My Memories of Yahoo!

Y!I used to work at Yahoo! for a very long two and a half years, from mid-2001 to the end of 2003. It was a strange period, with monumental shifts in the Internet. Yahoo! was a the center of it all, but the other players were rapidly rearranging themselves. Microsoft, for the longest time the bane of Yahoo! (more accurately, Microsoft’s MSN division, later Live, later Bing) was rapidly driving itself into irrelevance. Continue reading

Why this site changed name, and why you should be cautious about GoDaddy.com

You may have noticed the change: this site used to be hosted on the domain gawd.at. Now it is on mrgazz.com. Why? Let’s start from the beginning: what was that with the gawd.at domain in the first place? Well, if you go and look at your old feature phone, you’ll see that the letters that form the name are all first letters on the keypad. G is 4, A is 2, W is 9, D is 3, T is 8. Continue reading

Google+ (or, Why Do I Want to Leave Facebook?)

Well, no sooner had I posted my update on Facebook, that I had lost all my pictures uploaded with KIPI (the KDE plugin for Facebook) that I learned that Google is trying to crush its “evil” competitor again. Google+ is the company’s latest attempt at social networking, and it’s made a big splash in the blogosphere – probably mostly because it’s a private beta, invitation only, and the blogosphere can gush all about the exclusivity of it. Continue reading

The Comment Spammer

Strangely, around 6/11, traffic to this site started to skyrocket. Even more strangely, the traffic skyrocketed only in a few metrics, namely pages and bandwidth. The visits and visitors didn’t move much. How odd. I didn’t pay much attention: after all, I had been updating the site around that same time, although I though I had started after that date. But who is to remember. After a few weeks, though, I started to get spooked and looked at my AWStats report more closely. Continue reading

Intrade: Obama vs. McCain

Amazing what the web will do! I have been a fan of Intrade for years, using it first to gain a better idea of how the 2004 Presidential election would shape up, and then following the 2006 and now the latest 2008 election. Well, the platform is ever improving, and now Intrade officially tells you to embed the image of their current trades in your site. Here is the probably most important chart of the year, the Obama vs. Continue reading

Locked out of Facebook (2): The Reply

The reply without comment: Hi Marco, Facebook has limits in place to prevent behavior that others may find annoying or abusive. These limits restrict the rate at which you can use certain features on the site. You have received a warning because Facebook determined that you were going too fast when sending messages. If you have also been blocked from sending messages, please note that these blocks can last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Continue reading

Locked out of Facebook

No sooner do I discover the new personals ad on Facebook that I start getting flagged for sending too many messages. It starts with a warning that you are about to exceed your quota for sending messages, that you have to slow down. This message shows up every time you send a message. Then I am shut out: I can use Facebook, can receive and read messages, but cannot send them. Continue reading

Social Networking (2) - Replacing the Social Graph with Social Gravity

So, after we looked at how {moscontentlink:my primer|I saw Social Networking (SNW) develop}, here is my look at how I see things develop. As I mentioned in the article above, working for Bluepulse made me think about SNW a lot, and I decided the starting point for any conversation on the future of SNW had to be the current standpoint of Facebook. Now, you see, Mark Zuckerberg has been talking a lot about the social graph. Continue reading

Social Networking (1) - my primer

You know, having worked for a social networking startup (Bluepulse) made me spend a ton of time thinking about the purpose of social networking (SNW) itself. I had spent a lot of time on a bunch of different SNW sites, pretty much enjoying just the fun of looking at them, at how they tried to solve a problem, trying to get to the bigger picture. Of course, it all started with Friendster, the grandmother of SNW. Continue reading

Microsoft bids $44M for Yahoo!

Ok, the market and I saw this coming: Microsoft just announced last night they were going to start an unsolicited bid for Yahoo! at a share price of $31. There had been rumors (confirmed with the bid) that Microsoft and Yahoo! were talking about a merger, but (as Microsoft confirmed) they went nowhere fast. As an ex-Yahoo!, and one that cares about the company a lot, I am sad to see one of the flagships of the Internet (potentially) disappear, but it was a catastrophe long in the making. Continue reading