http://yumio.net/blog Blog of an economist who ended up working in web Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:51:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en After spending several years constantly hiring people in the Valley, here are small pet peeves that I encounter frequently - and bother me most. Last week one candidate did the hat trick and did all 3 which made me want to write it down and make it "public" for the record -- 1. ... http://yumio.net/blog/2008/09/11/silicon-valley-interview-pet-peeves/ I have a new job! Recently I became the VP of Product for FixYa, the world's largest community Q&A site for technical support on everything you own.  FixYa maybe the largest site in the world that no one knows about.  We get over 9 million visitors a month, which is equivalent ... http://yumio.net/blog/2008/09/11/i-have-a-new-job/ During the 80s and 90s, the only common uses of the word "social" as an adjective in front of a noun was for "social studies" that you took in elementary school, and maybe "social security".  Then in the middle of this decade we started to see it applied to Web 2.0 ... http://yumio.net/blog/2008/05/16/social/ Since there is practically a site related to every aspect of Social Networking - why isn't there one for profile pic management (or maybe Flickr should do a feature).  I don't particularly go out of my way to join social media sites, but even so I have more than 10 ... http://yumio.net/blog/2008/05/02/profile-pic-management/ 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 ... http://yumio.net/blog/2008/04/23/what-is-up-with-ebay-employees/ 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 ... http://yumio.net/blog/2008/04/15/hardware-always-beats-software-in-the-end/ 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 ... http://yumio.net/blog/2008/04/02/is-yahoo-going-to-buy-twitter/ There's a lot of buzz about Facebook these days, and the stats point to a still dominant MySpace. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/11/myspace-still-the-king/ One factor in their differences that I think is critical to their product direction is that Facebook avoided getting swallowed up by Yahoo! whereas MySpace became part of the Fox-NewsCorp empire.  And I think in small ... http://yumio.net/blog/2007/07/12/facebook-vs-myspace/ As I was buying a digital "gift" (aka icons) on Facebook for Caterina who just had her baby, I saw that the one I wanted to buy was a limited edition (100,000 only! Buy now!) and it cost $1.  I don't know how many of these Facebook sells each month, but it ... http://yumio.net/blog/2007/07/12/price-marginal-cost/ I came to South by Southwest 2007/Interactive, not knowing what to expect.  The only information I had was that there were good parties at night.  So I was pleasantly surprised when I can honestly say that I learned a thing or two about web design, as well as the story ... http://yumio.net/blog/2007/03/12/south-by-southwest-2007-interactive/