P16: Practical Progress

RIP delicious?

There has been a whole lot of chatter on the interwebs re: the future of delicious.com since yesterday, starting with a Techcrunch story and spilling over onto HN, Twitter, ReadWriteWeb, etc.

We now have an official blog response about this story, now, about 24 hrs too late. And it doesn't dispel the idea that Yahoo! actually wants to close Delicious. Instead, it sounds like whitewashing.

This sucks. I've used Delicious to store and share my bookmarks for a very long time, and I'm always surprised when someone mentions that they follow my bookmarks feed to see what I've been reading. (old friends living across the country, etc).

I could stick around, but now that I know the product is being neglected, I'll take my bookmarks elsewhere. Pinboard.in looks like a nice solution.

Old: http://delicious.com/kangas

New: http://pinboard.in/u:kangas

Pinboard is getting slammed with new traffic today, so it will take a little time for that "New" URL to fill out. That's fine by me. I can wait for Pinboard to catch up on the flood of new users.

But I won't wait for Yahoo to EOL Delicious. I'd rather leave on my own terms, thank you very much.

Election day attire!

Election day attire!
Originally uploaded by mattkangas

I just had to wear this shirt today. Too bad I didn't have a "Colbert/Manilow" shirt instead. :-)

Interesting tech events this week in NYC

Dear readers - my apologies for posting so lightly as of late. I suppose I should come up for air more often, even if I'm enjoying my work.

Some things going on in NYC this week:

1) Web 2.0 Expo New York 2008. Not planning to go; I don't feel like dropping $1k for a conference right now. However, the one session I would love to see is Joshua Schacter's presentation on del.icio.us. Wednesday Sept 17 at 1:20 PM.

2) CouchDB tech talk @ Arc90 - tonight at 6pm. I'm interested, but I want to ride my bike home tonight so I'll probably pass.

3) An evening with S60 in New York. Weds Sept 17 at the Nokia Store in NYC (57th St). This is critical for Nokia fans -- count me in for sure! :)

ps: I upgraded my phone to a Nokia E71 about a month ago, and I'm loving it. Nothing against the iPhone 3G, but I like this better. If you like Nokia devices and haven't read Joel on software's review of the E71 -- take a moment to read, it's priceless!

BusinessWeek article on Daylife.com

Have I mentioned that I have a new gig? We were just written up in BusinessWeek.

BusinessWeek: Redirecting the Web's News Stream

If that went over year head (it did for me), here's a simpler explanation of what we do:

Daylife: a guide to today's news

(ps: According to our homepage, George Carlin just passed away...)

Red State Update (video)

"Pick One, So Ah Know Who Ah'm Votin' Aginst"

LOL! Thank you Red State Update. :-)   [Hat tip: Kids Prefer Cheese and Pmarca ]

New job, Going to BarCamp3 NYC this weekend

Dear readers - I haven't posted much recently because I've been busy starting a new job. The company is MyStrands.com, the NYC office is still under construction, and my boss is this fellow.

The project I'm on is in early stealth-mode. All I can tell you so far is that it's not the MyStrands music recommender product, it's something new and very promising. And there's a good chance that I will be using Erlang for some part of it. :)

This weekend I will be at BarCampNYC3. Please stop by and say "hi"!

I'll be giving a presentation, like all BarCampers, probably a show-and-tell of how I set up the Apache Solr search engine for Flix55.com.

Event: BarCampNYC3
Begins: March 15, 2008 at 11:00 am ET
Ends: March 16, 2008 at 6:00 pm ET

Location:
Polytechnic University
6 Metrotech Ctr
Brooklyn, NY 11201

NYC New Tech Meetup - March 2008

NY Tech Meetup - Mar 4, 2008 - "The Future of Organizing"

I've been subscribed to the NY Tech Meetup for several months, but I've never been able to get an RSVP until now. Woo! They had a pretty interesting lineup of speakers... different from their usual format, they invited folks from outside of NYC to present.

Below are my notes from the event.

Today is a sad day (Yahoo-oo?)

Microsoft just made an unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo! for $31 a share. Yesterday, YHOO was trading for $19/share, so that's one heck of a premium for shareholders. It's going to be very hard for Yahoo's board to turn this offer down.

The talking heads on Bloomberg and MSNBC are gushing praise for this deal. Credible folks in the web space like Fred Wilson and Danny Sullivan are more measured in their response, but still sounding positive, from a financial perspective.

I'm going to ignore the dancing dollar signs in front of everybody's eyes, and focus on things less tangible: open source, web developers, and the soul of the web. If you care about those things, today is a sad day.

(FYI: I worked for HotJobs.com, which became Yahoo! HotJobs, from 2001 to 2005)

Why? I'll leave the weepy details for a later post, but in short: Microsoft sucks at the web because Microsoft thinks in terms of command-and-control, which is the antithesis of the web.

Putting Yahoo! inside of Microsoft is kinda like putting the Woodstock Festival, Jimi Hendrix and all, inside of the Kremlin. Maybe it was going to die off eventually on its own, but you know the life will be snuffed out now!