Wayne Pan

We started using Yammer, the 2008 TC50 winner, at our company when they first launched.

Personally, I had high hopes for a work based private status updates. Open communication amongst your peers is never a bad thing. We actually had roughly the same idea back when I worked at SugarCRM. (What better pre-built network of colleagues than a CRM system that every worker already uses anyway?)

At AdMob, Yammer started out with some good status about actual work related items. I learned a bit about what everybody was working on and waited patiently for more and more people joined the network. About a week into the experiment the only active yammers were engineers. However, more disheartening was the fact that the core concept of Yammer (What are you working on?) completely went out the window. Soon it was a full blown chatroom.

What went wrong? It’s the stickiness of the app, more specifically the lack of stickiness. The number of active yammerers went down dramatically after ‘launch’ either due to lack of content or people simply forgetting about it.

I’m not sure how to fix that, perhaps it’s a problem that doesn’t need to be fixed. We’ve mostly resorted back to email.

The url for the above image is actually http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=3AX&q=computers&start=360&sa=N. It’s supposed to be the 36th page of the query “computers”. You can test it yourself and if you happen to hit the same shard/bug as me, you can see the oddity too. (Keep refreshing if you don’t, roughly 1 in every 20 from my highly scientific test!) It definitely happens more often the deeper you go in the result set .

Interesting notes:

• Obviously, should be displaying more than 1 result.
• Wikipedia link some how survives what ever bug I ran into.
• 59.6 million results and only shows results 1-4.
• Supposed to be page 36, some how I’m back on page one.

A funny but harmless bug.

I just shifted half my portfolio into Apple (AAPL). I think it’s a bargain at this price, why? Simple…

It was $90 pre-iPhone.

That’s right, AAPL was hovering around $80 before MacWorld 2007, where the iPhone was announced. What’s happened since then? Apple has launched 2 versions of the iPhone in 50+ countries and essentially created an entirely new business for themselves with the AppStore.

They’ve also hit a record high in PC market share (~8%) and that will only continue to grow as the iPhone’s halo effect continues.

We’ll see how much of a fool I look like in a year…

I had it with bloglines.com and I’ve finally moved to Google Reader. Bloglines has been down a few times in the past month and I haven’t been able to log into the iPhone version of the site in a week. Also, I’m not sure when Google added the Expanded View to their interface (probably a long long time ago) but that was the one friction point for me when Reader first launched.

Along with my move, I reset my unread items to 0. There was no way I was going to catch up anyway.

It feels damn good to be at 0, now I just have to trim the fat on my RSS feeds.