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.

How Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account was hacked

You may have heard by now that Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account got hacked. It was her personal account, but allegedly she was using it for state business or somesuch.

More interesting to me is the story of how it was hacked.

Veracode Blog - Learning From Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail Compromise

Shockingly easy: they just used "password reset" and guessed some supposedly-private "secret questions". The article also points out why Gmail's password reset function is more secure.

Lesson: don't use "secret questions" that someone can easily guess about you -- or look up on Wikipedia!

Yahoo layoffs, alumni association?

It feels surreal to watch the Yahoo! layoffs from a distance. Some details about who got axed are starting to leak out...

Edward Vielmetti: Yahoo Alumni Association

I'm sure some of these departments were unnecessary. I like the new focus on "starting points, must buy, and open". But, my condolences to the folks who got the short end of that stick today...

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!