to a select set of developers is built on top of YAP and will have a public launch soon so we’re far from being vaporware.

For the many critics of Yahoo that accuses us of not moving, I can only say that while we might not be making splashy daily marketing propaganda that they are a lot of damn serious work being put in by a lot of dedicated engineers to put some serious fire power in the hands of its users.

Microsoft paid $240 million to invest in Facebook. This is a pretty small amount for Microsoft, but since it’s for less then a 2% stake in Facebook it puts a perceived value of Facebook at $15 billion. While this might make the people at Facebook feel pretty good about themselves, I wonder if this really helps them as much as it helps Microsoft. Effectively Microsoft was able to pay $240 million to prevent any other company from buying Facebook since very few company will want to spend that much money on a social networking site. This is as good as MS buying Facebook for chump change.

Over the past few years, social networks has been all the rage. Sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook has garnered a lot of media attention and the term has moved into the mainstream. I don’t have a problem with the term “social network”, but it does tickle my funny bone when I hear people talk about how social networks are new and pioneered by the likes of sites like MySpace or Facebook. Social networks has been in existence since… well, when Man crawled out of the ocean and saw that other naked person crawling out next to him. Humans are , by nature, social creatures and we tend to like interacting with others.

What bloggers and the media really mean when they talk about “social networks” is the technical application for communication on the web. I bring this up only because it annoys me when they make sound like social networks are some brand new thing (like Web 2.0? ^^) pioneered by the likes of MySpace or Facebook and any new site is just “yet another social network.” Yes, any new site is just another social network, but so is MySpace and Facebook. Pick up the phone book and there is a social network application that your great grandparent probably was already using and that is probably thousands of years removed from the first social network. Ultimately it boils down to how useful each of the site fulfill their purpose which often is for improving communication.

One common criticism of MySpace profiles is that they can be so hideously ugly or impossible to read. Y! Mash wants to be able to give users the flexibility to customize their profiles too but also protect the eyes of the unsuspecting viewer so if you run across a profile that just hurts your eyes and brains, try clicking on the “fugly” link and it’ll take away the crazy CSS and let you see the contents in a very basic format.

I’ve been reading some of the blog postings from new users of Yahoo! Mash and one of things mentioned but a few is whether Mash replaces My Yahoo!. I thought I should point out that these two product serves a very different purpose. Mash is information you want to share with the world while My! is information you want to see for yourself from the world.

Today, Yahoo released the beta of a new site called Yahoo! Mash. Because it is currently an invite-only site, going to the link might now reveal very much, but Tech Crunch has some coverage and screen shots here. Now, normally I don’t tend to talk much about my work or give my opinions about it other then to mention some new features coming out of Yahoo, but Mash is a little different in that I’m directly involved with it. I switched out of my previous group where I had been for the past few years to work on this project and be its engineering manager.

Mash is a strange beast and is different for different people. Some view it as a social network site. Some view it as a Facebook competitor. Some believe that it is a Y! 360 replacement. Mash is all of these and none of these.

At its core, Mash is your Yahoo! Profile with additional functionality often found in social networking site with a very wiki-like philosophy. Additional functionality can be obtained through “modules”. Not only can you customize your profile, but your friends can also help you build it (with your permission) by editing the profile and adding new modules for you. We hope to open it up so that everyone can write their own modules to share with others, but until them we’re giving people as much freedom as possible to customize the page. You will be able to edit and create your own CSS to make the page look however you like (or your friends can do it for you if you’re not so artistically inclined. ^^;).

I hope people find the site to be both fun and useful. Keep an eye out for the Hot Potato (get it? mash…potato…) module that jumps from profile to profile! It’s still in beta so we know there are some features that users are wanting. I encourage people to make suggestions on our suggestions board.

Here is a tutorial for writing a sliding divs like you see on Digg or many other sites. It was written in response to another tutorial on implementing a similar behavior.

Both articles are worth reading as it spells out clearly how to do the effect. The version on firblitz takes a more object oriented approach. In both examples, the initial call is from an inline Javascript (a href=”javascript:…”). There is nothing wrong with doing this, but to have an even cleaner separation between Javascript and the HTML presentation, it’s best to not have inline Javascript at all. Instead, use the event model to attach the function to the event so that that the HTML is completely clean.

Start with the following addition to firblitz’s javascript code.

function toggle() {
	var sd = document.getElementById("slidediv");
	if (sd.style.display == 'none') {
		Slide('slidediv').down();
	} else {
		Slide('slidediv').up();
	}
}
function init() {
   // attach event listener to objects
   var slidediv = document.getElementById("mydiv");
   slidediv.addEventListener("click", toggle, true);
}
window.onload = init;

And the body of the html would just be:

<div id="mydiv">clickme</div>
<div id="slidediv" style="height100px;display:none;overflow:hidden">Hello world!</div>

To take it one step further, take out the inline styles. However, this introduced one problem. Javascripts is unable to access the style value directly if it is not an inline style. This is because the element’s style is not the style of the CSS object that is assigned through the #id. Thus, you have to manually assign the styles to the element. This is the end result:

function toggle() {
	var sd = document.getElementById("slidediv");
	var styles = getComputedStyle(sd, '');
	sd.style.display = styles.display;
	sd.style.height = styles.height;
	if (sd.style.display == 'none') {
		Slide('slidediv').down();
	} else {
		Slide('slidediv').up();
	}
}
function init() {
   // attach event listener to objects
   var slidediv = document.getElementById("mydiv");
   slidediv.addEventListener("click", toggle, true);
}

And the body of the html is a clean:

<div id="mydiv">clickme</div>
<div id="slidediv">Hello world!</div>