Disqus - Latest Comments for yaniv

Re: AOL Answers Sees The Light Of Day, 3 Years After AOL’s Acquisition Of Yedda

Yaniv Golan — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:29:39 -0000

Robin, you're very quick - it's been less than 2 hours since it quietly went up :)

Anyway, while I understand that yesterday's news are, well, yesterday's, you might want to refer to the old TechCrunch posts covering Yedda - I believe you'll find out that it actually compares pretty well against what you call next-generation Q&A services.

If you can't find the time to do that, I'd be more than happy to walk you through the comparison. Some key points we could look at together - semantic search and matching, proactive distribution of questions, tapping the social graph (both Facebook and Twitter), automatic categorization, and probably quite a few more.

This is not meant to disparage these newer services - some of them are pretty good.

Re: Buzz, blogsphere and serial killers

Yaniv Golan — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:16:36 -0000

There is a very simple way to measure the maturity of a service.

If most of the posts you're seeing are about the service itself, or if such posts dominate the "most popular" lists, it's still in the Scoble phase.

Re: How to add a tweet this button with auto TinyURL or Bit.ly shortening

Yaniv Golan — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:38:57 -0000

Quick fix - the code breaks when the URL contains Unicode characters.

To fix that, use your favorite Unicode-compatible URL encoding function before sending the URL to bit.ly, and when parsing the response, replace:

$bitlyurl = $bitlycontent["results"][$url]["shortUrl"];

with:

$temp = array_values($bitlycontent["results"]);
$bitlyurl = $temp[0]["shortUrl"];

This removes the dependency on both bit.ly and you encoding the URL the same way.

Re: Why today's Twitter is like Napster in Y2K. (Scripting News)

Yaniv Golan — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 04:55:43 -0000

Or, you could go the other way:

@username is the pointer to my personal stream in the current service

@username@domain.com is the pointer to my personal stream on a domain.com. To resolve the pointer, use some kind of discovery API on domain.com, which will return the URL to my actual stream

@username@domainalias is the same as @username@domain.com, only shorter :) requires my current service to support this specific alias. Right now, we'll probably all want to support @username@twitter, though later there will probably be other major players we'll want to support.

I don't want Twitter to be the central clearing house for my identity. I have ClaimID for that (e.g. http://claimid.com/yanivg). I want my identity to be able to able to include references to my Twitter (and later, BranxX) conversation stream.

Re: Yaniv Golan Calls Twitter “The 140-characters Netscape”

Yaniv Golan — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 03:38:10 -0000

Not necessarily.

Twitter has an impressive but still limited reach at this point - a few tens of millions, depending on who's counting and how.

If a competing microblogging platform could end up being installed as the default on all Nokia phones, or - more likely - Googlephones - it could surpass Twitter in reach even if it was an inferior service.

Re: Yaniv Golan Calls Twitter “The 140-characters Netscape”

Yaniv Golan — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 03:33:16 -0000

Obviously, I am not a fortune teller, and if there is one thing you can always count on, it's surprises :)

However, to make things even worse, my view isn't even bipolar, it's uni-polar - I don't think Twitter will survive by becoming a giant.

I see a chance for Twitter to be around long term if it becomes the leader in establishing open standards that enable interoperability with its competitors. And no, this is not an oxymoron.

Based on observing the (admittedly somewhat short) history of the net, I don't think Twitter can survive long term if they insist on becoming the one and only funnel.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Yaniv Golan — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:03:55 -0000

I agree with your analysis. But I think there is one more thing that makes FriendFeed a less-then-optimal conversation platform, and that is the user intent.

People talk(ed) on FriendFeed. They started meaningful discussions, and participated in meaningful discussions. And that was interesting.

But FriendFeed is also very much a lifestream platform. Which means that when viewing my FF stream, I could see these bits that people put their mind to ( = posted with the intent of posting them to FF), but also lots of automatic bits, that FF was kind enough to collect from their various other online "places" - Flickr photos, Delicious links, etc.

These bits were created without an *intent*, and are therefore boring. They are mostly noise.

As a person who consumes a lot of information during the day, this is useful. I get a quick summary of what's going on without having to go places. But being useful is not the same as being interesting. FF was useful, but it wasn't very interesting.

Contrast that with Twitter. Most of the tweets are posted with intent. People intend to say something. Hence, the stream is interesting.

Facebook suffers from the same problem.

The same problem though is slowly creeping into Twitter, with automatic tweets from authenticated apps like FourSquare, Spymaster and friends. It's great for you that you just unlocked the explorer-whatever at wherever, but obviously, it is not very interesting.

I wish Twitter would acquire apps to always present the tweets they tweet on behalf of a person to the person, in edit mode, before they get posted. That would make it an intentional act, and IMO would prevent the boring-automatic-noise issue.

Lifestream is useful for us mass-information-consumers, but it's boring. Plus, most of the people are not multi-service mass-information-consumers, they just want to engage. With other people. In a meaningful way.

Re: The Internet abhors a funnel (Scripting News)

Yaniv Golan — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 04:32:00 -0000

I agree. It does feel like a fundamental law of this medium, and I've never met a company that was able to resist its implications long term.

Re: Flickr Lost Its Appeal

Yaniv Golan — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:56:07 -0000

I share your pain, Ilan. You asked me on Twitter - what will I switch to. I don't have an answer yet, but one thing I know is that I will not be so quick to switch to another service that holds that much power over my content *I've* created. Power corrupts :)

One thing though - while I appreciate the compliment, I do have to say that this is not doing Thomas justice :) in fact, when I grow up, I want to be a Thomas Hawk.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Yaniv Golan — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:55:30 -0000

Oh, I agree re existing domain names being short enough and the value to the reader - that was my point, I guess it wasn't clear enough.

Re 3rd party tracking, yes, the value is the ego boost, and also the ability to understand how something spreads across the net and who are the real influencers. For companies like http://tra.cx this is invaluable information. It could be provided by the conversational media (e.g. Twitter) or by the publishing infrastructure (e.g. Wordpress).

And of course, once we have multiple stat-providers, there will be companies that will create services that will aggregate all these stats in one place, creating a new industry segment, and so the cycle continues...

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Yaniv Golan — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:41:15 -0000

Good point. Using the same domain name will improve performance, and reduce use confusion. It will also fix the incentives - the folks with the most incentive to keep links from rotting are the content publishers. See http://yaniv.golan.name/blo....

We'll be losing the "tracking" aspect of the current 3rd party short URLs, but this tracking is already quite unreliable given the non-unique nature of the short URLs. Perhaps it would be in the interest of Twitter etc to provide this click tracking capability. It'd still be unreliable, but would be far less damaging to the net infrastructure.

Re: FasterWeb Gets Investment – Pushed To Go Faster

Yaniv Golan — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:16:11 -0000

This is exactly why I think that open source should have been a cornerstone of their strategy. And yes, without I do believe the biz model is at risk, and sale cycles will be long and hard.

Still, they provide a lot of value - and they are smart folks - I am sure they will find the right formula.

Re: FasterWeb Gets Investment – Pushed To Go Faster

Yaniv Golan — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:45:42 -0000

Kfir,

FasterWeb is addressing the non-bandwidth issues actually - from latency to client-side render time issues.

Higher bandwidth will only further highlight the need for this kind of optimizations.

Check out this Yahoo! article - http://developer.yahoo.com/... - you will notice that many of the suggestions there have nothing to do with bandwidth-related issues. FasterWeb does some of this, as well as some more advanced optimizations made possible by its server-side components.

I am less comfortable with other elements in FasterWeb's strategy (as it was a few weeks ago when I participated in a due diligence process on FW) - I strongly believe it would have made sense for them to work more closely with the open source community for at least part oft their offering.

Re: User data ownership on Facebook and why it doesn’t matter

Yaniv Golan — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:26:24 -0000

Robert,

At the risk of shooting my own foot, I for one would love stronger - much stronger - regulations on what companies can and cannot do with user accounts and user data, as well as an external "appeal" entity.

You read the TOS, and you know what you're signing up for. I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone to be as savvy though.

Re: צרות במספר המשתמשים הפעילים באתרי התוכן

Yaniv Golan — Sat, 26 May 2007 12:24:26 -0000

שימו לב שלפחות במקרה של פליקר, חלק נכבד (הרוב?) של העלאות התמונות לא מתבצע דרך דף ה UPLOAD - שזה מה שנמדד פה - אלא דרך כלים אחרים - Uploadr, ווידג'טים למיניהם, אימייל ועוד. כך שכנראה שהמספר גדול משמעותית מ 0.2%.

Re: אתגר המוגבלויות של Web2.0

Yaniv Golan — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 08:23:49 -0000

שושנה,

זה לא תאוריה :)

תוספת שעוזרת, היא לאפשר את רוב הפעולות - מלבד באמצעות AJAX - גם בדרכים "נגישות".
יש מקרים שזה בלתי אפשרי (תלוי בסוג האתר), אבל ברוב המקרים זה בהחלט אפשרי...

לייצר גרסה נפרדת שהיא נגישה זה - לטעמי - מסובך יותר - קשה לדאוג שגרסה נפרדת תשאר מסנוכרנת ובאותה רמה כמו הגירסה הרגילה.

ואולי הידיד שלך ירצה לעזור לנו בבדיקות נגישות ב- Yedda?

Re: אתגר המוגבלויות של Web2.0

Yaniv Golan — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 10:41:07 -0000

פתרון יותר פשוט זה "graceful degradation" - תכונה של הישום, שעוברת אוטומטית למצב "פשוט" כאשר היא מזהה דפדפן שאינו תומך בכל הפיצ'קס. למשל, אם הדפדפן לא תומך ב- JavaScript, הישום חוזר להשתמש בהחלפת דפים מבוססת שרת פשוטה, ללא שימוש בטכנולוגיות AJAX למיניהם.

טכניקה זו אינה טריוואלית ודורשת תכנון והשקעה, אולם לדעתי היא מביאה - מעבר ליתרונותיה למשתמשים בעלי המוגבלויות - גם לישומים טובים יותר ונכונים יותר באופן כללי.

קל יותר ליישם את הטכניקה הזאת אם מתחילים את תכנון היישום ללא הנחות לגבי יכולות AJAX ודואגים שהכל יעבוד קודם כל ללא AJAX, ורק אז מוסיפים AJAX אופציונלי איפה שבאמת צריך.