I admit that I am a “Google guy”. i.e. I like the companies products and their quirkyness. I have also long abandoned a number of core Yahoo products (IM, mail, MyYahoo, etc) due to their design choices and a general preference for most things Goog. However, Yahoo holds a soft spot in my heart, partly due to their history, and the fact that some close friends of mine worked there till recently, but mostly for their open source/*Nix ethos, their ownership of flickr and del.icio.us (two of THE best web properties out there), and for their support of projects like Hadoop (and for Jeremy Zawodny, who writes one of the best blogs in the business).
Yesterday, amidst all the Microsoft morass, Yahoo gave us a picture of what they have done with Hadoop, in some sense a necessity given what Google is doing with MapReduce, but an excellent example of a company making good technology choices. Some of the stats for their new webmap are astounding.
I wonder what it would take to create a map of the scientific web, or subsets of the scientific web and will anyone ever do it.
Yahoo is also hosting the Hadoop Summit in March
4 Comments
I agree, Flickr and del.icio.us are two of my favourite services. Perhaps the Yahoo brand suffers from longevity? I tend to think of it as “old web”, in the same breath as MSN and Lycos for some reason, even though Flickr/del.icio.us are the essence of Web 2.0.
Yahoo Groups is also much better than Google Groups, IMHO. I think Google have a few killer products (GMail, GReader, search) that make up for some complete dogs (Groups, iGoogle).
I agree, Flickr and del.icio.us are two of my favourite services. Perhaps the Yahoo brand suffers from longevity? I tend to think of it as “old web”, in the same breath as MSN and Lycos for some reason, even though Flickr/del.icio.us are the essence of Web 2.0.
Yahoo Groups is also much better than Google Groups, IMHO. I think Google have a few killer products (GMail, GReader, search) that make up for some complete dogs (Groups, iGoogle).
That could be the case, and for some reasons I find the Yahoo properties to be very discombobulated. For whatever reasons, I don’t think of Flickr or del.icio.us as Yahoo properties (and in the wake of the Microsoft situation, I really worry). My #1 objection to the Microsoft situation (which I think is going to get done) is that Yahoo is such an open source company.
That could be the case, and for some reasons I find the Yahoo properties to be very discombobulated. For whatever reasons, I don't think of Flickr or del.icio.us as Yahoo properties (and in the wake of the Microsoft situation, I really worry). My #1 objection to the Microsoft situation (which I think is going to get done) is that Yahoo is such an open source company.