delicious – Changing Way

Putting The “We” in WEB

Who fumbled the web? That’s a question I’m asking, mainly at a site called Fumbling the Web. The story so far: if any one organization can be said to have fumbled the web, it’s Yahoo; but that would be a gross oversimplification. So, if FtW turns into a book, many chapters may focus on a single organization, and how it fumbled some aspect of the web.

Who fumbled the web? We did. (That’s at least one chapter, and probably a thread running through FtW.) We’ve been doing so for over a decade, and seem likely to keep doing so. Now, about the “we” in web…

The post title was on the cover of Newsweek (with exactly that punctuation and capitalization, although I’ve changed such things elsewhere in this post). The issue was dated April 3, 2006. The cover showed the founders of Flickr, looking as happy as you’d expect given that Yahoo had just paid (an estimated) $35 million dollars for their business.

Bradley Horowitz, then of Yahoo, sounded like a happy acquirer.

[T]hey had millions of users generating content, millions of users organizing that content… people not on the payroll actually building the thing.

Continue reading “Putting The “We” in WEB”

Yahoo no longer delicious, interest Flickring

Yahoo has had a bad year. In a week or so, I’ll probably be able to update this post with a link to a timeline (I’m sure someone will do a Yahoo review for 2010).

The current month might be labelled the December of dumping Delicious, one of the hot social media properties when we used to call social media Web 2.0. A recent review at Mashable reminds us that Yahoo initially declared Declicious’ status to be “sunset,” then declared it to be for sale, but adds that a sale of Delicious might not be easy or even appropriate.

I use Yahoo for two things. One is email. I’d like to be able to get to my Ymail from the Android mail app, but since basic Yahoo mail doesn’t allow straightforward use of IMAP or SMTPs, I have to use the Android browser.

I also use Flickr. My Flickr Pro account is one of the few examples of my paying for a freemium service.

I’ve been very happy with Flickr, and have not been too annoyed since the Yahoo acquisition. So maybe my Flickr photo for this post about Yahoo is rather snide; or maybe Yahoo is like a precarious, storm-battered shack.

But my confidence is Yahoo has sunk below the point at which I can recommend Flickr. It has not yet sunk below the point at which I will use Flickr.

As we head into 2011, I’m regretting that each of the two Yahoo services I use is rather sticky. Perhaps it was silly to use an email address with a domain I don’t own (andrew at changingway dot org, now that makes more sense). I have thousands of photos at Flickr, some of which are linked to from this blog and from other sites.

Perhaps Yahoo will be the comeback kid of 2011. I don’t see that happening, though.

Wednesday Flashback

Once again, my review of the Wednesday-to-Wednesday week appears on a Thursday. Here goes:

Silliness of the week: Dell has applied for a trademark on the term cloud computing.
Anticlimactic relaunch of the week: delicious. Here are Merlin’s remarks; here’s an interesting Reddit topic, with comment from Joshua (Mr Delicious); here are my delicious bookmarks.
Startup web service to which I’d most like an invite: Heekya, which I became aware of via Mashable.
That reminds me, I enjoyed Mashable’s Boston bash, and will post about it soon.
The obvious, but needed saying, award goes to Bob Morris of ARM. As GigaStacey put it, if you consider that the mobile phone will soon be a place to make calls and access the web through cloud services, then the operating system is less significant and the browser becomes the king.

Feed Now With Delicious Diggy Stumbleness

If you’re reading this in your feed reader (Bloglines, Google Reader, or the like), many thanks for subscribing. This post is for you. If you’re reading this at the blog itself, thanks to you too, and please consider subscribing: go on, click on that lovely little orange icon in the sidebar.

I’ve just turned on the Enhanced Feeds option, recently offered at WordPress.com. Hence you see that this post has no comments (although you could change that), lots of tags, and so on.

You also see that you could add this post to del.icio.us, Digg, or Stumbleupon without having to leave the comfort of your feed reader. I’m sure that there will be lots of requests to add other social bookmarking services. My own request would be for reddit. Of the three initially provided at WordPress.com, I use del.icio.us occasionally, and have dabbled with the other two without becoming a regular user.

Then it occurred to me that those of us who send blog posts to del.icio.us shouldn’t have to rely on the blogs to which we subscribe to put “add to del.icio.us” in the feed. It should be built in to the feed reader, or it would at least make a good greasemonkey script. So I’ve just installed the del.icio.us Reader script.