Yahoo! and delicious.com

Yahoo! and delicious.com - What's wrong?

On December 5th, I wrote What's wrong with delicious.com and somewhat predicted it's suicidal phase. And, then I have noted relatively high incoming hits on my article. On December 16th, TechCrunch wrote Is Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us?. On December 17th, delicious/Yahoo! responded by clearing all blog posts and wrote What’s Next for Delicious? that confirmed suicidal in the form of sales.

What's wrong with Yahoo!

Yahoo! is in the wrong hands (Think of Apple without Steve Jobs)

Yahoo! is lacking vision. There are many ways to make profit and for the internet services like Yahoo!, the profit may be virtual things--instead of physical

Yahoo! is chasing Google and rivals. When you're the pioneer, people may not leave easily. Many people still use Yahoo! mail. Yahoo! may even raise money through donations like Wikipedia; no one would be bother to donate, if they really like it.

Yahoo! is hiring wrong people. I often used to tell "though skills are trainable, people are not replaceable". Yahoo!'s geocities closure without alleged backup is a stupid move.

Yahoo! is too panic. Knowing own strength is an important perspective in life and may overcome weaknesses through strengths.

Why delicious is a good idea?

It's a very good alternative for robotized search engines like Google (More SEO may spoil Google's power.)

It can be evolved much more than digg and twitter, on it's own.

It can also serve as a password manager and bugmenot killer. See, my post delicious.com as bugmenot.com killer?

What can we do? - Let's build better alternative

Though there are lot of other alternatives, it's better to build a system out of delicious before it's getting suicided [sic].

Raising money may not be an issue; may opt for VC or donations.

Has huge profit potentials (data mining like Facebook can easily be employed and commercialized)

Please make a noise here or there, if you believe it.

Open source PHP frameworks and problems

I was using CakePHP for sometime and proposed CakePlus , another UIMS toolkit on the top of CakePHP but also altering some problematic core of it. The thread should explain the outcome of the post. And, then I noted Akelos framework has most of the things built in. Issues with frameworks esp. CakePHP Scalability not a priority - Developers aren't aware that we can't throw more and more hardware Excessive use of regular expressions Evangelist isn't aware that the framework throws many queries unnecessarily More memory consumption - 100M would never be enough for a simple project Poor coding standards and practices - Prolong use of extract() often leads to more memory consumption Can't use the native approaches or baked codes. The override approach always lead to hard to debug codes Poor architected codes and no clear defined approaches. People belong to the cult drives the direction and often throws unprofiled codes. No native provision to share codes between M-V-C and...

Interview question #2

This is related to PHP's array . An array has number of elements. All elements are integers and unique, which means there is no repetitive integers. (e.g.) $foo = array(7, 5, 9, 13, 2, 8); You have to sort the array, provided: You should scan the elements only once. You're not allowed to compare the elements when sorting. (i.e., you're not supposed to use any comparison operators) Sorted resultant array may not be the source array. How will you do that?

What's wrong with delicious.com?

The recent UI changes of delicious.com is quite confusing and smells suicidal phase. I have noted that, after Joshua Schachter sold it to Yahoo!, it's going crazy changes. Probably, it's because a Yahoo! company now or Engineers don't get the real idea? Some crazy moves: del.icio.us to delicious.com change; probably to reach countries that censor .us TLD? delicious.com to www.delicious.com; unjustified Perl to PHP switch; why? for:handle geekish way to share to separate box; crazy but ok. Looks like, the new Yahoo! guys don't know how to make it a cult following like how twitter popularized @handle Recent broken UI

Anand Nataraj said…

You got the point Rajesh that Yahoo!! is missing Vision ... There has been huge cries agains the way Carol Bartz is handling things... She is ceasing everything to improve the profits... Not sure if she forgot the support she must have got from Geocities or Del.icio.us...

Personally I've grown levering the power of Yahoo tools and feeling heavy to see Yahoo!! sliding down...

You have done a nice analysis... Keep up the good work...

Dec 23, 2010, 12:09:00 AM

R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah said…

Thanks Mr.Anand for your kind words and sharing our opinions.

Dec 23, 2010, 11:59:00 PM