Shout it from the rooftops! Or maybe just mention it on your blog (which would be much less dramatic…yet now that I think about it, probably more effective). We Konfabulistas are inviting a few lucky authors who have created at least 1 Yahoo! Widget to come visit Widgets HQ for our first-ever Developer Day.
For more details and to sign-up, click here. Space is limited, so get yer hustle on.
[Originally posted on my 360 blog]
It’s 3AM, and this is the end of a very busy day, which is nearly the end of a very busy week that has not been unlike pretty much all of the weeks that have blurred together since the start of this year. At 12:01AM PDT, our team released Yahoo! Widgets 4, my first major product launch as a PM (this one was about 7 months in the making, as opposed to this one that took about 6 weeks). I also filed my first two patent applications today. 
My deepest thanks to everyone who helped make this happen. I’m too tired right now to go through everyone and their contributions, but it really was a team effort. It seems like the early reviewers like the new product (TechCrunch, Download Squad, Mashable, and Widgets Lab) and we’re getting a lot of good feedback from the fans in the forums. You can read more about what’s in the new release on the Yahoo! Widgets blog, and you can get the product (for Windows and Mac) here. I hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think.
zzzzzzz
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[Originally posted on my 360 blog]
As predicted, MySpace users are getting pissed off that the social network they originally chose for its openness is now denying them access to the best of breed services they desire.
There will never again be *one* destination that provides *everything* a user wants and needs. The only way to be ubiquitous is to be completely open and allow users to use your product (whether it be a homepage on which they can embed any service they choose, or a service they can embed in any homepage they choose) how they see fit. Openness is now a viable basis of competition, and you will be undercut by a more open competitor if you are too closed.
MySpace thinks that they built YouTube, and maybe they did. But, where would MySpace be without all those users embedding and watching YouTube videos on MySpace long before there was a MySpace video player? A smaller piece of the pie can be worth more, if the pie itself is made bigger by allowing distributed innovation to create value for your consumers in ways that you can’t or wouldn’t.
[Originally posted on my 360 Blog]
I found out on Friday night that my best friend from grade school had committed suicide. His funeral is in a couple of hours and I’m trying to write a eulogy right now. I’ve got a bit of experience dealing with death — too much for my tastes. When I was a junior in high-school, my paternal grandmother passed away followed by my father’s sister and his uncle all in the same year. And then the next year, one of my best friends had a skiing accident right in front of me that required 14 hours of brain surgery and put him in a coma for 3 days. Mercifully, he survived and is largely ok now. But, the confrontation with mortality was as jarring I have ever experienced. Subsequently, I’ve lost a fraternity brother to a car accident, a friend to a shooting, and more family, including three uncles with whom I was close and my maternal grandfather.
Everyone has their own ways of dealing with death. But, I think there are some consistent things we all feel when our own mortality pulls back the curtain and stares us in the face. Life is fragile and fleeting, and if we truly grasped that fact on a daily basis, we wouldn’t be able to function. And so most of the time, we live in a state of willing delusion — we refuse to confront ourselves with the reality of the human situation, that the life that is the center of our being can and will terminate. And that’s why death is always such a shock to us. It’s the finality of it all; the reality that sometimes there are no more tomorrows invading our necessary fantasy that the sun will still rise no matter what (or, more accurately, that we will be around to see it when it does).
I remember what I felt when my paternal grandmother died. I was 16 and it was the first time I really had to deal with death. There were two main sources of sadness, and I realized later that they were both rather selfish. It was the shock of the absolute finality that made me cry. I cried about the fact that *I* would never see my Grandma Lu again and that she wouldn’t be there to chide me and impart her pointed wisdom. I cried from the realization that there were no more fond memories to make and that the existing ones would inevitably dull and fade with time. And I cried from regret, and the fact that there was no longer any way for *me* to right those wrongs. I regretted every time I had been a brat to her (and there were a lot), and I most regretted not going to visit her (she lived in Chicago) the last time my parents went before she died. Of course they didn’t tell me quite how sick she was, but it was football season and if I missed a game I might lose my starting position. The fact that I chose high-school sports over my family was not as much a statement of selfishness as it was of obliviousness — it never entered into my mind that she wouldn’t be around when football season ended. The only unselfish reason I cried during that time was for my father. For knowing that he must be feeling those same things I was feeling only stronger.
I never actually cried for my grandmother. She was a dignified woman, who lived a long and full life, and she wouldn’t have been happy living on in a state that required constant care. When my Grandpa Wolfi passed away several years later after a long hospitalization, I was actually happy for him. I cried a little for myself, but mostly for my mom and grandma. Of course, it is quite different when someone passes away as young in life as the friend whose grave I will be standing over later today. The prospect of a life cut short and opportunities not lived is a tragedy. But it is a tragedy with no possible remediation. That is the finality of death that we struggle not to grasp. There is nothing we can do to change things now, and so there is nothing gained in crying for what will not be.
If you want to truly mourn, don’t do it for yourself. Don’t cry over memories that won’t be made, put that energy into cherishing the memories that you already have and making them last as long as possible. Don’t cry over regrets you won’t be able to make right, put that energy into righting the wrongs against others with whom you still have that chance, and do it in the memory of your friend who reminded you that you might not be able to fix things tomorrow. And don’t cry for the life not lead and the opportunities not realized, put that energy into honoring your friend’s loss by living your own life to the fullest. But do miss your friend. Miss him every day, because that is the highest honor you can show someone who is gone. But do it with happiness and laughter and with friends, because that’s what he would want.
…when you respect someone’s opinion so much that it impacts your evaluation of the thing he recommends. Call it the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of taste. I think that any professional critic who has achieved a following starts to think about things more in terms of what their audience expects from them than in terms of their own personal taste. It’s because trust is binary — you either believe in someone or you don’t.
That said, trust is not necessarily global. As I told Melanie today, I trust her taste in music and (most importantly) people, but I’ll judge for myself when it comes to sushi (I’m a pretty big food snob, and most of the people I do trust in that area are chefs — so, Mel shouldn’t take it personally 
). This is how we live our lives: there’s the musician friend you ask about the latest albums and the film geek you consult before going to the movies. And it seems to me that life gets a great deal less stressful when you find those domain experts you trust so much that their endorsement actually makes something seem *better* and you put your fate in their hands totally on the faith that they will continue to live up to that trust. When Ian tells me to buy a book, I just do it (and sometimes even read them). This is basically a type of personal delegation: “I’m hiring you to be the manager of this decision for me.” And just like in the workplace, you can get burned (“Dude, that movie totally sucked! What was he thinking?”). And then you take action after the fact (“fire” that person by not trusting them anymore).
In fact, this whole line of thinking was inspired by observing how Marco works. If he trusts you, he just wants you to go off and do stuff and come back when it’s done — no check-ins, just trust. I’ve watched this management style both spectacularly succeed and spectacularly fail (IMHO, no middle-ground isn’t such a bad thing). When it goes wrong, there’s generally a lot of yelling and late nights fixing things. But when it’s going well, it’s amazing to watch (or be a part of). The trust becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — people proactively look to live up to it.
While trusting the wrong person on a big decision can be a devastating mistake, handling all the big decisions yourself means you are inherently limited in the number you can make. And when you find the right people, the time and energy you can save by trusting them will likely greatly outweigh the potential cost of a screw-up multiplied by the probability of one happening. Finding the right people to trust is the hard part (knowing when you have is actually the hardest part), and I can’t tell you how to do it (my dad calls it “ass-twitch”, don’t ask). But once you’ve found them, you want to remove all friction and empower them as much and as easily as possible (I should probably just give Ian my credit card and have him order me the books himself).
I would love to see a product that allows me to do this across all my online services. Yahoo! Music has this great (if completely buried) Influencers feature, which allows you to choose other users whose ratings get factored into your recommendations. But, there’s no way for me to see those recommendations (a la Netflix). So, all of that knowledge is only actionable in the (relatively limited — but, that’s another post) context of Yahoo! Music. Other services, like Netflix and Yelp and Yahoo! Local, allow you to add friends so you can easily see their ratings, but these features are broken in a couple ways.
First of all, they require you to recreate an instance of your social map on their proprietary system that’s only useful within that context (in the case of Y! Local, it’s Y! 360 — but who actually uses *that*?). So, I’m supposed to create and maintain as many lists of friends as services I use online?!
Back in the old days of Web 1.0, I believed that only a large company like Yahoo! or Google could pull this off because of all the integration points (at the end of the day, all this is really is a management console on top of your address book and integration with the relevant services). But now, I think this has a better chance of being built as an open standalone web service. I’m waiting…
I don’t have a lot of people I call friends, but those I do it is always with pride. And this week, I am particularly proud of my friend Ian Rogers, who has officially been named GM of Yahoo! Music.
Professionally, this is one of those things that makes you actually believe there may be justice in the world after all. And it is definitely the most exciting thing to happen to Y! Music in a long time.
Personally, I really couldn’t be happier. The longer I have known Ian, the more ways I have come to admire him. And his achievement of this latest goal has just added to that. It is truly amazing to witness someone successfuly pursue such lofty professional ambitions with both single-minded focus and genuine altruism. In all of my observations of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, I have never seen anyone achieve so much so quickly and make so many *friends* along the way. Ian’s apolitical approach to climbing the corporate ladder should be an example to us all.
When I told my mom the news Wednesday night (yes Ian, I didn’t even tell my parents until it was announced), she responded “Zoe must be so proud.” We all are pal.
Look ma, I’m on the Yahoo! Search Blog.
If you have a 360 page registered on MyBlogLog , you should now see a “Get Widget” button t add their badge to your 360 page. The only problem is that I can’t figure out any place on 360 to enter HTML other than the blog.
So, here goes:
