IT Management: Yahoo Pipes: A User’s Guide

Yahoo Pipes is an interactive tool that enables you to combine many data feeds, like RSS, into a single aggregate. Pipes offers an intuitive visual programming field that lets you filter, remix, and mash-up these feeds to your heart’s content.

p2pnet.net: Yahoo Pipes data mashups.

It's a "milestone in the history of the internet," declares Tim O'Reilly. "It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output."

While it's still a bit rough around the edges, "it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone," he states. ...

Digital Trends: Mash up Your RSS Feeds with Yahoo Pipes.

The basic idea behind Pipes is to offer users a visual interface to mixing, matching, and mashing up various RSS and XML data sources available over the Internet to create new, highly-personalized data feeds. Pipes can accept user input—like names, dates, numbers, and locations—and use them to filter information from a variety of sources, construct custom searches and queries, and integrate information from multiple sources into one, concise RSS feed. Right now Pipes only outputs data in RSS format, but Yahoo hopes to expand output options to include badges, maps, and other forms of structured XML data ...

It takes effort to explain the significance of a new product when the immediate benefit to consumers may not be so obvious, and the awkwardly named “pipes” from Yahoo! is no exception. The product name is taken from the world of UNIX where a pipe is a conduit for the transfer of data between applications, while with the Yahoo product it is a conduit for data between web services. In a basic form Yahoo! Pipes allows you to take data from one or more sources and to bring it together, for example - to aggregate a group of feeds.

But Yahoo! Pipes goes beyond what just pipes are and what pipes do though as the application provides functions (or as they are called in the app - modules) that will perform a variety of different actions. There are modules available to prompt the user for input (a variety of input types), different operators to count, loop, cut, count, sort and merge data along with a variety of string and date functions. Because of this already broad base of available functions, Yahoo! Pipes is more akin to a shell scripting environment for the web rather than just a simple conduit between applications. It works like a visual procedural programming language with the output of the process dropping out at the bottom, in the form of text output, RSS, SMS alerts of even JSON. You can use feeds, user input or other pipes as input.

The beauty of the application is with its simplicity - a user can take any sources, user input requests or the above mentioned module and drag+drop them into place and then connect the pipes. Within minutes I had built an application (also known as a pipe, they should probably change the name as not everything can be a pipe) that would search for ‘Techcrunch’ in a variety of feeds, bring that data together, sort it and filter it for unique results. I saved the application and published it, from where I can now execute it at any time and receive the output in a variety of formats. I can take a copy of an existing pipe (application, argggh) and use it as a base template for my own pipe and I can browse an existing library of pipes.

Pipes can take any feed as input, and combined with the already available list of functions proves to be very powerful - my mind is still buzzing thinking about all that can be done with Pipes. I think some of the terminology needs to be cleared up, there needs to be a better introduction on the main page - but besides that this product is fantastic. It was inevitable that such a product would be released, and it is very good for Yahoo! that they managed to be the first of the big web companies to release such a product. The fact that they include Google Base as a default source in Pipes shows that the web is much more about interoperability than the desktop ever was or ever will be.

See Anil Dash, Tim O’Reilly and Jeremey Zawodny for more.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care, either," he says. He's looking at how best to manage the transition from print to Internet. ...The New York Times is on a journey, Sulzberger says, and its end will be the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will be the end of the transition.

A mother of three died from water intoxication after a radio station drinking competition, a California coroner said on Saturday. Jennifer Strange, 28, competed in Sacramento station KDND 107.9's "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest to try to win Nintendo's console for her children.…

Target's full prices end in 9. So the first price tag will be $14.99 or $27.99, something like that.

Then, every time Target discounts the product, the final digit of the price drops.

The lowest the last digit will drop is 4.

If you see something you want at Target and the price ends in 4, buy it. The price won't go any lower.

Update: Andrew sez,

Here's the scheme for Canadian electronics retailer Future Shop, but it should be identical for Best Buy in Canada & the US. They're all one big company now. Here it is:

Price ends in .99 - Regular or sale price, hardest to get a discount on. Not that that's saying much.

Price ends in .97 - Clearance price, you can push a bit harder for a discount because they want it out of the store. Stores have a certain percentage goal of clearance product per day.

Price ends in .96 - Open box. Product has been bought and returned or possibly refurbished. A discount has already been applied to it but you *might* be able to push for a bit more by accenting any negatives (missing manuals, case scratches)

Price ends in .95 - Pre-clearance price. This is not clearance yet, but will be soon. You can't push as much as on clearance product, but you can push a bit.

Update 2: Josh sez, "I worked for Target from December 2005 until June 2006 as a departmental manager, that's how I know this information. There is a pricing team within each store. The sole purpose of this team is to reprice and mark down sale merchandise. Target has a weekly sale that starts on Sunday and ends on Saturday. These sale prices vary and the stores only get the sales flyer 2 weeks in advance. Markdown pricing is done via a database of prices coming out of headquarters Minnesota. It is not really done on an individual store basis. This information is fed into the store for the markdowns to be taken. Each pricing team member has a PDA (PDA or LRT in Target speak) type device that directs them around the store to change the prices of items. Each department has a set markdown day. In my store, (T1499) electronics markdowns happened every Wednesday. Ideally if an item is being marked down soon, there will be a stockroom purge of those items in the days leading up to the clearancing of those items. The items are then priced and placed on the floor, usually on back clearance endcaps away from the main racetrack aisles of the store. Typically items are first marked down at 15% off. After two to three weeks, the items will go 30% off. Then 50%, finally 75%. It is generally two weeks between markdowns but that varies. For seasonal items (Christmas, Valentines, Halloween) the markdown is much faster and can vary from store to store. My store once piloted a faster markdown scheme for seasonal items. Immediately after the holiday, they went 50% off, two days later 75% and on the fourth day they were 90% off. The pricing teams have no way to look into the future to see what markdowns will be taken next week, they can only offer you and educated guess as to what will mark down and when. I've found that they are generally helpful if you ask them when items might be reduced further. The pricing team works a morning shift, usually 6 am - 2:30 pm, although this varies. They are easy to spot as they will be pushing buggies filled with items that have gone 'salvage'. These items have been removed from the floor to be returned to the manufacturer or to the Target warehouse where they will be sold off or donated to charity. In my experience, electronics are rarely reduced beyond 50%"

It’s clear that new venture fundings are still out pacing DeadPool admissions by a large multiple - it looks like $600 million or so was invested in Web 2.0 startups in 2006. And since most startups fail, I expect this commenter may be correct when he says “I predict 2007 will be the year of the deadpool.”

But this doesn’t mean we’re in a bubble. In fact, I think the exact opposite. I think a few failures are direct evidence that we are not in a bubble and that the private venture markets are actually in the process of letting off a little steam to keep things rational.

The Web 1.0 Implosion

Web 1.0 effectively ended on Friday, April 14, 2000, when the Nasdaq lost about 10% of its total value. Between March 10 and April 17, 2000, the Nasdaq lost over 37% of its all time high of 5,133 (and it fell far further later on). The Nasdaq was practically an index of Web 1.0 companies v. the “old economy” NYSE, and it got hammered.

One of the biggest issues driving the collapse was a failure by companies to drive earnings enough to keep up with stock prices. Many public companies had three-digit P/E ratios at the time of the crash. By contrast, the P/E ratios for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft today are 62, 35 and 24, respectively.

The Web 2.0 Reality

Today, the IPO door is nearly shut for Internet companies. GoDaddy withdrew it’s registration statement in August 2005 before going public. NetSuite is next up - we’ll see if they can make it happen in the next couple of fiscal quarters.

There are probably two reasons for the IPO drought. First, there are very difficult reporting requirements now in place that weren’t around in 2000. It takes a lot of administrative overhead to be a public company today. Second, and more important, the public markets have factored in what they learned the last time around and they just won’t let companies go public on the vague promise of future revenues and profitability. Once bitten, twice shy.

That leaves the acquisition market as the only viable source of a liquidity event for most startups. And while there have been a handful of high profile Web 2.0 acquisitions (YouTube, MySpace, etc.), entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have significantly lowered expectations compared to their state of mind in 1998-2000.

Bubble!

But even in this new reality, we’re seeing what looks like way too much money chasing too few good ideas. And when someone does have a good idea, all of the principles of Web 2.0 work to destroy competitive barriers companies try to put in place to protect their business (See Todd Dagres of Spark Capital make this argument recently in the Wall Street Journal).

So when we see a few companies fall, people run for the hills.

But I disagree that Web 2.0 companies cannot become sustainable businesses. The Network Effect is still the most powerful force driving Internet success today. People don’t, for example, go to Digg because it has great software. The original Digg, as launched, cost Kevin Rose less than $2,000 to create. Anyone can create a Digg clone, and many have. The reason Digg is, and will continue to be, successful is because of the community it has created. People go to Digg because everyone else goes to Digg, and every new user who submits stories and/or votes occasionally adds value to the whole network. The Network Effect is also driving Facebook’s success, and YouTube’s. None of these companies have interesting software. All of them have an incredibly valuable community. All of these companies have to work hard to keep their lead, but it is nearly impossible for new entrants to catch up.

And I also disagree that too much money is chasing too few good ideas. We’re seeing a lot of $3 - $8 million Series A round experiments, but not nearly as many follow on offerings. Remember that VC’s business models are designed to fail most of the time - the majority of their investments are expected to go belly up, and they hope that just one or two out of ten have a big return. VCs place a bet, and if it fails they move their money and attention elsewhere. And the entrepreneurs move along to their next thing as well. Assets are allocated efficiently, and everything works out fine in the aggregate.

Letting Off The Steam

2006 may have been a sign that things were getting a little overheated. One long term problem with VCs is that if they get locked out of a hot deal, they fund a competitor. The result is three or four funded startups for every good idea, and they have to fight it out until one hits critical mass and the Network Effect kicks in. This seems to be playing out with the market niche of online slide shows - Slide, FilmLoop, RockYou and Photobucket all have similar products and all are funded. FilmLoop is in trouble, and the other three will continue on fighting.

So there are too many review sites (Yelp, Insider Pages, Riffs, Judy’s Book). And too many Q&A sites (Yahoo Answers, Live.com Q&A, Yedda, Answerbag, Askville, etc.). And too many customizable home pages (Netvibes, Pageflakes, Google, Live.com). And so on. Most of these will fail. Some will win. Hopefully, the total return on investment to the winners will be greater than the sum of all investments in all of the startups. If that ends up being the case, we all win.

As these companies fail, the markets take note. This lets off steam and settles things down. Venture capitalists are less frothy. Fewer investments are made. Valuations go down. Things equalize.

In Web 1.0 companies didn’t fail (until the crash). They just raised more money, at a higher valuation, and gave it another shot. That isn’t happening today. VCs are letting their startups die, as they should. Things aren’t as exciting as they were in 1999, but it’s a whole lot saner.

So every time a startup dies, I don’t think it’s evidence of a bubble about to burst. I think it’s evidence of a market that is working exactly as it should. Most companies fail, but enough win to keep the whole ecosystem healthy.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Tags: techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0, bubble, venturecapital

The Digital Decade

He starts off by discussing "the digital decade", noting in particular digital photography and the Internet. He says 65% of homes have digital cameras, there's more broadband penetration now, and 40% of homes have multiple computers. As far as Microsoft devices go, he says there will be more high definition and use of advanced graphics in games and virtual reality - "presentation richness" he calls it. He also talks about the terabytes and petabytes of storage being made available now.

Although he says "we have amazing hardware" (referring to hardware in general, not necessarily Microsoft's), he thinks there are some key things missing - especially "connections". He gives the usual Microsoft refrain about multiple devices connecting people together, via the Internet. Interestingly he also notes that it's not just a consumer experience - but spans into the business environment too.

Foundational Products

He then talks about the "foundational products" that Microsoft has coming into the market. Firstly he notes Vista, "the highest quality release [of Windows] we've ever done". He says Vista and the PC "continue to have a central role, all these devices have to work together."

He also notes the importance of Office 07 - saying that Office and Windows Vista will work closely together. With Office 07, there is a new UI (with improved richness) and it will connect up to Office Live services.

Vista Media Center

Vista Media Center is an interesting product. The demo showed on stage focused on live HD TV and rich on demand media services. They showed off Sports Lounge, a partnership with Fox Sports. It gives users real-time sports scores, real-time alerts, and ability to track fantasy teams. There was also talk about new content partnerships in Media Center, which is another familiar Microsoft strategy (partner with as many major content/service providers as possible).

Windows Ecosystem

Bill then discusses the ecosystem of windows. Services are key for connecting up software and hardware to online. He says s/w developers are doing all kinds of apps for vista - sidebar, using search APIs, visualizations (WPF and more), etc. The general theme here is the "enablement of hardware and software partners".

Connected Entertainment

Robbie Bach bounds onto the stage to talk about connected entertainment. Content and community are the two key concepts here. He starts off with music - noting the MTV Urge partnership launched at last year's CES, and also the launch in 2006 of Zune. He says Zune is already the 2nd most popular music device in their segment.

Bach then goes onto mobile phones, which he positions as "connected entertainment on my phone". Windows Mobile "outsells Blackberry in the market", says Bach.

Next up is gaming. He says the PC and Windows is the number 1 gaming platform in the world - with 200 million users. Vista will make this more powerful, he says. He talks about "the very broad ecosystem" of casual gamers.

After a long segment on Xbox (which seems to be a key part of this new living room media environment for Microsoft) Bach talks about IPTV. Microsoft (surprise surprise) has a lot of partners with IPTV. In the demo, the first thing they trumpet is its speed. Also noted is "improved channel browsing". Plus IPTV will hook into Xbox Live, so it can be used on the Xbox 360. So essentially they're integrating TV with gaming.

Summary

Engadget has the full blow-by-blow of the keynote, including other features such as Sync for cars (a partnership with Ford) and a kitchen and bedroom of the future (pic below).

Overall my impression was that this year's CES keynote by Bill Gates and team was remarkably similar to last years. If you recall, the main themes at 2006 CES were: device connectivity, partnerships, Internet as delivery vehicle, video/TV, mobile Web. The main difference between 06 and 07 is that now Microsoft is much closer to delivering on the promises, with Vista. A lot of focus was still on the pie-in-the-sky future scenarios though, like the obligatory tradeshow kitchen of the future.

Another impression I got from Gates' keynote today is that Xbox is a very important part of the digital hub for Microsoft. Not particularly surprising perhaps, given how successful Xbox has been for Microsoft, but it was interesting how many times Xbox and gaming popped up in the keynote.

Also notable, as Dan Grossman commented just now on our previous post, was the relative lack of Windows Live products. Dan wrote: "Windows Live didn't get a whole lot of coverage; most of the talk was about integration of the Xbox with Xbox Live, using the Xbox to download TV and movies, using the Xbox to play games with people connected through Vista, and using the Xbox to play new HD DVDs." I agree - apart from a mention of Virtual Earth's 3D features and also Image search (generally regarded as Microsoft's most impressive Live product currently), the silence about Windows Live apps was deafening.

Extra images: Palmsolo

Letters We've heard quite a few anecdotes of bizarre interview practices from Google over the years, so when we asked if you had some of your own, you didn't disappoint.…

Furthermore, I might just not know how to use umbrellas or just have a habit of buying the cheapest and crappiest umbrellas available, but I go through the damned things like you wouldn't believe. It doesn't seem like the most reliable place to stick fancy electronics. I'll just keep my iPod, thanks very much. –Adam Frucci

Product Page [via MocoLoco]

Create a thread on any topic you like. This is a good place to pitch your new startup or product if it hasn’t been featured yet on TechCrunch (or even if it has), share tips with the community, spread rumors, or endlessly debate the definition (or existence) of Web 2.0. When interesting conversations spring up, we’ll link to them from the main TechCrunch blog.

We’re still getting the bugs worked out, so it will evolve from its current state over time.

The software behind the Forums is from Jive Software. Their stuff is bulletproof (or so we hear), and they power the Apple discussion board as well as 1,450 other forums on the web. Thanks to them and Media Temple, our primary hosting provider, for their help in getting this set up.

We’ll roll out dedicated versions of this for the other blogs in the network as soon as this is nailed down. Please let us know of any bugs you find.

A permanent link to the TechCrunch Forums is in the navigation bar at the top of the site (on the left), or you can get there directly at forums.techcrunch.com.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

A seven-year-old British boy has been killed in Thailand after being electrocuted during an attempt to plug the mains-charger for his Nintendo Game Boy into a hotel power socket.…

Today, however, there is a bit of news. They’ve launched a website widget that displays the how many times that site has been bookmarked in Del.icio.us, along with popular tags. We’ve added the widget script below in this post. We may add it permanently to the site as well, in our effort to continue to provide full visibility into TechCrunch statistics.

To add the widget to your site, see the instructions here. It’s a one line script. Our previous coverage of Del.icio.us is here.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Tags: yahoo, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0

A report into illicit marijuana cultivation in the US says it is now the country's biggest cash crop, having seen a tenfold increase in production over the last 25 years.…

What Time got right

Yes, the Web is "a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before." It is about normal people contributing to media on a mass scale, thanks to web sites like MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia. It is also about "an explosion of productivity and innovation" which is "just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy." 

All of this is what I refer to as the Social Web, or the read/write Web. Time magazine generally refers to it as Web 2.0 - which they archly note is what "Silicon Valley consultants call it". 

What Time got wrong

This isn't a "revolution". It's an evolution of the Web - and I've written a hundred times about how Tim Berners-Lee always wanted the Web to be read/write, or editable. Sure Sir Tim probably never envisaged the Web he created 15 years ago as being the center of our electronic social lives in 2006, at least on the scale it's become. But he always wanted the Web to be a two-way medium - which is exactly what Time magazine is celebrating today. So no, it's not a revolution - the Web has evolved to be what it is over 15 years, including a few years of growing pains in the early part of this century known as the 'dot com' years.

I also somewhat resent the (usual) mainstream media condescension about blogs and social networks. Consider this passage from Time's cover article:

"Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do."

Gee, thanks Time. I'll just go and blog about my state of mind now... I'll leave the real journalism to the professionals. And btw, what the heck are "steak-frites"?!

One final thing bothers me.... Time goes to great lengths to say that the Web is a democratizing force for 'the people'. Yet their view of the Web seems to be very centered on one place: Silicon Valley. I can understand this, to a degree. The Valley is where most of the action is, just like Hollywood is where it's at for movies. 

But still, it seemed like the international people that did get mentioned were just clichéd bit players in this Web 2.0 world: the French rapper, the Pakistani Flickr user, an "irreverent Chinese blogger", "a mother in Baghdad with a videophone"... you get the picture. Meanwhile Silicon Valley bloggers Dave Winer and Om Malik got to explain what the new Web actually means and in another part of the Time coverage Web 2.0 was described as "an excess of democracy" (which, let's face it, is a very US-centric way to view the Web). I'm not sure what my point is here, other than I think the international players on the Web deserved wider and less clichéd coverage. But then I would say that.

Overall though, I can't wait to pick up a paper copy of this edition of Time magazine - I'm thrilled that the Web is their Person of the Year!

I can only imagine the email strings being fired around Google HQ this evening. New site is below. Robert Scoble, who has lots of experience with PR headaches of this kind while working for Microsoft, gives some advice to Google.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Tags: yahoo, ie7, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0

Muttering Hats [via We Make Money Not Art]

a dual deck, mixing CD player, USB guitars, etc. Excellent, creative stuff.

The iProjector should be just as fun, but also affordable. It has...unspecified inputs, but we're guessing its limited to standard vid, maybe VGA, and if you're lucky, component. The 800 by 600 pixel setup does 1000 lumens of light, making it good enough for the 640 by 480 movies you'd buy in iTunes. In the end, its very novel, but let us remind you that projectors are high end sexy gadgetry, even in their cheapest form. So buying one just because it's an iPod accessory is probably not the smartest thing one could do.

iProjector: It's not a great idea, but at least its a new one.

iProjector [Consumer Electronics Daily News]

(click image for full screenshot)

While Google has advertised Firefox on its homepage before, it was a co-promotion of Firefox with the Google Toolbar. This current advertisement is for Firefox alone. But what does "Optimized for Google" mean??! The Firefox 2.0 browser already comes with Google as its default search, but this advertisement implies there are more default Google services integrated into Firefox. Is it just Google Toolbar, or does it include other things?

Update: OK I wasn't the first to blog this. So I removed the 'breaking news' bit :-) I guess Fox News doesn't have to worry just yet.... (ref Jeremy's comment #1).

Update 2: Some interesting reactions already in the comments. Emre Sokullu says this validates R/WW's previous GoogleOS coverage - i.e. Google is taking steps against the upcoming Vista rollout, by promoting Firefox. Also John Milan notes:

"I can't imagine how its any different than Netscape of old. They started with great internet mindshare, but never could overcome Microsoft's OS advantage."

Finally, as Emre also pointed out, it's noteworthy that Google never puts advertisements on its homepage. Leaving aside the close relationship between the two organizations, this definitely counts as an advertisement...

Mozilla is calling on developers to help it ensure that the next version of the open source web browser is solid. And it has released an alpha version of Firefox 3 for developers to play with.…

But we are hearing that those discussions may have stalled due to the recent release of November Comscore traffic numbers. The number of monthly unique visitors to Metacafe continues to decline from a high of 4.2 million in September, to just 3.1 million in November, a drop of approximately 25%. Total page views are relatively flat over this period, going from 97 million in September to 101 million in November.

Acquirors are also expressing concern over the relatively large percentage of “adult content” hosted by Metacafe - a profitable but difficult business to be in.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Tags: techcrunch, youtube, video, flash, web2.0, web_2.0, israel

I spoke to Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, at the end of last week in anticipation of the TV advertising launch. I'd previously spoken to Chris Beard (Mozilla's vice president of products) in October when Firefox 2.0 launched. At that time Chris had mentioned the tv ads were coming, so it was great to catch up with Asa last week to get the full skinny.

TV commercial sponsors and demographics

We started by talking about the sponsorship model, where Firefox fans can sponsor the commercials. As of now there will be 16-18 sponsors named per ad, but the plan is to scale this up and rotate the names of thousands (or tens of thousands) of sponsors. People can contribute as little as $10. For the initial period, it was first-come-first-served - the first 72 people who donated $10 have their names on the initial 4 ads. So to be clear, these are individuals sponsoring the ads - not commercial entities (although Asa said in future they may open it up to friendly organizations).

As for which tv companies Mozilla is targeting, they're going after prime time cable channels like Comedy Central, ESPN, TNT, History Channel, USA, and MTV. In terms of demographics, they're targeting people who they think are willing to download and try Firefox. People who they hope will be responsive to learning about Firefox and their brand. But Asa said they're not targeting particular age groups. In an earlier blog post, Asa described their target audience as "savvy web users".

Firefox and Social Networks

I asked Asa whether Firefox uses social networks to promote itself - I citied R/WW's post last week about Campari's use of social networks to market their brand. Firefox has indeed used social networks, but they've always had their community to do the promotion for them (i.e. they haven't had to force it, like Campari and most other commercial brands). Indeed Asa said that Firefox has used social networks right from the beginning - via grass roots, online community action. He says their community put some of the Firefox Flicks videos onto YouTube, where he said they got 2-3 million views - more than they actually got on their own Flicks site (Asa estimated a couple of million there).

Asa also mentioned an upcoming campaign using Facebook. They have a "sponsored group" there and they will launch a campus outreach program soon - which will involve having nominated students be Firefox's representatives "on the ground" for distribution. Additionally Facebook has built a "Firefox companion", which will be a set of tools and extensions for Facebook (for notifications, status alerts etc when students are not logged onto Facebook's website). They're looking at this as a prototype that they may use for the likes of MySpace and Orkut in future.

International Firefox community

I asked Asa what Firefox's community is like overseas and how they will promote Firefox in non-US markets - given that the TV ads will only air in the US. Asa mentioned the Japan community is very strong - and has been active since 1999. He said there is a group in Japan called the Mozilla-gumi - who are doing outreach and volunteer work for Mozilla. They describe themselves on their homepage as follows:

"Mozilla-gumi is a community of Japanese Mozilla developers, translators, QA and web standards evangelists. We maintain a Japanese localization of Mozilla, Japanese translations of mozilla.org documentation and also a Japanese Bugzilla server."

It's a bottom-up social approach and includes things like beach clean-ups and attending street costume parties. Asa also mentioned newer efforts in places like Korea and Taiwan. He noted that Europe too is very strong and cited localization efforts (language translations, etc) that are happening worldwide.

Conclusion

The TV commercials show that Mozilla is starting to reach out to mainstream, but still web savvy, audiences in order to ramp up its competition with Microsoft's IE browser. It's kind of an odd step going from a 40,000 square-foot Firefox crop circle in an Oregon oat field (which happened in August) to TV commercials on prime time networks! But it shows what can be done with a popular open source community and the power of the Web.

The TV ads will no doubt be released to social networks in due course - e.g. YouTube. Personally I'd love to see the TV ads go international - we get MTV in New Zealand too! In any case, Mozilla is doing sterling work promoting its open source browser to the world.

WikiMatrix has over 100 wikis to compare. The wiki designers maintain the information on their listing because, as WikiMatrix founder Andreas Gohr puts it, “nobody knows a product better than its creator.”

WikiMatrix was launched about a year ago and Gohr says that it is popular enough within the wiki developer community that wiki owners are proactive about getting their sites listed. But he says that users’ knowledge of wikis usually doesn’t go much further than Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia was written to power an encyclopedia,” Gohr said via IM on Friday. “Not everyone needs an encyclopedia. Others might have the need to have the wiki integrated into enterprise structures. There are various different use cases for wikis and various different engines and each does things a little bit different. If you decide to replace the Intranet of a 5,000+ employee company with a wiki you may need to compare different choices. That’s what WikiMatrix is for.”

Users can also create their ideal wiki on the site and then see which wiki comes the closest to matching their needs. Gohr’s 10-person company also launched ForumMatrix.org last year as a spin-off, which is basically the same site but for forum software, although Gohr admits it isn’t as popular as WikiMatrix yet.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Tags: wikimatrix, jotspot, socialtext, wikipedia, wikis, collaboration, techcrunch

  peanut butter. 
  Originally uploaded by megamommatron.

The blogoshere is abuzz with a leaked memo written in October by Yahoo senior VP Brad Garlinghouse dubbed the Peanut Butter Manifesto.  In it he warns that Yahoo is spread too thin and is all over the place.  Excerpt:

We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything -- to everyone. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don't talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn't to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.

Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like -- rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy.

I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

I hate peanut butter. We all should.

We lack clarity of ownership and accountability. The most painful manifestation of this is the massive redundancy that exists throughout the organization.

We lack decisiveness. Combine a lack of focus with unclear ownership, and the result is that decisions are either not made or are made when it is already too late.

We end up with competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company.

• YME vs. Musicmatch
 
• Flickr vs. Photos
 
• YMG video vs. Search video
 
• Deli.cio.us vs. myweb
 
• Messenger and plug-ins vs. Sidebar and widgets
 
• Social media vs. 360 and Groups
 
• Front page vs. YMG
 
• Global strategy from BU'vs. Global strategy from Int'l
 
We have lost our passion to win. Far too many employees are "phoning" it in, lacking the passion and commitment to be a part of the solution. We sit idly by while -- at all levels -- employees are enabled to "hang around". Where is the accountability?

He goes on to suggest how to remedy these issues, principally by picking its best bets and getting rid of everything else. "Heads must roll," he writes, as many as 15% to 20% of employees, and Yahoo needs to stop managing by committee. These are all good (and somewhat obvious) suggestions. The question is, will Yahoo follow them?

Yahoo has done a good job of identifying and acquiring hot startups on the cheap (Flickr, del,icio.us, Bix, MyBlogLog) but then fails to integrate them with the rest of Yahoo, creating all those redundant properties Garlinghouse lists. By leaving them alone, Yahoo has at least succeeded in not screwing them up, but it also has succeeded in creating a lot of silos.

Yahoo is in a tough spot. It needs to stay on top of the latest Web fashions, but at the same time not alienate mass audience of hundreds of millions of people who visit it each month. In an interview I did with Garlinghouse a few weeks ago, he told me:

It is certainly not a simple thing to do. The first thing is you have to fundamentally understand what users care about the most. Too often business people try to deliver the coolest, whiz-bang widget they can do that will appeal to 1% of users. You have to understand what the mainstream users care about the most. I think it helps that I am from Kansas.

The Yahoo home page is the number one homepage, with 300 million monthly unique visitors. How do we appeal and exceed the expectations of all of those users? Therein lies the crux of a delicate balance between delivering what the users expect , and anticipating what will Wow them. How do we make a user say, ‘Wow, I did not even know you could do that.’ Some companies over-invest in the table stakes, and then they become mundane. The secret sauce is effectively balancing excellence in the table stakes with Wow.

My guess is that Garlinghouse's next move is to start tying different parts of Yahoo together in a more cohesive fashion. And communications products like Yahoo Mail and Messenger will be the string. It's no coincidence that Google is similarly trying to pull its various products together instead of launching five million different ones a day. People like to be Wowed with simplicity.

AIM 6.0 is built on top of the experimental project AIM Triton. That means that a lot of “value added” features like links to AOL music will be present - perhaps people like that but judging from the screenshot after the fold I can’t imagine using it. Desktop IM should be open source or a loss leader with unobtrusive ads at most. If you are an AIM user who doesn’t like the upgrade and insists on still using AIM anyway see oldversion.com.

AIM is Windows only but does have a new API, which could lead to interesting developments. The absence of interoperability across platforms means that Adium or Trillian are the only real options for heavy IM users, but casual users will have their experience changed by tonight’s upgrade. If you don’t mind a Windows only IM that can’t communicate with other IM platforms, has plenty of advertisements and a number of honestly useful features like mobile integration - then the new AIM could be for you. Highlights of the new version include the following:

Conversation logging. If you are using AIM for conversations that are at all important, you want to save a log of those conversations. It’s essential. Opt-out is an option. Adium and Skype do this for me, who does it for you?

Offline messaging. Send messages to people even when they aren’t online, they will receive them when they sign on. Also essential, just note the time stamp of any message you get when you first sign on - it may not be urgent any more. Skype does this for me.

RSS integration with social networks. Inform your buddies whenever you update your page on YouTube, Digg, Flickr, Xanga, and other accounts. This is a very compelling features that will ramp up page views substantially. Call it a Multiply/Facebook/Vox style newsfeed or call it Zaptxt, it’s the state of the art. The only question is how to manage permissions and privacy.

AIM presence and more on AIM Pages. That’s good. MySpace presence indicator, MeeboMe widgets and more - social networking and IM go together like social networking and site mail. Very well.

Mobile Dashboard - one-click access to the Buddy List, manage mobile alerts, reminders and IM forwarding - have IMs sent to your cell phone once you log off the desktop AIM client. This sounds good and bad, it’s a monster in and of itself that deserves detailed review.

1,000,000 friends. That means no limits on friends, which is good. Limits on the number of people you add as friends is as silly as designating all your contacts “friends” is, but hey - one issue at a time.

Amp’d Mobile will offer the Mobile AIM free for the next 2 months. Amp’d and Helio are in a war to see who can add more 3rd party services. That’s great.

Together these updates represent a major relaunch for AIM. AIM is the world leader in IM, so this is going to change a lot of peoples’ experiences with the medium. It’s still hard to get too excited about any of it without cross platform interoperability, so I’ll continue using Adium and Skype IM. It’s good to know what millions of young people will now be introduced to though. Unless there is a major consumer backlash against the now long feature list, and I doubt there will be, then tonight’s relaunch looks like good news for AOL.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Tags: Techcrunch, Web2.0, IM, AOL, AIM, chat, IM

A UK artist has dismally, albeit heroically, failed to get off the ground in a 20ft aircraft powered by a giant rubber band, the Daily Telegraph reports.…

Users have a number of options to customize the search engine: choosing which pages they want to include in their index, how the content should be prioritized, whether others can contribute to the index, and what the search results page will look like.

This isn’t new - Rollyo, Eurekster and Yahoo already have similar products. But Google is also offering, as an option, to bundle the service with Google Adsense ads and share revenue with websites that embed the custom search engine into their site. Only Eurekster currently shares revenue with users. Yahoo’s product, which got a lot of press at launch, has barely been mentioned in the nearly three months since then.

For bloggers, using Google Co-op may be a better choice than the built in search feature. A search engine can be created that searches just a single site, and Google search is generally better than search features included with blog software, and with the addition of Adsense this will generate a separate income stream as well.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Tags: techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0