Shout it from the rooftops! Or maybe just mention it on your blog (which would be much less dramatic…yet now that I think about it, probably more effective). We Konfabulistas are inviting a few lucky authors who have created at least 1 Yahoo! Widget to come visit Widgets HQ for our first-ever Developer Day.

For more details and to sign-up, click here. Space is limited, so get yer hustle on.

Very exciting news! Yahoo!’s own Douglas Crockford, one of the industry’s foremost authorities on JavaScript, will be keynoting with one of his world-famous talks on the language that is the basis of Konfabulator (i.e. JavaScript). W00t!

In your face Spiegelman!

It has begun.

…when you respect someone’s opinion so much that it impacts your evaluation of the thing he recommends. Call it the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of taste. I think that any professional critic who has achieved a following starts to think about things more in terms of what their audience expects from them than in terms of their own personal taste. It’s because trust is binary — you either believe in someone or you don’t.

That said, trust is not necessarily global. As I told Melanie today, I trust her taste in music and (most importantly) people, but I’ll judge for myself when it comes to sushi (I’m a pretty big food snob, and most of the people I do trust in that area are chefs — so, Mel shouldn’t take it personally ). This is how we live our lives: there’s the musician friend you ask about the latest albums and the film geek you consult before going to the movies. And it seems to me that life gets a great deal less stressful when you find those domain experts you trust so much that their endorsement actually makes something seem *better* and you put your fate in their hands totally on the faith that they will continue to live up to that trust. When Ian tells me to buy a book, I just do it (and sometimes even read them). This is basically a type of personal delegation: “I’m hiring you to be the manager of this decision for me.” And just like in the workplace, you can get burned (“Dude, that movie totally sucked! What was he thinking?”). And then you take action after the fact (“fire” that person by not trusting them anymore).

In fact, this whole line of thinking was inspired by observing how Marco works. If he trusts you, he just wants you to go off and do stuff and come back when it’s done — no check-ins, just trust. I’ve watched this management style both spectacularly succeed and spectacularly fail (IMHO, no middle-ground isn’t such a bad thing). When it goes wrong, there’s generally a lot of yelling and late nights fixing things. But when it’s going well, it’s amazing to watch (or be a part of). The trust becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — people proactively look to live up to it.

While trusting the wrong person on a big decision can be a devastating mistake, handling all the big decisions yourself means you are inherently limited in the number you can make. And when you find the right people, the time and energy you can save by trusting them will likely greatly outweigh the potential cost of a screw-up multiplied by the probability of one happening. Finding the right people to trust is the hard part (knowing when you have is actually the hardest part), and I can’t tell you how to do it (my dad calls it “ass-twitch”, don’t ask). But once you’ve found them, you want to remove all friction and empower them as much and as easily as possible (I should probably just give Ian my credit card and have him order me the books himself).

I would love to see a product that allows me to do this across all my online services. Yahoo! Music has this great (if completely buried) Influencers feature, which allows you to choose other users whose ratings get factored into your recommendations. But, there’s no way for me to see those recommendations (a la Netflix). So, all of that knowledge is only actionable in the (relatively limited — but, that’s another post) context of Yahoo! Music. Other services, like Netflix and Yelp and Yahoo! Local, allow you to add friends so you can easily see their ratings, but these features are broken in a couple ways.

First of all, they require you to recreate an instance of your social map on their proprietary system that’s only useful within that context (in the case of Y! Local, it’s Y! 360 — but who actually uses *that*?). So, I’m supposed to create and maintain as many lists of friends as services I use online?! openness rant here> But even if they did build off the very robust Facebook API, for example, what these services are doing today still wouldn’t work for me. I don’t want to just see the average overall rating and then my friends’ individual ratings. I want to be able to at least see an average of just my friends’ ratings. And if you are building off of a central address book/social map, then I will need the ability to customize the lists of friends whose opinions I care about for each of the respective services (I want Ian’s opinions on music and books but not movies).

Back in the old days of Web 1.0, I believed that only a large company like Yahoo! or Google could pull this off because of all the integration points (at the end of the day, all this is really is a management console on top of your address book and integration with the relevant services). But now, I think this has a better chance of being built as an open standalone web service. I’m waiting…

I don’t have a lot of people I call friends, but those I do it is always with pride. And this week, I am particularly proud of my friend Ian Rogers, who has officially been named GM of Yahoo! Music.

Look ma, I’m on the Yahoo! Search Blog.

If you have a 360 page registered on MyBlogLog , you should now see a “Get Widget” button t add their badge to your 360 page. The only problem is that I can’t figure out any place on 360 to enter HTML other than the blog.

So, here goes:

I *heart* Flickr machine tags. The integration with Upcoming (e.g. Flickr & Upcoming) is a model of Web 2.0 bliss. Yes, I’m a nerd (this post definitely goes beyond the more flattering “geek”). But, watching my identity (and thus content) seamlessly span the best-of-breed services of my choosing makes my heart melt — seriously, I’m that big of a loser. And the most beautiful thing about it is that this integration has absolutely *nothing* to do with the fact that these two products happen to both fall under the same purple corporate umbrella. The Flickr machine tags API is totally open and can work with any site that applies for an application key. (I must add that 360 tried to do a lot of this type of stuff with the ill-fated Feeds, but the implementation was just too proprietary and confusing to really catch on.)

If Web 1.0 was a land-grab of getting users to store stuff with your service (and holding on to it as tightly as possible), Web 2.0 is about creating added value with stuff that’s not locked-in to and may not even be stored with your service. Yahoo! Photos used to gladly allow you to upload high-res images, but only paying subscribers could get them back at their original resolution — this is mercifully no longer the case. Flickr never tried to use your investment in their service as a coercive force (either to get you to stay forever or to pay to leave). Instead, they focused their energies on features that created value on top of your initial investment of uploading and possibly annotating your photos. To succeed in a market with no real switching costs (e.g. the consumer internet), when users invest in your product, you must use that investment to make it better for them to stay not to make it harder for them to leave.

As big a mental shift as this is from the business models of only a couple of years ago, I feel like this type of philosophy is pretty much conventional wisdom at this point (at least in my circles). That’s why I was so shocked to see that neither Yahoo! Local nor Yelp are using Flickr machine tags to link photos to establishments in their databases. Instead, both ask you to upload your photos directly with the sole purpose of correlating with that establishment. Puke!!! I already have my chosen best-of-breed photo sharing service. Why are you *forcing* me to duplicate that effort and use your crappy single-purpose tool as well?!

I took the above photo at the Great Western Steak and Hoagie Company in LA this weekend. I thought it was a pretty cool photo, so I uploaded it to Flickr from my phone. Tonight, I was going through this weekend’s photos adding tags etc. And instead of placing this photo on the Flickr map (which is an awesome, but unscalably time-consuming feature), I wanted to link it to local reviews of the place where I took it (and maybe even write my own review). I was disappointed, but not wholly surprised to find Yahoo! Local doesn’t yet have Flickr integration (disappointed because they’re in the same Business Unit, not surprised because the overlap between audiences is probably relatively low). But when I pinged my friend who works at Yelp to see if they had Flickr integration hidden somewhere on their site (a feature that would have totally gotten me to switch from Yahoo! Local, which only integrates with my less useful 360 identity, to Yelp), I was sorely disappointed.

Not only was she unaware of the machine tags feature on Flickr (admittedly, relatively new), but even after an explanation insisted that Yelp was more interested in having me upload my photos to them than making it easier to integrate with the service where I (and I’m sure a substantial portion of their user-base) *already* upload our photos. I guess my disappointment stemmed from the fact that I had been tricked into thinking that Yelp was a Web 2.0 version of Yahoo! Local, but then it dawned on me — it’s really Web 2-faux. Yes, it’s got the sexy, young, geek-chic brand identity that we’ve come to associate with the second coming of the consumer Internet. But when you actually take a look past the surface, there’s nothing more than an old-school reviews site with some excellent (and “cunningly cost-effective“) hipster marketing. I would hire Stoppelman and co. to take my stodgy old product and give it youth appeal without substantive changes anytime, because that seems to be exactly what they’ve done with Yelp.

Once I came up with this little hypothesis, I scoured the Yelp site for any evidence of true openness. Any developer APIs? Nope. Content syndication? Yes, a couple of RSS feeds — but, that’s more Web 1.5. Any identity portability in or out (MySpace badges and the like)? Not that I can find. Yelp employees (cuz “Yelpers” are the users), come one you can do better. Facebook has some awesome APIs, and I’m sure you guys share a huge overlap in target demographics. Why not hook up to that and import all my relationships without me having to recreate my entire social map from scratch in your system? Or create badges so I can display my Yelp activity on other sites? Or hook up to Flickr machine tags so I only have to upload my photos *once* — oh, we covered that already.

Om was talking today about social networks as a feature of all products. He brings up a good point of the inevitable commoditization of the technologies that spawned Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. But, I think there’s a more important point to be made than the trend towards the elimination of the standalone social network — and that’s the demand for social network neutrality. I may use a lot of different services online (and will only continue to use more), but there is only one me. The companies that offer me cool services to express myself while allowing me to connect these various dots of my online identity into the meta-picture of my choosing will have the competitive edge on the post-2.0 Web.

I would like to be the second Widgeteer to publicly welcome Microsoft Windows Vista into the world. And here comes the shameless plug: Yahoo! Widgets 3.1 (our current version) officially supports Windows Vista, making ours the leading Widget platform for Vista with over 3,700 Widgets available for you early adopters to start using *right now*.

Anyway, per the parenthetical in the post title, there’s also some other news that seemed to get lost in the whole Vista launch hullabaloo. Today, after 2 years, 7 months, and 16 days at Yahoo! and a little over 8 months as a product manager, I shipped my first product. (Can you believe CNET missed that?!) It’s nothing major — in fact, it’s kinda been my side project for the last 6 weeks while we work on some bigger sexier things (coming soon…) — just a Yahoo! Search gadget for the Windows Vista Sidebar and an accompanying page that aggregates downloadable software from Yahoo! available for Vista. (Note: You must have Vista actually installed for all of this to work properly)

This first definitely means a lot to me — it’s what I’ve wanted to do since I came to Yahoo!. And, what means even more to me is all the hard work put in by the people who made it happen. Thanks to Jeff, Billy, and Alfonso at The Skins Factory for your tireless efforts as well as to Brady, Marcus, Ariel, Anne, Shane, John A., Arlo, and Ed for your help. And, an extra special shout-out to Derrick and John H., who burned the midnight oil to get it all live on Vista launch day.

Making this week even better is the very positive response to the blog post Ed and I worked on over the weekend (thanks to Zealous, Brady, and Thi for their help as well). While TechCrunch called the post “surprisingly unbiased,” my favorite analysis came from a French blogger, who said it was (and excuse my rusty Francais) “a superb lesson on the transparency and authenticity of teams at Yahoo!”. It is really gratifying to see an honest and open approach to communicating with our developers and users pay off in this way. All of us on the team are extremely passionate about what we are doing, and I feel that shines through.

Which brings me to the final bright spot of this week, the team. Those of you who know me personally know that the last 8 months haven’t been the easiest. When I came into the group, there was a bit of uncertainty. But, we have continued to work hard — building great products while also building a great team. And even though we’re all working our tails off, it seems like I’m having more fun coming to work everyday because of who I get to work with and what we get to do. Yesterday, one more piece fell into place. But, we’ve got a few more spots left to fill. So, check out the jobs that show up when you do a search for “Widgets” here.

Three things to smile about this week, and it’s only Tuesday.

For a couple of people who work in tech, Ed and I argue over grammar and usage a lot. We’re currently working on an upcoming post for the Widgets Blog, and got into it over the English use of the French word “naitre,” as in “nee.” I originally used it in the French masculine (“ne”), which Ed then changed to the feminine (“nee”). At which point, the following IM conversation ensued:

I think Ed is technically right in that English has totally bastardized the correct usage of the French original. But, that’s not a reason to give in. I’m standing on principle that a foreign word should retain it’s usage rules when appropriated in another language — even if those rules are not normally applicable in the new language (e.g. the gender of an object).

Nerdy enough for ya? Weigh in below to help us decide the battle of the grammar-inclined Widgeteers.