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Founder of FoIP-News.com  (FoIP = Fax over Internet Protocol)

“I always thought polo was lacrosse on horses.”

Hand tossed salad, homemade lasagna, fresh baked cookies…and Dixie cups.

If I wanted Gizmodo, Y! News: Top Stories, or Y! News: Movie News, I would add them to my freakin’ My Yahoo! page!!!! I came to 360 to learn about what was going on with my friends, because I haven’t been able to talk to anyone about anything non-Howard Stern/CES/2006 Planning/Pan-Yahoo! Video Strategy in the last 2 weeks. Instead, I get 3 news stories (1 of them twice) that I didn’t want to read in the first place…which trigers so much displaced frustration that I spend my entire procrastination break ranting against feeds instead of reading about Ian’s  latest claims to be the coolest man alive. It was kinda bad when it was just my stupid friends who had AP feeds on their 360 page, but since Favorites came online and my whole Messenger Friends List was added, it has gotten totally out of hand!

Isn’t something wrong with the design of a product when users have to resort to deleting their friends  who don’t understand the proper use of a feature? I love the idea of feeds – it’s a great way to make 360 an open platform, which is the only way it can become a true personal portal. And, I know that it’s pretty easy to get for people who understand the distinctions between the proper use cases for Feeds, My Yahoo!, and a Blogroll. But, you can’t design a product that requires too much prerequisite knowledge in order to use it properly…especially when its a community product, and accidental misuse (as opposed to intentional abuse) diminishes the unser experience of other users.

I even went and read the copy on the 360 Feeds set-up page, which starts with “Set up feeds to share content you create elsewhere,” and even includes some good examples of personalized feeds (e.g. Netflix queue, My Web bookmarks, Upcoming.org events, etc). So, it’s not the 360 team’s fault that their users can’t read. But, it is their responsibility to come up with ways to drive people to the proper user behavior, otherwise the rest of the users suffer and no one will use this product. So, if the current user-base, a good portion of which works for Yahoo!, can’t figure it out, imagine what happens as even less savvy users join.

Obviously there is an unplanned usage pattern of adding non-personalized feeds to the Feeds section (instead of to the Blogroll or a user’s own My Yahoo! page). Without spending too much time thinking about it, I have come up with two potential fixes: 1) add a “Personalized” radio button to the Add a Feed page next to each Feed, and only share the feeds that have that button selected, or 2) aggregate the feed adding process for the three relevant products into one, so that when I go looking for a feed to add to My Yahoo!, my Blogroll, or my 360 Feeds, I am presented with the option of adding it to any of the three, which reminds users of the different use cases and gives a good opportunity to educate the less savvy users who didn’t know about the distinctions before.

An even simpler fix hit me after I wrote this: just give users the ability to control what updates show up on their 360 homepages. Duh!

So, I hope someone at 360 is working on some kind of fix to this…and I hope they have better ideas than mine. In the meantime, if you are reading this, TAKE THOSE F@#*KING STUPID FEEDS OFF YOUR 360 PAGES!!!! That means you George, Markov, Yam, Hubert, Graber, and Toby! Those of you with AP feeds on your pages, I’m going to shove a newspaper in your faces next time you come talk to me and see if you like it. And those of you with more eclectic stuff, yes you are so cool and tech-savvy! I’m totally impressed – oh, except that you don’t know how to use your freaking blogroll!

Ok, I think it is clear that the 8 hours of sleep I got last night was not nearly enough to make up for the week and a half of no sleep that preceeded it.

I HATE YOUR FEEDS!!!

85 degrees

The below is the exact (and entire) text of an email sent to my Yahoo! Fantasy Football league:

Ok, so I’m officially annoying now, I realize, but emailing through Yahoo Sports apparently didn’t work so well.

Warning: this is a pretty lengthy email, so if you don’t care at all about the trading stuff, you might just want to skim.

First:
The control over trades has been changed such that I control it, yes. However, that is a result of a consultation with Yahoo! Sports. They said it wasn’t possible to view who voted to veto the trade, which I would like to do, in order to discuss why it had been vetoed. So, the only other option is to put it under my review and then have the airing of complaints be public. Rest assured that I didn’t do it in order to jam my trade through, I did it in order to make public the vetoes. I apologize that this note didn’t come before it happened, but they actually made the change as a result of me asking them how to do it, as opposed to “would you make the change?”

Second:
Mark’s counter offer that he thinks is clearly superior is debatable. I would argue that Cadillac Williams was performing much better prior to his injury than Barlow has to date. Furthermore, Barlow’s clearly losing carries to Gore. Obviously, the decision maker about this debate is Peter, the owner we’re approaching.

Also, the time for offers and counter offers is BEFORE an owner accepts a trade. If an owner accepts a trade offer that you might have bettered, had you been negotiating, the correct response is NOT to veto it so that you can offer a new trade. I know that Mark was just trying to prove a point, but I want to make it clear that this is NOT how trades work. If you weren’t in the mix trying to negotiate a deal, tough luck. You don’t get to veto it in order to propose another deal. Furthermore, even if you were in the mix and you lost, you have to accept the fact that the owner went with another deal. I know that some of you are new to fantasy, but this stuff is not rocket science. There’s a market for players, you have to convince someone that what you’re offering is the best and if you don’t, well, that’s too bad. That’s how trades work.

Third:
I view the complaints about this trade as pretty frustrating and not very objective. I think that the reason to veto a trade is plain and simple: if you think that the owners are colluding.

However, it appears that there are some differences of opinion on this. The arguments seem to follow one of two lines:
1) Such and such owner is an idiot, clearly. He doesn’t care about the league or he’s just stupid and must be protected from himself.
2) I’m competing with the owner in this trade who I think is benefiting greatly and as a result, it hurts me. So, I’d rather reject the trade so that he can’t become stronger.

Let’s start with the first argument:
-If we’re not going to let owners make judgments about how to manage their teams, why the hell are we even playing in the first place? Look, we all drafted (or autodrafted) for ourselves and nobody said anything about picking up Culpepper or Kevin Jones or Jamal Lewis in the first round. We’re not sitting around babysitting our opponents when they don’t set their lineups. If you want everyone to have the same opinion as to how to manage a team, this game gets boring very quickly. You might agree or disagree with Peter about this deal, that’s fine, but I think it’s pretty insulting to basically call him an idiot and say that he’s not allowed to accept or reject trades as he sees fit.
-Also, if one is going to object to a trade, it’s probably a good idea to take a look at the data and also ask the owner who you judge to be an idiot why they accepted the trade. Peter’s put his reasoning out there and while you can disagree with it, I think it’s hard for any one of us to argue that we objectively know what constitutes a good decision better than any other player. Despite his record, he has scored the 4th most points in the league, so I think he’s clearly capable of at making some decent decisions here.
-If I was to nitpick about decision-making, I would go back to an earlier trade in this league: Ahman Green for Warrick Dunn. The trade, which happened on October 15th, occurred AFTER Green had already missed a game due to injury and while he was heading into a bye week. At that point in the season (5 games in), Dunn was worth 58 fantasy points to Green’s 29. DOUBLE the points! The point is not to bring this trade back into review and point fingers, but rather to illustrate that we, as a league, let that trade occur, without objection. Maybe it was because no one else was paying attention (wow..) but I assumed instead that the rest of the league, like me, took a look and said, “Ok, that looks lopsided, but they both agreed to it so, congrats to Mark”.

On the second argument:
-Shit happens. Seriously, that’s the only necessary rebuttal. Players get injured, other teams pick up guys from the waiver wire, trades happen that make other players better. This is how the game works. It’s frustrating for all of us. But if anyone is rejecting the trade because they don’t want an owner to get stronger, that’s just being a baby. Sack up and go figure out who you can trade with to be more competitive. We have 9 days until the deadline and if you all think that we should, we can push back the trading deadline.

Finally:
Like I said, I’m frustrated that a few of us have gotten upset about this. I don’t like being accused of colluding, implicitly or otherwise. I’ve been involved in a lot of fantasy leagues and seen a lot of trades go down that I didn’t think were very balanced, but I’ve gotten used to it. I also love trying to swing deals that help me out and try to spot out worthwhile waiver pickups. However, I’m not about to CHEAT in order to win. I respect that some of you might think this trade isn’t balanced, but would hope that you wouldn’t assume that Peter or I lacked the integrity to play a freaking game!

In any case, since it appears that this trade has upset a few of you, I’m not going to re-propose it. I am going to propose a smaller deal that a few of you had mentioned as being more palatable. If you have objections, please speak up and put your comments on the message board. Hopefully, at the very least, this has illustrated that there is, in fact, a thought process behind this and maybe I’ve even convinced a few of you to get out there and try to negotiate your own deals. Hopefully we can tone down the rhetoric a bit.

Last week (or maybe it was the week before), I walked into the Yahoo! cafeteria (oh so cleverly called URL’s), and found the above stickers plastered on every seating surface. I found them to be pretty obnoxious, and more than a little concerning…I wasn’t as concerned about what the external perception would be as much as I was worried about the internal message – that the relative goal of beating Google was more laudible than the absolute goal of creating a great product.

I was so turned off by this that I never got around to reading the (now missing) plaque that was in front of the celebratory statue. Had I done so, I would have been a little more concerned about how others might view this kind of behavior. This morning, Russ  IM’d me a link to a blog post  that would have justified those fears. The author is a former Yahoo!, who I believe now works at Google, and he bashes Yahoo! pretty hard…but, you know what, he’s right!

I hope someone is paying attention.