yumio.net

During the 80s and 90s, the only common uses of the word “social” as an adjective in front of a noun was for “social studies” that you took in elementary school, and maybe “social security”.  Then in the middle of this decade we started to see it applied to Web 2.0 concepts (e.g. social bookmarking, social networking, social software, social graph) but now it is proliferating out of control - (e.g. social gaming, social commerce, social broadcasting, social media).  The only letter in the alphabet that does not generate a Google suggester in the G-Toolbar is the letter X (social X-box is not yet a common term). 

Since there is practically a site related to every aspect of Social Networking - why isn’t there one for profile pic management (or maybe Flickr should do a feature).  I don’t particularly go out of my way to join social media sites, but even so I have more than 10 profile pics that I have had to upload separately.  Now, you really expect me to go to each & every site and upload new pics, every time I have a makeover (or trying to play down my crazy Tequilla past?) No - there should be some kid at Stanford who starts a profile pic mgmt site or Flickr should allow me to do this.  Maybe I should write Kakul…

Every time I post on Craigslist for a part-time position for Web work (coding, design, etc.) I get a ton of replies from CURRENT eBay employees who all say they can work up to 20 hours a week on moonlighting freelance.  One person we hired for a facebook application was absolutely horrendous - but I still am amazed at how he often came to our office in the middle of the work-day (long lunch???) to do milestone meetings.  Is life at eBay that slow & boring that you have to look for outside work? Or do they not pay enough?  Inquiring minds want to know….

Reading about Mowser’s demise (I sat in on a few mobile search meetings with Russell Beattie at Yahoo! a couple years ago), it reminded me that everytime smart people try to invent ways to deal with hardware limitations with software (like Mowser tried to do by smartly converting regular web pages into mobile web pages), they are burned in the end by hardware making the Moore’s Law jumps in capacity/capability that make the software solution moot.  One example is all those data archiving software solutions in the 90’s which are totally useless now that you can store tetrabytes of data for $50/month.  Another may be the way scaling “search” used to be trying to come up with ever-sophisticated algos for that one Sun server - while Google was just scaling with thousands and thousands of ever-more cheap Linux boxes.

Given that Y! will probably soon be part of Microsoft, it may not be such a good tip any more, but I noticed that in the last 30 days, I have been getting an inordinate amount of people from my former company (Yahoo!) signing up for Twitter and telling me that they are “following me”. 

This happened 3 times before in the last 2 years - where I saw a big surge in people from my Yahoo! network asking me to join their “network” - and especially people you would not have expected to be interested in social networks - once for Flickr, then for del.icio.us and finally for Facebook.  First 2 were bought by Yahoo!, and a billion dollar offer was made for the last one.

Is this the last gasp of Yahoo!’s bid to stay independent? Twitter????? (next may be justin.tv.