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.

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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.

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.

If you archive your messages in Y! Messenger and need to move to another location, the files are stored in:

Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profile\\Archive\

As Yahoo! rolls out their new homepage design, I’ve been asking various friends what their thoughts are on the new look-and-feel. The reactions has been mixed although none have been outright negative. Initially, I thought that those who didn’t like the new look was because it was such a big change and change is not always welcomed. Some things aren’t necessarily the best, but they work and people can get what they need out of them without much thinking.

After awhile, I started to ask myself why is it that I liked the new Yahoo homepage and while there are many different reasons, I thought that maybe one of the reason is that Yahoo homepage is beginning to be more of an “application” then an online publication.

As a software engineer, I like building applications and I’m not so inclined to build online content. One is a problem that challenges me while the other is equivalent of data entry (remember that this is from the perspective of engineers who aren’t being paid to be creative writers so they are usually handed the content from “writers” and are told by non-engineers to “implement” the articles).

I guess I’m saying that I liked the web initially because it was more about programming (software engineer). Then it became more about content layout and it got boring (web developers). As the balance went back towards programming and application, it became challenging again (frontend engineers).

The new Yahoo! Messenger is out. The biggest change is its ability to load user created plug-ins. Everything besides the base functionality is a plug-in and users can create their own. I can see this really expanding the power of Y!M, but can it overcome established IM clients which offers many of the same things? Sometimes, I feel that the feature war is one the Cold War where eventually people forget the purpose and just ends up doing stuff for the sake of keeping busy and the status quo.

That’s why I like Google Talk. It’s not jumping into the feature war, but going after the simple but effective philosophy that has worked for UNIX for so long. I also like Trillian which allows me to talk to multiple IM providers (Yahoo, AIM, MSN), has a nicer interface then most “official” clients, and just has the features I want to use. In the long run, I feel that this is the winning strategy.

I think we can learn from the success of Trillian and to an extent Google Talk (not enough mass adoption to be called a success yet). An interesting case study might be GAIM. Here was a open-source application that was really ready to take off and become a leader in my opinion. Although the UI could’ve been better (I prefer Trillian’s look), it was one of those “it just works” programs that could’ve hooked users. However, it’s been stagnant in its development. 6 months goes by without any updates on its official site and each beta release takes ages. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that the project was dead and why would I use a dying application?

Update: I just want to clarify that I do realize that there is development going on with GAIM. I can check the source control and see that changes are taking place. However, even though I am a developer, this isn’t my area of focus so I don’t usually go looking at the change logs. I go to the web site every so often and see if there are any important changes or news. After many months of no updates, I start feeling like the project is dying which happens to most software projects since not one important change has happened that is worthy of being put on the web site.  To me, none of this is a big deal.  GAIM is pretty cool and if it works, I’ll use it.  If it doesn’t, I’ll look for something else.