yumio.net Blog

I came to South by Southwest 2007/Interactive, not knowing what to expect.  The only information I had was that there were good parties at night.  So I was pleasantly surprised when I can honestly say that I learned a thing or two about web design, as well as the story behind Lonelygirl15 from its creators, Miles Beckett, Greg Goodfried, and Mesh Flinders (med-school drop out, lawyer, and film director wannabe) and how Genghis Khan obliterated the Russian knights in the 13th century (“The Ten Ways to Run a Startup like Genghis Khan“) from an Asian American dude named “Kevin Hale“.  

All in all, the people were normal folks (as normal as Web designers from the Bay Area can be considered normal), not snooty NYC design types, and mostly very friendly. I heard the attendance numbers were 5000+ (up 60% from last year) so that may have something to do with the normalization of the attendees.  Maybe not as edgy as it once was, and certainly not as entertaining as its Film and Music cousins, but it was certainly a worthwhile professional conference.

Good times…
 

We’re in 2 day usability testing for http://www.mythings.com.  We’re finding out a lot about what works and doesn’t work with our site.  We’re using a 3rd party tester called www.testkitchens.com  What’s really been great about working with Test Kitchens is the quality of their test subject recruits.  They personally phone interview recruits for “how articulate they are about their opinions/ideas” before putting them in the pool, and they’ve done a great job of finding recruits from our target demo/psychographic profiles.  I’ve been in many usability testing with Yahoo!, but so far, the quality of results we’re getting from Test Kitchens is way better than what we’ve ever gotten at Yahoo!. 

Last time I changed jobs (from Plumtree to Yahoo!), I swore I would take at least a week off between jobs.  So what do I do this time? I quit my old job at Yahoo! Answers on Friday, and I started my new job on Saturday. On Saturday, I jumped on a plane to Tel Aviv, Israel, where the development team resides. And here I am now, first time in the Middle East.   The new gig, MyThings, is hopefully going to be a blend of e-commerce and social networking.  At least it uses all the Web 2.0 buzzwords.  Now I have to help make it become reality.  With the development team in Israel, the sales team in London, and the Marketing & Product Mgmt team in Palo Alto, it will be a real challenge to manage the geographic divide, but the opportunity in this space make it all worthwhile.  Or at least lets hope so…..

Yumio

Yesterday was my last day at Yahoo!, and at Yahoo! Answers.  It was the usual last day at work with the cube cleaning, deleting personal files from the harddrive, a farewell lunch, bequeathing accumulated swag and memorabila to colleagues and a happy hour with silly balloon hats.  This morning when I woke up and saw the little cardboard box that contained 2 years worth of crap that had accumulated on my desk, I was struck by how small that box was, and how the contents of that little box did not even begin to tell the stories of the last 2 years of my life – the smiles of co-workers, the bitter political in-fighting, the disappointments and drunken hilarity. And then I thought of a short story that I read in college about the man who remembered everything in real time, and so could not live his life (he kept on remembering his past….).  Then I thought, hmmm, what about a video memory of your life in YouTube?

which I haven’t been following at all.  Caterina of Flickr fame told me, before she became Newsweek-cover famous, these  golden rules:

1) Write short entries (all my entries are 500 words or more)

2) Blog often (I have 3-6 month gaps)

3) Suckup to popular bloggers and beg for their links

 Anyway – maybe I’ll try that now.  So here goes – Caterina is doing something really interesting on her blog http://www.caterina.net/archive/001008.html Its the six-word story mentioned by Hemingway – “For sale: baby shoes, never used.”  Lots of people are contributing…. (can you find mine?)