Tag: Web

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Business Technology

The Role of the Web

I’ll start by confessing that I have never build a non-trivial application in my life. I’ve mainly worked on creating websites for people and working with HTML and CSS with some Ruby/Python/PHP thrown in.

However, as I contemplate building a non-trivial application, I’m debating where to start and what role the web will take.

Basically: do I build Twitter or Instagram? Hear me out.

If I build Twitter, I build the entire client on the web first. That’s where I start. After I have that squared away, then I could move onto other clients using an API.

Building Instagram, I’d build the native applications first and the web would be the saving and transport mechanism. I might return later to build a web client, but I’d be using IP networking mainly to transport bits to a server so that it could be shared with others.

That’s the mental problem I am working with right now along with learning how to code within iOS. It is a fun argument to have in my head.

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Business Technology

Yahoo! Hope?

Sriram Krishnan has some unsolicited advice advice for Marissa Mayer.

I agree with much of what he wrote, but I think the main thing that Yahoo! needs (now I’ll just type Yahoo) is some excitement and some direction. Who really cares about Yahoo right now? When the most exciting thing that has happened for Yahoo is the hiring of another CEO, you know you are in trouble.

Flickr might be a good place to start, but I think #9 on the above list is my favorite:

Institute a policy that Yahoo will use off-the-shelf/popular open source tools and technologies whenever possible. When those don’t meet Yahoo’s needs, teams will fork them and contribute back changes. No more pet projects to reinvent what everyone else in the open source world has already built. Fire anyone who uses the words ‘Yahoo scale’ to debate this with you.

This is going to open up some engineering talent to work on products, which is where Yahoo needs to really work. It also opens up candidates to work for the company because there are many people with experience using those technologies.

Is it going to happen? Who knows. The board will need to buy into whatever Ms. Mayer is bringing to the table, so there will be push-back on almost every turn …

… but for Yahoo’s sake I hope that they do.

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Business Technology

Marissa Mayer in as CEO of Yahoo!

The exclamation mark isn’t there for emphasis.

As reported all over the internet yesterday, long-time Google employee and VP Marissa Mayer has moved over to Yahoo! as their CEO (hat-tip to The Verge).

I hold out hope that maybe she can turn that place around and provide a credible competitor to Google in many ways. She is, by far, the best candidate that Yahoo! has been able to grab and I eagerly wait to see what changes she might bring to the company.

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Technology

The Need To Link

From Marco Arment’s post Stop Not Linking (which links to Stop Not Linking by Matthew Panzarino):

But the bigger problem is the practice of news sites rewriting articles from source sites while adding little to no original value. In those cases, where they put the source link doesn’t matter, because as I wrote a few months ago, they replace the need to view the source article.

I try to link as clearly as possible to the source material and this is the reason why (along with everything else in those two articles). Seemingly the larger the publication, the worse it is.

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Technology

Terrible Facebook

Facebook is again being a pain (link to Lifehacker). They have gone through and changed the primary email address to their own @facebook.com address.

Bad move Facebook.

Go in and change it back to your own so that people can contact you at YOUR OWN email address. Just another shady move by Facebook.