waider

I go to the west of Ireland for a weekend, and Yahoo buys del.icio.us. I can't leave you people out of my sight for a minute, can I?

So yahoo have broken third-party interop with their messaging network again. My sole reason for getting a yahoo account was because someone organised a party using yahoo's mailing list doohickey, and I've only hung around because my mother uses yahoo as her IM client. Now I can't connect to it unless I use their official client, which - on unix - is a piece of suck anyway - and really I'm wondering what the point is. It's certainly got nothing to do with spammers, and everything to do with forcing people into their market, people like me who have contacts using yahoo.

And if that wasn't enough, tell me why it is that Yahoo's TV listings for my area are starting at 8pm? It knows what timezone I'm in, after all. Would it be too much to ask that they give current listings?

Mostly content-free article about Orkut on News.com. It does mention that there are only three engineers working on the system, but most of the rest seems to be handwaving. I was interested in the comment from the Yahoo! guy; technically, Yahoo! is probably the longest-standing social network of them all, so they should have a lot more useful information to contribute on the topic. As mentioned before, I've hacked up a bunch of notes on what I think is wrong - and possibly unsolveable - with social networking software, but I've yet to actually do anything like write a coherent rant^Warticle on it. Having discussed it with wisn for a bit yesterday, we both agreed that the biggest stumbling block for anyone's rating system is that the ratings are inherently at the mercies of social dynamics, as existing networks like LiveJournal have shown - hands up who hasn't had one of their "de-friended" acquaintances go off in a big hissy fit on being removed from said friendslist? Or who hasn't agonised over how someone will react to not being reciprocally friended? (or who cringes at the arbitrary conjugation of the word "friend"...)

I really should write this up into something. Although I notice Clay Shirky appears to be doing some similar exploration, except he's writing multiple articles on it.