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On Yahoo!'s Acquisitions
Barry Norton writes "The Guardian has quite an insightful article about recent Yahoo acquisitions Delicious and Flickr. They quote Joshua Schachter, Delicious' creator: 'We're excited to be working with the Yahoo search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. We're also excited to be joining our fraternal twin, Flickr!' And why Yahoo's interest? The article opines: 'It takes a lot of the hard work out of searching the web. The very clever thing about social software is that it puts the burden on to the user, not the provider.'"
You aren't remotely funny
The very clever thing about social software is that it puts the burden on to the user, not the provider.
That sounds much worse than it is.
It takes a lot of the hard work out of searching the web. The very clever thing about social software is that it puts the burden on to the user, not the provider.
If this is how Yahoo sees it, they're missing the point. Yahoo (and other web-portals) can use Social Networks to learn more about their users. For instance, a certain social circle may all be members of a bowling league, so maybe show bowling ball advertisers to people that have a direct connection with the bowling league circle. The connection I see is more in delivering more appropriate content to users, not saving money on search.
No Sigs!
So how long until Yahoo changes their name from Del.icio.us to "Yahoo Social Bookmarking Service", just like they changed Konfabulator to "Yahoo Widget Engine", Oddpost to "Yahoo Mail" and Launch.com to "Yahoo Music"...?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
What you see there is the Public Relations Friendly(tm) version of the advertising plan you speak of...
When making a statement about such an acquisition, you don't say "The very clever thing about social software is that we can sell advertising at higher rates because we can tailor the ads to the market and promise more responsive viewing."
It's not that they are missing the point, it's that it doesn't sound very good to come out and say something that sounds so self-centered.
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
I'd wager it won't take very long, unless they intergrate the social network into their already existing Yahoo! Groups ...
They bought the companies... I think it's a lot more straightforward/honest to change the name.
Yahoo! is not a holding company or anything, they are in a brand war with Google, they need to get their name out there, it's just good business.
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I don't want to make any inferences, so I will just ask... do you think that it is at all questionable that Yahoo buys these companies and changes the name?
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Delicious is spelled "del.icio.us" and Flickr is spelled "Flïck..krr" I hope you're more careful in future.
With all of the services Google has been offering, YAHOO has to catch up if they hope to stay on top. Google started simple and grew. YAHOO exploded, and has never really grown. Personally, I like what YAHOO has to offer, but I spend much more time on Google.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Don't forget Konfabulator! They bought that as well.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Sure, social networks can mine users data and habits, that's a big deal. But I'm sure Yahoo gets that. But don't underestimate having an army of users doing your work for you. I've worked for companies that would have killed to have users doing their work for them in this way. In fact, it's almost a sure thing to say that future 'content providers' will employ more of this along with AI and not have many companies employees - if any - touching any of the input data. As a programmer, sounds good to me..
This is just the next step in Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft fighting to provide more features than any other website. Google buys Blogger, so Yahoo needs delicious. Google makes maps, so MSN needs to make them also. Everyone's copying each other, and Google usually starts it. -- United Bimmer BMW Enthusiast Community
I KNOW!!!
"If man evolved from apes, why are there still apes and not more people?"
following that line of logic your question should ultimately be: "if everything evolved from primitive life then how is it that there has been more than one species of animal in existence at any one time?". the answer is probably easily understood if you bring to mind the fact that children descend from, in our case, 2 animals and not the entire species.
yeah yeah, mark me down as off-topic.
"Everyone's copying each other, and Google usually starts it. "
Google buys Slashdot.
One can also make the argument that the web was created by humans and social tagging (via HTML links)... this is more or less the same but not defined by a protocol standard yet.
Is! exciting! news!
Yet apes exist, and in great variety... but there is no variety in the developmental stages of humans.
... then as we moved out of Africa, we had no splinter groups, all over the world... no lost chains? We all evolved at almost the same rate (again with minutely small variations)... and now we are equally developed... while the apes remain incredibly diverse (and largely unchanged) ...
The apes we are descended from have not changed much in thousands of years, meanwhile we've developed from apes and there are none of our anscestor species in the world today.
This causes me great confusion.
So basically, you mean to say, we are evolved from apes, and there are some apes that didn't evolve, so they are still around. Many species of apes, really.
Then we have men, who have evolved from a common anscestor, and we just didn't look back, we kept going. We had a number of physiological changes and migrations throughout Africa, but we never diverged into seperate population groups, and every single population group (dispersed throughout Africa) simultaneously evolved (with variations of a thousand years here or there)...
Perhaps you can see why I am confused...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Why is it that when Google makes a purchase, it is lauded as a brilliant idea... ... and when Yahoo makes a purchase, it is bashed and made to be a horrible thing?
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Can someone explain this to me, and in a way that doesn't involve singular instances... a broad spectrum view of why so many people are so keen on Google and so unkeen on Yahoo...
I'd really like to know!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Interesting graph comparison of the major search engines.
? entry=google_versus_yahoo
It shows Yahoo pulling ahead of Google in 2005, and the
search engine battle itself is peaking in hype and media interest.
Yahoo's emergence into first place could be a function of their social software acquisitions.
http://www.realmeme.com:8080/roller/page/realmeme
xml rss rdf atom ajax blogs wiki
Nothing happened when I moused over it. Have you implemented Opera support yet?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
And the real question becomes, why aren't there any hairy humapes? You know? It's like in that Britney Spears song, "Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman", but only with apes and humans and stuff. And, hey, where did woman come from? And couldn't we reverse engineer an ape-baby? You raise a good point about the rate of evolution, and how we all evolved at the same rate, but I gotta say, that ain't true. HOLLYWOOOD SQUARES, need I say more? Or, maybe we have evolved splinter groups and they wander among us. It's like that society in the Foundation. You know?
FORWARD THE FOUNDATION.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
Now if someone could just get across to Yahoo that the acquisition and crushing of All Seeing Eye over not getting their way in a lawsuit with XFire is pissing off alot of gamers, perhaps people would gain a bit of insight as to why Yahoo is generally loathed only slightly less than AOL.
"To err is human, to mod Funny divine."
yeah, basically.
but we never diverged into seperate population groups, and every single population group (dispersed throughout Africa) simultaneously evolved (with variations of a thousand years here or there)... ... then as we moved out of Africa, we had no splinter groups, all over the world... no lost chains
well actually there are plenty of bones to suggest that our species' family tree was not linear at all, and quite messy really with possibly many branches existing at the same time. digs and new finds have suggested that contrary to the perception our growth was one variation after the other, than many variations existed at the same time, and perhaps coexisted. now, on the fact that there is only one variation of human today that makes finding out how the variations either merged, or died off, a fascinating journey.
the question of why variations of apes haven't evolved since the breakoff group that initially formed the family tree of humans, is a very good one. but is only baffling under the assumption that evolution is a constant and steady process with no speeding ups nor slowings down, which of course is clearly not the case given the sequences suggested in the fossil record. whatever evolution is, it appears to happen sporadically, but it does appear to happen (and be happening). i feel like i'm in a shampoo ad.
llah, have you been reading the blogs and news lately? some are perceiving Google as the new Evil Empire supplanting MS. Of course, a lot of people are giving them a break to prove themselves since they've just embarked on this new path to world domination. The Web 2.0 crowd (excuse that term, I hate it myself) is going kind of gaga over Yahoo lately. They're doing some cool things. I think some people do have problems with Yahoo's changing half the stuff they buy. But they haven't messed with Flickr too much, and this is one of the things that is giving people a lot of confidence in Yahoo lately. Google is trying to do too much too fast and acting plain weird. That whole thing with Eric Schmidt not talking to CNET because they published info about him they found on GOOGLE! What fools. I love Google, but some of their new stuff ain't that cool. Gmail is hot, their maps are hot. But MS and Yahoo are showing stuff that is actually more compelling (I didn't say delivering, especially in the case of MS). I think they have a long way to go in proving MS Live. Meanwhile, the blogosphere is debating whether Google is the next Evil Empire, and for the most part applauding Google.
Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft will eventually buy ALL the internet services that exist and then battle it out.
They keep adding more and more stuff into the Yahoo page
but it justs looks too busy.
Google - damn - the logo, the search box, some small print.
Sweet Perfection!
Google could do something to clean up those page designs.
And drop any useless graphics and go easy on the advertisements.
Especially moving GIF, Flash, talking video ads with sound, etc.
Ads that complex are just annoying, not encouraging business.
Their acquisition seems reasonable to me. In this way they can target people with specific needs
http://www.websitesdev.com/
Why else would you even ask that stupid fucking question? Did your mother spend too much time shoving her tongue up your toddler anus when you were very young? Your small, taut anus, that smelled of roses and peppermint? And you moaned with delight as you experienced your first taste of sexual pleasure as you lay on your stomach, with the smell of baby powder in the air, and daddy walking into the changing room -- to his delight he gets to taste your backside too... and only then did you first discover the real pleasure of the human penis...
"In fact, it's almost a sure thing to say that future 'content providers' will employ more of this along with AI and not have many companies employees - if any - touching any of the input data. As a programmer, sounds good to me.."
That's geeks for you. Less touching, more machines.
Algorithms and 'communities' used to deliver content based on previous and current interests are completely
perverse if you think about it. What defines human intelligence? It is the capacity to grow, to change. All of us move from one thing to another in our lives. We are not cast in stone. Generally the more intelligent you are the faster you will move through lifes chocolate box. Politically you'll be a fascist at 14 where the simple rules of power seem appealing, but by your 20s you'll have discovered other people, community and responsibility and start to take on socialist ideologies. In your late 30s you'll learn to temper ideologies with realism and become more of a conservative liberal. Perhaps by retirement your fear of progress and change will take you full cycle back to the stagnant naivety of right wing thinking again. Throughout this life you will have interests in cars, then not. Maybe your passion for football will wane and a love of fishing will take over, only to be replaced by a love of flying or motorsports. Your teenage apathy for diet might blossom into a curiosity for food and fine wines. Even seemingly immutable characteristics have the capacity to change. Atheists become believers and vice versa, you might even change your sexuality. The thinking behind much of the current attempts to direct content at people based on their profile is damaging. You simply become more of yourself. So these are actually inhibiting and stifling technologies. To circumvent them I find it useful to develop multiple online personalities, or to occasionally correct my profile by taking an interest in far right politics for a week, or suddenly becoming a fan of art movies, or looking at property in the south. This has huge payoffs, not least of which I get to know the views of my enemies and occasionally I genuinely take on new ideas and interests that were far outside of my scope. Only this way do I stop profiling from effectively connecting my arse to my mouth and exploding me in a feedback loop of drowning in my own shit. As Einstein said "Life is a bicycle, to stay on it you must keep moving" Profiling and hanging out in cliques stops you from doing so. I dare to say, even this very Slashdot website is one such example.
Okay, so Google's not really innovative. They don't invent things, they make them better.
Sort of like the Japanese with manufactured goods. And what happened to the Japanese who, like Google, were supposed to take over the world?
Their economy imploded, and couldn't recover. Why? Because they weren't able to innovate when the train of 'things to improve' ran out.
If that holds true for Google too (and honestly I hope it doesn't) , woe unto he who owns their stock.
The Del.icio.us acquisition by Yahoo is about to turn into one of the most innovative and powerful marketing tools since Adsense. Visitors who swarm a site will be presented with end up with highly targeted ads being served at them and advertisers will have better market segmentation as tags are grouped by user.
There has been a lot of variety, though many of the other branches of our extended family have become extinct. The reason that you think that "only apes are left" is just that this word "apes" has traditionally been applied precisely to the ones that are left, and not to us. So it says a lot about how we name things, but nothing about the actual states of affairs (i.e. who evolved from whom, and when). It's purely semantic - it's like wondering "when I finish eating, why is that the only things left are leftovers?" :-)
It is confusing, because evolutionary biologists have changed their minds a lot, as evidence has accumulated over the years.
Why not check up the great article on Wikipedia about apes, and get it straight in your mind?
Actually, we evolved from earlier apes (but we are still a kind of ape!), and in the meantime other kinds of ape also evolved from those same ancestors. There's a whole family tree there (a "super-family") - at one point our species diverged into proto-gorillas and proto-human-chimps, and later the human-chimps diverged into humans and chimps (so humans and chimps are like brothers, and gorillas are our cousins).
Yes ... you sure are :-)
You need to abandon the misconception that apes and humans are something distinct. This is empirically false, and it's leading you astray. Many people find it something shameful to think of themselves as an ape (don't know if that's you) but really it's nothing to be ashamed of at all. Have a banana!
PS In regard to "lost chains" etc, haven't you heard of "Neanderthals"? - they were a kind of human which died out quite recently.
If we are not distinct, where are the 'spaces between' ape and man, now?
... we still have no variation in human physiology.
...
... but hey, who doesn't like a little bit of that, ey? ;)
If ape exists as it has since we evolved... and we have evolved... despite ONE group splintering and dying off (the neanderthals)
If we evolved from earlier apes, why haven't other apes similarly developed?
If humans are apes, shouldn't there be some intermediaries? SOMEWHERE? Heck, even in the rain forests or something...
I can't pretend to know much about physical anthropology, I had a one week overview in cultural anthropology and that's it. I was left with the same questions I have now... the same confusion.
Sadly, this is not the sort of confusion that can be cleared up by saying 'We are apes. This explains the lack of human variation, because there is plenty of variation in apes, and we are apes, so therefore, there is plenty of human variation.' (perhaps I am getting the wrong idea from your post)
We have some physical evidence, but there things just don't seem to add up, to me.
The theory is that we became more intelligent when we started eating meat. I'd be curious to see some studious on the subject (where gorillas or other apes were fed meat, to see what impact it may have had on their offspring)...
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However, honestly, it is an issue of little real importance to me. Where I came from doesn't matter much, I am here now. Debating any sort of evolution seems rather like intellectual masturbation...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
I worry that del.icio.us-- which is the best, though not the most featureful, service of its kind-- is going to get ruined by Yahoo. Of course they say they are not going to mess with it and that it won't get merged into MyWeb and Joshua can do his own thing... and I'm sure that no small part of the acceptance of the offer is based on Flickr surviving the transition pretty well (even given the balking at the Yahoo account thing)... but we've all heard this story before. Yahoo ruined Launch. AOL gutted Winamp. No one ever plans for it to happen.
On the positive side, with the resources they have, imagine what they could do! Google deserves the credit it gets not for inventing new things (though how quickly we forget how innovative Google has been-- no one likes the king of the hill) but for taking existing ideas and making them a LOT better. Sometimes.
You ask "If we evolved from earlier apes, why haven't other apes similarly developed?". The anser is that your question contains an error - the other apes have also evolved! At one time, there were apes which were the ancestors of modern gorillas, modern humans, modern gibbons, and other modern apes. Then these families diverged. One family evolved into gibbons, and another evolved differently, into another species of ape (a species which is no longer extant). Eventually this species diverged again, and again, producing at various times, orang-utans, gorillas, humans, bonobos, and chimpanzees. Over time, all of these families became more distinct from their common ancestors, and from each other. Modern gorillas are emphatically NOT identical to those early ancestors.
:-)
As for your other question, about why aren't there more intermediate species extant today - the answer is that they became extinct. Why did e.g. Neanderthals become extinct? Some people think that Homo Sapiens Sapiens were better adapted to the warming climate, being lighter. Who knows? It's an interesting historical research area for paleoanthropologists, but I don't see why it should cast any doubt on the idea that humans evolved from apes! I mean - who else could we have evolved from?! Cats?
When's the slashdot crowd going to distinguish business from techie bullshit?
Everyone on here arguing about the "xyz 123 version 2.41 semiconductor fuzzy logic ultra-edition release of obscure technobabble revision 4, therefore is logically better/improved/etc. over ".
Remember the old saying: "what goes up, was put there by someone".
And just like with Flickr, when the Yahoo business weasels force everyone to get a Yahoo login, it's going to piss of a heck of a lot of people. How's that for suporting the "community" that they just paid a big chunk of good money for?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I mean - who else could we have evolved from?! Cats?
Given that my cats seem to have a higher IQ than a fair percentage of the people I've met in my life (ok,
Just turn on TV.. people eating maggots on TV just hoping to earn some money, getting their tongue "forked" and head implanted with plasic ridges, whiskers, tatoo'd like a snake/cat/whatever... great for a career in the freak show, but...
It seems sometimes as if as we "evolve" (and I use the term loosely), the intelligence level drops. Maybe someday cats *will* take over (although its more likely cockroaches as the nukes proliferate).
Presently it seems that both Yahoo! and Google are both presently concentrating on lapping up growing and popular websites.. When will the serpents eat their tails? The question is: Who (Yahoo!/Google) is going to acquire the other(Google/Yahoo!)? I wish they used this time and effort to improve their search technologies - which seems to be stagnating - they're putting their feet into too many boats - forgetting where they came from, their roots, what made them what they are really.... ...because I still haven't found what I am looking for!
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I liked the way you put it...Yahoogle
And finally it's gonna end up with: Google buys Yahoo! Microsoft buys Google. World Domination and Apocalypse!
(Note: In the above sentence G,M and Y are interchangeable)
And it's very easy to send a copy to the Chinese Communist Party so that the user can be properly "re-educated."
sulli
RTFJ.
Not to mention that there seem to be too many assholes working for Google. I had some contact with one of the Google Maps team, and they proved to be the most unprofessional bunch of people I have met in my life. They act like rock stars thinking they are gods and caring shit about normal, inferior people
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.
Umm, there are.
Chimpanzees and bonobos are a lot more closely related to us than gorillas are. Hell, they're more closely related to us than they are to gorillas, too. If both gorillas and chimps are "apes", then there's no biological reason to say that humans aren't apes.
If you look different in certain ways from your father, wouldn't you expect that you must have an inetrmediate family member who's more closely related to both you and your father who looks halfway between the two of you? If not, why not?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Since we're talking about acquisitions, does anyone else get the impression that eventful.com is trying to get bought by Google?
service... StumbleUpon. Yahoo simply acquired the one that's currently more popular. Not for long.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
If anyone else is a little uncomfortable about the web app (if not to say 'Web 2.0') consolidation going on at the moment, especially wrt Yahoo, they may be interested to know about an alternative to Flickr.
It's called iMob and is run by the folks from Seattle Wireless.
It's not polished like Flickr, and I don't know how much usage it gets, but I figure that more people using it is only going to encourage further development of the site.
As for a non-corporate alternative to del.icio.us, that's less clear. CiteULike is nice for academic papers, but Annotea Ubimarks might be the answer (plus they're nicely semantic web flavoured).
I've backed up my http://del.icio.us/steevc bookmarks just in case they decide to mess it up. I've almost given up using browser bookmarks apart from a few I visit every day.