Archive for April, 2008

What is up with eBay employees?

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Every time I post on Craigslist for a part-time position for Web work (coding, design, etc.) I get a ton of replies from CURRENT eBay employees who all say they can work up to 20 hours a week on moonlighting freelance.  One person we hired for a facebook application was absolutely horrendous – but I still am amazed at how he often came to our office in the middle of the work-day (long lunch???) to do milestone meetings.  Is life at eBay that slow & boring that you have to look for outside work? Or do they not pay enough?  Inquiring minds want to know….

Posted in Working in the Valley | 1 Comment »

Hardware Always Beats Software in the End

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Reading about Mowser’s demise (I sat in on a few mobile search meetings with Russell Beattie at Yahoo! a couple years ago), it reminded me that everytime smart people try to invent ways to deal with hardware limitations with software (like Mowser tried to do by smartly converting regular web pages into mobile web pages), they are burned in the end by hardware making the Moore’s Law jumps in capacity/capability that make the software solution moot.  One example is all those data archiving software solutions in the 90’s which are totally useless now that you can store tetrabytes of data for $50/month.  Another may be the way scaling “search” used to be trying to come up with ever-sophisticated algos for that one Sun server - while Google was just scaling with thousands and thousands of ever-more cheap Linux boxes.

Posted in Econ & Social Software | No Comments »

Is Yahoo! going to buy Twitter?

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

Given that Y! will probably soon be part of Microsoft, it may not be such a good tip any more, but I noticed that in the last 30 days, I have been getting an inordinate amount of people from my former company (Yahoo!) signing up for Twitter and telling me that they are “following me”. 

This happened 3 times before in the last 2 years - where I saw a big surge in people from my Yahoo! network asking me to join their “network” – and especially people you would not have expected to be interested in social networks - once for Flickr, then for del.icio.us and finally for Facebook.  First 2 were bought by Yahoo!, and a billion dollar offer was made for the last one.

Is this the last gasp of Yahoo!’s bid to stay independent? Twitter????? (next may be justin.tv. :)

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