Tag: yahoo

Social network suicide

I pay for my flickr account. I will commit social network suicide if they mess them up. I bet you a lot of other people will to. We are getting to an age where we can build the open social network tool set based on open principles, open tagging.

luckily, i already have all the yahoo spam domains in my host file, so i won’t get any of those ads

Prediction Markets

Internet gambling is good for consumers. Too bad America wants to ban it

The spread of the internet has made the online gambler king. The emergence of large online gambling companies has slashed gaming operators’ margins and driven up payout ratios for gamblers. And the punters have embraced it in their millions, especially in America, where illegal gambling has long flourished. Last year 12m Americans placed about $6b in online bets, 50% the world’s total. You might have hoped politicians would greet such a demonstration of popularity with moderation—welcoming online gambling’s benefits and curbing its inevitable excesses. Instead they have put all their chips on red. Last weekend Congress passed a bill that will stop banks making payments to online gambling sites, adding to an already formidable legislative arsenal that outlaws most online gaming.

congress just killed a golden goose.
2006-12-03: uh crap i would have LOVED to attend this one. prediction markets is one of my permathreads.
2007-01-30: performance matters for betting markets too. to get even faster you’d have to factor out the humans clicking the buttons, but i guess that would require betting to grow up from being entertainment.
2007-04-24:

The key drivers in both filtering and consensus making in such systems is often positive feedback. For Digg, good stories get “dug” which makes them more likely to be seen and dug further. Poor stories do not get dug, rank lower, are less likely to be dug and slowly disappear. In ant trails, pheromone deposition stimulates further deposition if the food source really is good. Perhaps software developers should be given a cache of tokens. They can give the manager of a project 2 tokens each day if they think the project worth continuing. The manager can hire a programmer for the day [for 1 token] if he has enough tokens. Thus, crappy projects soon get filtered out by consensus. [The 2 vs 1 token prevents too much fluidity in the project and damps some random fluctuations].

2007-12-06:

In a new book, “Imperfect Knowledge Economics”, Mr Frydman sets out an alternative approach to prediction, in which the forecaster recognizes that his model will inevitably be less than perfect. Their work has received glowing praise from Nobel-prize-winning economists such as Kenneth Arrow and Edmund Phelps, who wrote the introduction to the book—though it is unlikely to have gone down so well with Robert Lucas, who won the Nobel for his work on rational expectations.

2008-01-07:

Despite the markets’ strong forecasting abilities, there is a slight optimistic bias driven mainly by new employees. On average, outcomes that were good for Google were overpriced by 20%. This bias was strongest on days after appreciations in Google stock and, ironically, for outcomes under our own control! We also find biases against extreme outcomes and short selling. Given a range of 5 outcomes, the middle ones were typically overpriced and unprofitable by comparison with the outliers.

hmm, i must have slept through that one.
2021-04-21:

are prediction markets doomed to repeat errors as grave as giving Trump a 15% chance of overturning the election in early December, and a 12% chance of overturning it even after the Supreme Court including 3 judges whom he appointed telling him to screw off? My answer is, surprisingly, an emphatic yes, and I see a few reasons for optimism.

2022-02-09:

In 2010, Philip Tetlock (one of the signatories on the pro-prediction market letter) did some pretty basic forecasting work, not even prediction market level, and proved that he could significantly outperform top analysts at the CIA with access to classified information. The government refused to hire him or use any of his methods, and continued shutting down new prediction markets as they arose. Polymarket is probably the biggest prediction market currently available. US law considers unlicensed prediction markets to be somewhere between illegal gambling and illegal futures trading, ie definitely illegal. The US is becoming the North Korea of forecasting. Every other civilized country allows prediction markets. In a perfect world, they could ignore our constant own goals and move on without us. But because America has a disproportionate share of money, users, coders, and entrepreneurs, a US-less prediction market ecosystem won’t be living up to its potential. That means decreased ability to gather and process information and worse decision-making worldwide.

Spam filtering

Spam filtering as a proxy for search market share

Why is it that the most basic spams and 419 scams make it past yahoo’s spam filters into my Yahoo inbox? I was willing to go give them a fair shot with their new ui, but their spam filtering is beyond bad, and makes their new mail beta just as unusable as the old one. Almost makes me wonder if they have commercial reasons for letting a lot of spam through to their user base. Not having a capable contextual advertising platform must put them in some tight spots when revenue maximization time inevitably rolls around, and spam thresholds are early victims, I suppose. Even more so at MSN, whose hotmail is even worse. it is the rare event, however, maybe once a month, that spam makes it to my gmail inbox.

The less search market share your email provider has, the more spam you can expect in your inbox.

The new york times reports that gmail spam filtering is getting even better. Meanwhile, the obvious spam in my Yahoo inbox continues.

Looks like yahoo can’t even afford a SSL certificate for their mail domain.. oy. Plus they insist to show you a spammy ‘start page’ instead of your inbox. Someone getting desperate in the monetization department?

yahoo mail sucks

Yahoo

What moron would expire news article URLs when disk space is plentiful and cheap? Apparently Yahoo doesn’t want me to use del.icio.us. The sad thing, just as with their RSS mess, is that they have people working for them who know better. That place needs it’s own mini. Too many clueless middle managers.
2006-09-29: The red tape saga at Yahoo continues.

“NOW let’s just pause for a second.” It is the 4th pause for thought that Terry Semel, chairman and chief executive of Yahoo!, has requested in 10 minutes. He is trying to marshal various arguments to prove that his firm, the world’s largest internet company by visitors to its website, has a coherent and winning strategy compared with Google, a phenomenally successful search engine. With only slightly bigger revenues, Google has 3.5x the market value of Yahoo!. 2x in 3 months Wall Street has dumped the shares of Yahoo! and widened the gap.

2006-10-09: Good article on the many problems at Yahoo.

But the problems at Yahoo go beyond advertising. From video programming to social networking — areas of interest to users and advertisers alike — the company is losing its initiative. And each time a product fails in the market or is late, Yahoo loses some ability to do more deals and hire more talented employees. The shares are down 38% this year, sending some employees out the door in search of better shots at stock market wealth.

2006-10-14: Who indeed

I think the better buyer is a media company. News Corporation is the one that most comes to mind. Rupert has shown that he’s serious about the Internet and that he is not afraid to make big bets. It would be highly dilutive since News Corp itself has a $65B market cap, but it might be accretive to earnings given that News Corp trades at a higher EBITDA multiple than Yahoo! now. The one reason I think its most unlikely is that News Corp has shown an interest in working closely with Google and buying Yahoo! would take them in an opposite direction.

2006-11-23: Heh. Snark at the incompetence manifest in the manifest.

The latest example from Yahoo!, the world’s largest internet company by some measures, reverses the trend. Brad Garlinghouse, a manager just senior enough to be noteworthy, has put forth a “Peanut Butter Manifesto”, which was helpfully “leaked” to the Wall Street Journal. It was meant as part St Crispin’s Day speech to rally the troops, part corporate analysis of Yahoo!’s many troubles, part turnaround plan—and, it seems, part publicity stunt. But it turned out to be a redundant series of platitudes, split infinitives, clichés and mixed metaphors.

2006-12-03: Problems not just with monetization, but basic search, still:

Y! may have 28% of all Internet searches, but for some reason Y! does not generate 28% of Internet traffic.

2006-12-07: Cultural conflict

The story about Braun taking a big corner conference room at Y! HQ and turning it into an office (when even Jerry Yang has a cube out amongst the ‘rank and file’) is a totally rich illustration of SoCal vs NoCal, uh, charm.

2006-12-11: “leaked” like peanut butter?

Facebook flatly rejected the $1B offer, looking for far more. Yahoo was prepared to pay up to $1.62B, but negotiations broke off before the offer could be made.

2007-01-18: Time for Plan B at Yahoo. Funnily self-referential
2007-02-25: +1

At Yahoo, the marketers rule, and at Google the engineers rule. And for that, Yahoo is finally paying the price.

2007-04-19: Nice 1 page summary of an endless list of problems.
2007-06-11: 80 VPs? That’s crazy, and 70 too many.

Yahoo disputes the notion that it is losing people at an unusual rate, saying that it had named 80 vice presidents worldwide this year

2007-07-25: Now there’s a surprise. I am puzzled why good people like Micah Dubinko can stand the nonsense over there.

My time at Yahoo! wasn’t super productive – I had a lot of ideas, but zero ability to get them implemented

2007-09-12: Oy. Talk about a preference for pain.

I’m not going to lie to you, it’s rough going right now. We get smacked around by the media. It’s been a while since we had a really big, notable win. I think morale at the company is low, the future uncertain and the food still sucks (although, I’ve had worse). But despite that, we had a record turnout for our last internal hack day. We had so many people with ideas that we had to completely change the format of the event because the campus could no longer scale to meet our demands. There is still plenty fight in this company and we have no shortage of asses to kick. So lace up all you Yahoo!’s…the ass won’t kick itself.

2007-10-03: 50? Try 500. No wonder they can’t get anything done.

People at Yahoo figure out the average number of employees per VP. The number seems to be around 50.

2007-10-06: Could be worth as much $45 per share with a dramatic overhaul that would include outsourcing its paid search, cutting staff by 25% and restructuring its graphic display advertising.
2007-11-30: I especially liked the one about the 300 VPs.

2007-12-11: Traffic down

web search queries on Yahoo! were down 10% from November 2006

2008-02-01: Comarketing

Think about it… Yahoo doesn’t mean keyboards. They didn’t do plastics or ergonomic research or think of some insight about key travel distance. The message was that Yahoo was willing to put their name on anything.

2008-02-15: I think its related to education levels. Dumb people can’t tell if they are getting crap results.

Yahoo is strong in “struggling societies,” “blue collar backbone,” and “remote America,” where as Google obtains higher use in “small town contentment,” “affluent suburbia,” and “upscale America.”

2008-04-21: Simple features take 2 years to launch indeed.
2008-07-01: Can I haz flickr / del.icio.us?

Microsoft is trying to put together a sort of take-over coalition where Microsoft would get Yahoo’s search while AOL or News Corp would acquire other parts of Yahoo. However, it doesn’t seem all that likely.

2 approaches to rss

i don’t normally comment on RSS, but i have recently had occasion to deal with 2 sets of RSS extensions. both extend RSS into the geographical realm, but are lacking test cases so far. so i wrote to the 2 originators of those extensions, and got wildly different responses. a clueless “shucks” from yahoo, collaboration from the georss community. luckily, the yahoo extension is not causing a lot of damage since they are limiting their own success with their ineptitude.

Bot classes

After a couple days of robots.txt love, I have now much less crap in my logs. A good opportunity to see which bots are well-written. Based on what I am seeing with /robots.txt, I am sure glad I blocked most of these festering piles of dung from my site.

not using conditional get while requesting /robots.txt

Only kinjabot, OnetSzukaj/5.0 and Seekbot/1.0 get this right. All other bots, including Google and Yahoo, do not. Lame.

requesting /robots.txt too often

The biggest offender is VoilaBot, checking /robots.txt every 5 minutes, every day. You gotta be kidding me. Google and Yahoo are not much better, you’d think they’d figured out a way by now to communicate the state of /robots.txt across different crawlers. Other bots fare better by virtue of being less desperate.

Problems like this are economic opportunities.