A Yahoo named Amr Awadallah whacked up a subtitle parody of 300 as a commentary on Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo.

As Microsoft, we are the Persian forces, coming to the free land of Yahoo to ask for submission or some such nonsense. Sunnyvale gets to be the bastion of liberal thought, while Redmond is portrayed as a uninspired collective wanting nothing more than to grow in size.

I can really only appreciate the design of the joke, because as a part of Microsoft, I have a more humane view of the company than the rest of the world. The part of this that upsets me is how handcuffed we are. There’s no effective way we at Microsoft can comment on this sort of thing with the same tone; it’d only be funny to my co-workers, while for anyone else it’d be in extremely poor taste.

As a postscript, you’ve got to enjoy the irony of an ad for this parody appearing on Facebook.

I got an invitation to Yahoo’s new Fire Eagle location-sharing service this morning. While it’s still not fleshed out yet (the only function appears to be updating your location from the website directly). It’s somewhat hard to see what use the service will provide, but I don’t care about that. The polish on the Inferno Pigeon site is so well-executed, I want to use it regardless of what it does.

This screen is so human, so soft, so downright fucking cuddly, I just love it. Props should also be given to whomever on the Fuego Sparrow team came up with this privacy ping function. As the default is for the site to email you monthly to check that it’s still OK for them to share your location data, this is a great way to protect against irrate users. Nice work team Flame Heron; now just tell me what I’m supposed to use this Backdraft Canary thing to do.

PS - Yea, I think the name is funny, and I would’ve loved to be in the room bouncing those ideas off the walls.

When it came time to ask someone to refine the idea behind the Defrag conference, Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo) was tapped to provide an explanation. The first ideas Jeremy felt were the reasons for Defrag to exist were Open Source, Social Everywhere, Web Services, and Web platforms. Open Source got left out of the discussion a bit, but the remaining three were very interesting.

The point was made the MySpace and Facebook typify sites that are built as destination sites without much real function. In contrast, MyBlogLog attempts to incorporate social software around online activities people already participate in.

This argument makes plenty of sense up front. Providing rich socialization ability in the online locales where users already spend a lot of time is both obvious and logical. Personally I get all dizzy at the thought of a Facebook-esque news feed built into my Flickr homepage. However the question of a tipping point is worth exploring; If enough users all show up, does a site need a real purpose? There are plenty of popular bars that have lines out the door and tonnes of people inside, while the only function of the place is to buy overpriced drinks.

Yahoo’s investment in Hadoop, in conjunction with the in-house growth of Yahoo Research’s Pig, represent a shift in development priorities towards something Jeremy calls, “infrastructure software.” The social networks, even in their first-generation ‘outpost’ modes, are showing us that software needs to leverage grid/infrastructure computing, as distribution is handled by the users.

The movement towards developing software to run in the cloud is clearly a mandate for anyone who wants to have an audience moving forward. When you combine the idea of relocating social software and building the tools for developing infrastructure software, the end result is an extremely democratized method of software deployment. The human experience of finding software through your social grid is more capable than traditional marketing and distribution. This is incredibly similar to the painful evolution of the music industry, and I think what application developers need is something like a Radiohead vanguard to follow.

This morning’s Defrag keynote opened with a panel discussion on where the business of search and discovery has come from, and where it needs to go.

Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley) made a strong opening analogy by explaining that search is currently an, “experience in orienteering;” the journey to your information begins with a few words, followed by a long period of sniffing out clues. This process repeats until hopefully you find what you were looking for.

Obviously this creates a demand for a major upgrade to the human experience of search. One of the natural solutions is natural language processing, where Microsoft is doing a lot of great work (TellMe, Windows Speech Recognition, and Ford Sync).

Another of the interesting factors in the evolution of search is a pitch for building more topic-specific indexes. Steve Larsen (Krugle) argued a compelling case for vertical search indexes, “In a code-writing search index, Python is never a reptile and always a language.”

This feels like a workaround for the lack of NLP implementation/effectiveness, but as opposed to most instances, that sort of design sounds extremely valuable. I think I might rather have a half-dozen different search engines that I use across a day, assuming they are each much more targeted toward the information I’m looking for. I think this type of strategy could allow for a lot of smaller-scale growth in the search market.

Bradley Horowitz (Yahoo) gave an explanation of Flickr’s Interestingness system which brought up the powerful difference between explicit and implicit discovery systems. Explicit systems (voting, rating) are ripe for gaming and rigging, which obviously prevents an honest view of the landscape from emerging. The Interestingness recipe watches views, comments, and favourites across all the system’s photos. In addition though, it weights the value of those actions based on the relationship the author has with the viewer (your brother marking your photo as a favourite is different than a stranger doing the same). Intricacies like that help develop a more honest result set.

The beauty I see in these implicit designs is their invisibility to a user’s actions. Rather than putting the request on the user to think consciously about the value they place on something, the software simply listens and reacts. As Bradley put it so eloquently, “The system changes in the user’s wake.”

When the discussion got to addressing the uncrawlable information trapped behind paywalls and corporate firewalls. Jeremie Miller (Search Wikia) made the comment that as people define knowledge by what is discovered through search, knowledge that doesn’t make it into the index may cease to exist (so far as many people are concerned).

Honestly I’m terrified by the social implications of such a reality; the rift between those with access to the indexes and those without can have dire effects, not to mention the concerns around who controls those indexes.

The other night the Meebo crew through a second birthday party for themselves, mostly to play Guitar Hero and munch, but there was a larger goal: to announce the next iteration of Meebo as an online platform.

Having spent the past few years building one of the best web-based IM clients in town, team Meebo decided to make themselves available to developers with one simple phrase, “I want to _____ with you.“

Scrape together some Flash or JavaScript into a way to watch, shop, frag, (or eat?) all within the Meebo universe. They’ve organized a Lunch 2.0 + all-night dev camp on 27 November to kickstart the ecosystem. The team will even set up a video conference if you’re interested but can’t make it down to Mountain View, CA this month.

Emre Sokullu has rolled up the Office 2.0 space for Read/WriteWeb including Meebo’s entrance. The productivity-on-the-web market would appear highly lucrative from all the companies diving into it. From Yahoo’s purchase of Zimbra, to the current crowd favourite Google Apps, and even Adobe’s Virtual Ubiquity, Meebo’s rocket has taken off for a very desirable planet.

All of this puts Microsoft in a very delicate position. The continued investment in free, online productivity tools certainly represents shots across the bow of the Office Armada. While the Office Live tools are mostly about the storage of data in the cloud, everyone else seems to be banking on the ability to do their work online; We’ll have to wait for Ray Ozzie’s other shoe to drop. Even after all the kimonos have been opened and all the offerings have matured, who knows what humans actually want.

eBay will now be purchasing Yahoo ads, both of the graphical and text variety, and displaying them on eBay pages. I was initially surprised, but after a bit of thought this really should’ve happen sooner. Yahoo’s ad business is massive, and eBay is in the commerce business and they can’t bury their heads in the sand about targeted advertising.

Most of the coverage I’ve read this afternoon points to this agreement as a defensive tactic against Google’s war machine. eBay and Yahoo are recognizing that search is the ultimate leveler and that there are very few shopping destinations on the net, even if Ms. Whitman doesn’t think so. From the New York Times:

“There is a lot more to running a marketplace than getting a lot of listings,” Ms. Whitman said. “There is trust and safety, and payments and reputation. That stands eBay in good stead.”

It’s disappointing to me how slow Microsoft seems to be in finding a ticket to the dance on this one. Yet another example of how being a large organization can hold you back I suppose.

(via John Battelle’s Searchblog)