Wayne Pan

The YUI 2nd Birthday was a dud except for the free shirts, free food, free beer, oh and something about YUI 3.0. The vision plan they have for 3.0 is faster, lighter, more secure, more modular.The front of the shirt is above but the back of the shirt has the quote “This is Yahoo!” and I agree.

Yahoo! has done wonders in terms of front-end engineering with YUI, Design Patterns, YSlow, Juku, and even hiring someone full time for firebug. They are bringing much needed attention web dev and the continued promotion of javascript as a first class language.

On a side note, when I read the “This is Yahoo!” slogan I imagined Jerry Yang kicking Balmer into an endless pit and yelling “THIS IS YAHOO!” 300 style.

I read that Microsoft’s online storage solution Skydrive was just upped to 5gb. I haven’t tried Live so I tried to register as a new user, what did I get?At first, I figured they were getting bombarded with new sign ups and I thought it was odd. On a whim, I opened up FireFox and lo-and-behold, the sign up page finally showed up.I tried again with Safari and I received the same error page! I can’t believe Microsoft is still pulling this shit. Maybe I’m wrong, if you’re on Safari let me know if you can sign up using this page.

Let’s take a look at the recent headlines, all garbage. Nothing to do with actual tech!

• Steve Jobs isn’t in Apple’s Facebook network — but his wife is
• Gene Simmons sex tape leaked on Web (NSFW)
• Sergey Brin’s weird wedding ring
• Sex parties in the Valley — how do I get invited?
• Become her sugar daddy in 3 easy steps
• Googlers getting laid way more than Microsoft, Yahoo
• Viagra ruining everything for Valley’s mistresses

Yes, I know VW is a gossip rag, but at least a year ago there was some semi-relevant content. I’m going to have to blame Denton’s new pay scheme which pays the writers on number of pageviews a story gets. The greatest draw? SEX. Right now it’s a free for all for who can come up with the story with the most sex. Sad.Deleted from my bloglines and deleted from my bookmarks. It looks like the only decent now a days is Gawker Media site to read it Kotaku.

If you haven’t started watching Start-Up Junkies on MojoHD, you should. (Catch the latest episodes here.).

This season is about the new start-up Earth Class Mail, a company that intends to put your snail mail and online. The show highlights the troubles of building a start-up and in this case a start-up with a lot of capital expenditures. These guys have to figure out a way manage millions of physical items, not just build a kick ass website.

Who would’ve guess? Now I have no doubt that my prediction will come true. Just a matter of which of Yahoo!’s properties bites the dust first.

Where is the Mac? No, not the iMac or the Mac Pro or even the Mac Mini. I’m talking a Mac, a machine that gives me better than iMac specs without a built in monitor. I don’t need the nuclear powered Mac Pro (or it’s price) but at the same time don’t want the paltry Mac Mini. Give me something in between damn it!

IMO, Apple has missed yet another opportunity at this year’s MacWorld by not introducing such a machine.

The first Acid test was essentially to test browser compatibility for the box model. The Acid2 (try it out in the browser you’re on, Safari3 passes btw) test focused on HTML/CSS for static content.

Now Acid3 is being developed and will focus on the dynamic portion of the web, ie javascript. Finally, an Acid test I can get behind! The other Acid tests merely pointed out inconstancies in very edge cases of css and html rendering; not very useful. Acid3 ensures that javascript code written adheres to the ECMAScript spec, which is much more important in my mind.

John Resig has a good summary of the draft along with renders of the test in different browsers. (Many more here.)

More to record my own thoughts…. Let’s do the obvious ones first:

• Facebook will decline as people either go to the next hottest thing or advertisers realize their ROI on the FB ad platform isn’t the greatest
• Google will acquire at least two mobile companies to aid Android
• iPhone will continue to gain mobile browser market share stagnating the mobile web even more

Now some not so obvious ones:

• Slide or RockYou will be acquired. If 07 was the year of widget, 08 will be the year they cash in.
• Google or Microsoft will launch an Amazon AWS competitor
• Yahoo will close at least 4 more properties in an attempt to slim down. (one down)
• A web 2.0 company outside the US will eek out a new niche (see last.fm)

I love the movement in the community as of late regarding front end engineers. PPK (of quirksmode.org fame) has been making great strides in by trying to establish an organization called Fronteers. Now, I just read that Yahoo! is doing something even more unprecedented… Yahoo! Juku. Essentially a training program for Fronteers to learn from the top people in the field and become a full time Yahoo! employee.Regardless of how Yahoo! is doing as a company, nobody can’t fault their contributions (yui, yslow, design patterns library, etc) in terms of web front end.

Joel had an interesting take on start ups…

The one thing that so many of today’s cute startups have in common is that all they have is a simple little Ruby-on-Rails Ajax site that has no barriers to entry and doesn’t solve any gnarly problems. So many of these companies feel insubstantial and fluffy, because, out of necessity (the whole company is three kids and an iguana), they haven’t solved anything difficult yet. Until they do, they won’t be solving problems for people. People pay for solutions to their problems.        

There’s been a lot of talk lately about a another bubble, and it definitely feels this way. Everybody is following in Facebook’s footsteps to be open. Even fighting each other to see who can out open each other (re: OpenSocial, Verizon’s Open Network, etc.)I was discussing with a friend about the whole Facebook Apps thing… Look at these two graphs of an app called Drink Recipes on Facebook (taken from adonomics.com)

Daily Active Users

Valuation

Someone explain to me how the valuation is an inverse relationship to active users? There’s also a third graph of installs, but it’s can’t be based off that can it? Active users can be synonymous to daily page views, which is how most sites base their valuations off of. The current valuation of Drink Recipes is $1.45m, mind boggling considering 3 kids an an iguana or two could have made it…. I guess the key is to be one of those kids (or maybe a RoR coding iguana?)