SSL is for two things:
1. Encrypting the data going back and forth between user and sever.
2. Proving that the server is who they say they are.
#2 is inherently flawed, and really gives you nothing anyhow, as hundreds of comments before mine have pointed out.
#1 is useful, and the lack of a lock icon doesn't change a thing.
If you already trust the domain, then go ahead and accept the cert. I use SSL on servers that I run all the time, and don't bother to get a CA to sign the certs, since I trust myself to be who I say I am:) Just don't enter your bank info or email credentials unless you really really trust them!
You have all the free speech you can get---on your own dime. YouTube is a business, not a public service. They have a right as a private organization, and a responsibility to their shareholders, to determine what stays and what goes, based on what they think will make the most money, plain and simple.
It so happens that free speech is very marketable. If "Web2.0" means anything, it's that one fact. But they have a vision of what they want their site to be like, and a legal responsibility to do basic due diligence in response to copyright violations. The video poster's 1st Amendment rights have nothing to do with this case. You wanna post videos of beheadings on the internet? Fine, go get a domain name and a web server, and you can do just that. I'll bet you wouldn't be the first. (If you can imagine it, there's porn of it.)
If Joe Lieberman or Mrs. Grundy or Jesus Christ says "Remove this," it's up to YouTube's staff to decide whether or not to honor that request.
This isn't about censorship. Let's say I own a building, and I tell you you can draw whatever you want on it, with the stipulation that I'll remove anything that I decide is "bad". Then you draw a person getting their head asploded, and someone says to me, "Hey, Isaac, that drawing is pretty bad." It's my call whether to take it down or not.
The minute the State starts saying that YouTube MUST remove content, then we're all in trouble. But you'd better believe YouTube would cry First Amendment on that one right away, and they'll be right.
Google doesn't have their fingers into every online ad outlet. They just have the widest search market share. Search ads are the most valuable because they are the most targeted and acted-upon: 1) We know what you want right now (because you entered it in the search box), and 2) You're planning on clicking something very soon.
Yahoo has much greater mass adoption than google in every other area in which they compete. Yahoo Mail is the single largest email provider on earth. (About double Hotmail's user base, and 13 times GMail's.) Yahoo is also the top seller of display ads (ie, ads on non-SERP pages.)
That's not to say that Google isn't making any money in display ads, or that no one uses GMail. But Google has one monstrously successful moneymaker, and that gives the company the freedom to play around in a lot of other areas without worrying too much about the costs.
It's debatable whether Google or Yahoo has an objectively better search product based on the results they return. It's hard to measure, and they're mostly the same, anyhow. But Google had a "modern" search algorithm first (ie, using link-weighting, very smart freetext search, etc.), and that built the brand. Brand loyalty IS a measurable quality.
I've watched user studies where participants were told to run searches on both Google and Yahoo, and report which provided better results. 50% of the time, the logo from one was actually shown with the result set from the other search engine. Almost every.single.time users will say that the page with the logo they usually use has better results, even if the results are actually coming from the other search engine. When it comes to search market share, brand loyalty is worth quite a bit more than quality.
Yahoo! needs to get its hands dirty and lay off the technology and fix its business penetration first...
If anything Yahoo! needs to stop trying to be all things to all people, and focus on the areas where it is successful. Like Ari Balogh said in the Web2.0 talk, there's a lot of un-leveraged information and social activity, as well as a lot of not-strictly-social activity, that Yahoo can use to be a much more interesting destination than other socially focused sites (ie, facebook, MySpace, etc.)
In real life, it's not like you spend some time being social for the sake of being social, and the rest of the time you're a hermit. (Well, maybe for/.ers... Minus the social half...) In real life, we mostly communicate with people about other things we're doing. Going to the game? You'll need tickets. Invite some folks. Flying into town? Let your visitees know when you'll land. Arrange a pickup from the airport. Buying a car? It would be good to get some reviews from other people, and maybe get introduced to a FOAF in the area who's a mechanic. And so on.
Yahoo has the "fingers in the market" so to speak, to provide that experience in a lot of areas. But it's not an easy thing to really get right, and it requires a delicate balance of agility and focus. But that's what Ari was talking about: making "social" an integral part of a bigger system. Not "social for the sake of being social," and not "a duck with a social network attached."
Sorry, I've been hearing a lot about how what we're doing is a response to Google App Engine (which it absolutely is not), and misinterpreted your comment.
I should know better than to fire off responses without reading carefully. 100% my bad.
Yahoo announced Search Monkey, which runs user-installed apps based on search data. Please think for at least three seconds about this.
Search Monkey needs an underlying platform on which to run the code that developers wrote.
I'm not going to disclose any details about what we're doing beyond what Ari said, because, well, I like my job, and I'm not in the business of spoiling the release of products that I work on. But Ari did say that Yahoo is committed to our Open Strategy... And we have a platform where Search Monkey apps run... Apps written by outside developers... It's almost like Search Monkey might be the pilot consumer of some kind of "application platform", no?
Open Social is primarily about providing APIs and sandboxes and servers on which to run user-installed, outside-developed applications. It requires an application platform of *some* sort.
Yeah... nothing alike. No correlation whatsoever. And since Google's announcement came before ours, that obviously means that we just started working on it now. Everyone knows it just takes a few days to whip up a new software product, right?
It would be hideously naive to think that Google's App Platform has "nothing to do" with Open Social, or that Yahoo's app platform is just a response to Google's. Both companies have been working on this for a pretty long time behind closed doors.
The whole "apps on the web" idea is exciting, and new, but it's also extremely challenging. How long did it take for posix systems to "get it right" running apps on the desktop? You're executing one person's code, and (in an open social application, anyhow) giving it another person's data, and have to somehow make sure that no one can do anything bad with it. Being the first to break the news doesn't count for much in the long run.
This whole "open initiative" business shouldn't be news to anyone with any clue as to what's going on.
Granted, I've got a bit more clue to what's going on with this, since I'm a tech lead on this project at Yahoo. That intent agreement isn't just corporate BS. We (that is, actual programmers, not just CxO's) are talking with them on a regular basis. This is very much a cooperative initiative.
"Open" isn't just a new buzzword. Yeah, they've got their stuff and we've got ours, and we compete fiercely in a few areas. But they're both big companies, and it's a big internet, and there's a lot that Y! and Google can do together that benefits both parties.
People just like soap operas, and when there isn't a real soap opera, they manufacture one.
Full disclosure: in case you missed it above, I work at Yahoo, on our open social project, which is a big part of what this announcement was about.
They have second-rate crash-prone products in half a dozen markets, and they're #1 or #2 in most of those. You don't get there without some business savvy. Call it evil if you want, but it ain't stupid.
They have consistently had problems in the web sphere. Yahoo!, despite any criticisms of the company, has done pretty well online, to say the least.
Microsoft wants Yahoo's expertise along with the brand and users. Yahoo has an army of top-notch developers, designers, and product managers who have driven a lot of successful products on the internet. Forcing those people to use.NET would drive them out the door, and, given the severance plan in place at Yahoo, that choice would give them a "good reason" to leave, meaning that Yahoo/MS would have to pay them 6 months severance.
That would not be good for business.
Microsoft is not going to buy something, and then turn around and destroy the value in their purchase.
As for the value of Y!, the stock price is not a direct measure of a company's value, but rather a measure of the desirability on the market of that company's stock. Most of the time, that's a pretty good proxy. However, if you just add up the value of the companies that Yahoo owns, it adds up to more than the current y! stock price. So, yes, the stock is undervalued, unless you think that mail, messenger, search, and all the other products Yahoo owns are a financial *liability*, which is just absurd. At the very least, I think we can all agree that Yahoo's revenue is non-zero. The fact is that the whole market is undervalued due in large part to other sectors of our economy falling on hard times. That's why MS acted when they did, because they see an opportunity to get y! at a bargain.
Full disclosure: I work at Yahoo, as an engineer (no kind of CxO, so it's not like my intel or opinion matters all that much in the big scheme of things). If this merger goes through, my feeling on the matter (which is echoed by most of my coworkers that I've spoken with) is: I don't care if the paycheck says "Microsoft", but if my workplace starts to suck (either because of undue bureaucracy or being forced to use Windows/IIS/MSSQL/.NET), I'm going to start calling back all those recruiters who keep bugging me. (Some, of course, are more or less passionate about it, but that's by far the most common attitude.) I have to think that Microsoft knows this, and wouldn't do anything so monumentally foolish.
It would be perfectly appropriate for them to say, "If you're Yahoo's size, then open source solutions make sense. If not, then ours offer a better cost/benefit ratio." Personally, I disagree with the second part, but they wouldn't exactly be cutting out that much of their customer base with such a statement.
Hotmail was and is *puny* compared to Yahoo. Converting all our products to run on IIS would be unrealistic by the time our grandchildren retire, and would cost a lot more than $40B in the long run. Unless this is a "buy and trash" strategy, I don't see that happening.
b2evolution has pretty much all of the features supported by MT's paid-package, unlike WP. Trackbacks/pingbacks, multiple blogs, multiple languages, extended categories, clean permalinks, you name it - the list of features seems to never end. Version 0.9 was just released today (Check the snazzy press release.) A MT migration script should be out within the next two weeks, and we're hoping to scoop up some of the disenfranchised MT bloggers.
The dev team for b2evolution, in my experience, tends to be extremely responsive to users' needs and feedback. The support is extremely good, and the documentation is growing rapidly.
Overall, a very flexible, powerful, and user-friendly system. (It's also one of the only open-source CMS systems that I've seen that will run on an IIS platform!)
Best of all, it's free, and looks like it's going to stay that way for a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
SSL is for two things: 1. Encrypting the data going back and forth between user and sever. 2. Proving that the server is who they say they are. #2 is inherently flawed, and really gives you nothing anyhow, as hundreds of comments before mine have pointed out. #1 is useful, and the lack of a lock icon doesn't change a thing. If you already trust the domain, then go ahead and accept the cert. I use SSL on servers that I run all the time, and don't bother to get a CA to sign the certs, since I trust myself to be who I say I am :) Just don't enter your bank info or email credentials unless you really really trust them!
...YouTube was owned by Google, not the State.
You have all the free speech you can get---on your own dime. YouTube is a business, not a public service. They have a right as a private organization, and a responsibility to their shareholders, to determine what stays and what goes, based on what they think will make the most money, plain and simple.
It so happens that free speech is very marketable. If "Web2.0" means anything, it's that one fact. But they have a vision of what they want their site to be like, and a legal responsibility to do basic due diligence in response to copyright violations. The video poster's 1st Amendment rights have nothing to do with this case. You wanna post videos of beheadings on the internet? Fine, go get a domain name and a web server, and you can do just that. I'll bet you wouldn't be the first. (If you can imagine it, there's porn of it.)
If Joe Lieberman or Mrs. Grundy or Jesus Christ says "Remove this," it's up to YouTube's staff to decide whether or not to honor that request.
This isn't about censorship. Let's say I own a building, and I tell you you can draw whatever you want on it, with the stipulation that I'll remove anything that I decide is "bad". Then you draw a person getting their head asploded, and someone says to me, "Hey, Isaac, that drawing is pretty bad." It's my call whether to take it down or not.
The minute the State starts saying that YouTube MUST remove content, then we're all in trouble. But you'd better believe YouTube would cry First Amendment on that one right away, and they'll be right.
You've got a few things backwards there.
Google doesn't have their fingers into every online ad outlet. They just have the widest search market share. Search ads are the most valuable because they are the most targeted and acted-upon: 1) We know what you want right now (because you entered it in the search box), and 2) You're planning on clicking something very soon.
Yahoo has much greater mass adoption than google in every other area in which they compete. Yahoo Mail is the single largest email provider on earth. (About double Hotmail's user base, and 13 times GMail's.) Yahoo is also the top seller of display ads (ie, ads on non-SERP pages.)
That's not to say that Google isn't making any money in display ads, or that no one uses GMail. But Google has one monstrously successful moneymaker, and that gives the company the freedom to play around in a lot of other areas without worrying too much about the costs.
It's debatable whether Google or Yahoo has an objectively better search product based on the results they return. It's hard to measure, and they're mostly the same, anyhow. But Google had a "modern" search algorithm first (ie, using link-weighting, very smart freetext search, etc.), and that built the brand. Brand loyalty IS a measurable quality.
I've watched user studies where participants were told to run searches on both Google and Yahoo, and report which provided better results. 50% of the time, the logo from one was actually shown with the result set from the other search engine. Almost every.single.time users will say that the page with the logo they usually use has better results, even if the results are actually coming from the other search engine. When it comes to search market share, brand loyalty is worth quite a bit more than quality.
If anything Yahoo! needs to stop trying to be all things to all people, and focus on the areas where it is successful. Like Ari Balogh said in the Web2.0 talk, there's a lot of un-leveraged information and social activity, as well as a lot of not-strictly-social activity, that Yahoo can use to be a much more interesting destination than other socially focused sites (ie, facebook, MySpace, etc.)
In real life, it's not like you spend some time being social for the sake of being social, and the rest of the time you're a hermit. (Well, maybe for /.ers... Minus the social half...) In real life, we mostly communicate with people about other things we're doing. Going to the game? You'll need tickets. Invite some folks. Flying into town? Let your visitees know when you'll land. Arrange a pickup from the airport. Buying a car? It would be good to get some reviews from other people, and maybe get introduced to a FOAF in the area who's a mechanic. And so on.
Yahoo has the "fingers in the market" so to speak, to provide that experience in a lot of areas. But it's not an easy thing to really get right, and it requires a delicate balance of agility and focus. But that's what Ari was talking about: making "social" an integral part of a bigger system. Not "social for the sake of being social," and not "a duck with a social network attached."
Even more off topic, but I guess it's OK to talk about YAP now :)
Ahh....
Sorry, I've been hearing a lot about how what we're doing is a response to Google App Engine (which it absolutely is not), and misinterpreted your comment.
I should know better than to fire off responses without reading carefully. 100% my bad.
My colleague Stephen Woods summed up the situation well.
Yahoo announced Search Monkey, which runs user-installed apps based on search data. Please think for at least three seconds about this.
Search Monkey needs an underlying platform on which to run the code that developers wrote.
I'm not going to disclose any details about what we're doing beyond what Ari said, because, well, I like my job, and I'm not in the business of spoiling the release of products that I work on. But Ari did say that Yahoo is committed to our Open Strategy... And we have a platform where Search Monkey apps run... Apps written by outside developers... It's almost like Search Monkey might be the pilot consumer of some kind of "application platform", no?
Open Social is primarily about providing APIs and sandboxes and servers on which to run user-installed, outside-developed applications. It requires an application platform of *some* sort.
Yeah... nothing alike. No correlation whatsoever. And since Google's announcement came before ours, that obviously means that we just started working on it now. Everyone knows it just takes a few days to whip up a new software product, right?
It would be hideously naive to think that Google's App Platform has "nothing to do" with Open Social, or that Yahoo's app platform is just a response to Google's. Both companies have been working on this for a pretty long time behind closed doors.
The whole "apps on the web" idea is exciting, and new, but it's also extremely challenging. How long did it take for posix systems to "get it right" running apps on the desktop? You're executing one person's code, and (in an open social application, anyhow) giving it another person's data, and have to somehow make sure that no one can do anything bad with it. Being the first to break the news doesn't count for much in the long run.
Yahoo owns AltaVista. Has for a while, actually.
`dig altavista.com` for more info.
In the footer, it says "Overture Services, Inc."
Overture was acquired by Yahoo back in 2003 (which makes it practically biblical in internet time.)
statement of intent
yahoo joins open social
yahoo joins open social
This whole "open initiative" business shouldn't be news to anyone with any clue as to what's going on.
Granted, I've got a bit more clue to what's going on with this, since I'm a tech lead on this project at Yahoo. That intent agreement isn't just corporate BS. We (that is, actual programmers, not just CxO's) are talking with them on a regular basis. This is very much a cooperative initiative.
"Open" isn't just a new buzzword. Yeah, they've got their stuff and we've got ours, and we compete fiercely in a few areas. But they're both big companies, and it's a big internet, and there's a lot that Y! and Google can do together that benefits both parties.
People just like soap operas, and when there isn't a real soap opera, they manufacture one.
Full disclosure: in case you missed it above, I work at Yahoo, on our open social project, which is a big part of what this announcement was about.
...they're not stupid when it comes to business.
.NET would drive them out the door, and, given the severance plan in place at Yahoo, that choice would give them a "good reason" to leave, meaning that Yahoo/MS would have to pay them 6 months severance.
They have second-rate crash-prone products in half a dozen markets, and they're #1 or #2 in most of those. You don't get there without some business savvy. Call it evil if you want, but it ain't stupid.
They have consistently had problems in the web sphere. Yahoo!, despite any criticisms of the company, has done pretty well online, to say the least.
Microsoft wants Yahoo's expertise along with the brand and users. Yahoo has an army of top-notch developers, designers, and product managers who have driven a lot of successful products on the internet. Forcing those people to use
That would not be good for business.
Microsoft is not going to buy something, and then turn around and destroy the value in their purchase.
As for the value of Y!, the stock price is not a direct measure of a company's value, but rather a measure of the desirability on the market of that company's stock. Most of the time, that's a pretty good proxy. However, if you just add up the value of the companies that Yahoo owns, it adds up to more than the current y! stock price. So, yes, the stock is undervalued, unless you think that mail, messenger, search, and all the other products Yahoo owns are a financial *liability*, which is just absurd. At the very least, I think we can all agree that Yahoo's revenue is non-zero. The fact is that the whole market is undervalued due in large part to other sectors of our economy falling on hard times. That's why MS acted when they did, because they see an opportunity to get y! at a bargain.
Full disclosure: I work at Yahoo, as an engineer (no kind of CxO, so it's not like my intel or opinion matters all that much in the big scheme of things). If this merger goes through, my feeling on the matter (which is echoed by most of my coworkers that I've spoken with) is: I don't care if the paycheck says "Microsoft", but if my workplace starts to suck (either because of undue bureaucracy or being forced to use Windows/IIS/MSSQL/.NET), I'm going to start calling back all those recruiters who keep bugging me. (Some, of course, are more or less passionate about it, but that's by far the most common attitude.) I have to think that Microsoft knows this, and wouldn't do anything so monumentally foolish.
It would be perfectly appropriate for them to say, "If you're Yahoo's size, then open source solutions make sense. If not, then ours offer a better cost/benefit ratio." Personally, I disagree with the second part, but they wouldn't exactly be cutting out that much of their customer base with such a statement.
Hotmail was and is *puny* compared to Yahoo. Converting all our products to run on IIS would be unrealistic by the time our grandchildren retire, and would cost a lot more than $40B in the long run. Unless this is a "buy and trash" strategy, I don't see that happening.
Check out b2evolution.
b2evolution has pretty much all of the features supported by MT's paid-package, unlike WP. Trackbacks/pingbacks, multiple blogs, multiple languages, extended categories, clean permalinks, you name it - the list of features seems to never end. Version 0.9 was just released today (Check the snazzy press release.) A MT migration script should be out within the next two weeks, and we're hoping to scoop up some of the disenfranchised MT bloggers. The dev team for b2evolution, in my experience, tends to be extremely responsive to users' needs and feedback. The support is extremely good, and the documentation is growing rapidly. Overall, a very flexible, powerful, and user-friendly system. (It's also one of the only open-source CMS systems that I've seen that will run on an IIS platform!) Best of all, it's free, and looks like it's going to stay that way for a long time.