I really need to write more about Frost. Image from wordle.net.

As you may or may not know, I’m from Kansas originally. It seems like lately every week I read stories about severe weather destroying swaths of the Midwest. In fact, I gave my Mom a weather radio for Mother’s Day this year. Apparently it will squawk in the middle of the night if there’s severe weather in your county.

I used Dipity’s Tickr mashup to make a slideshow of severe weather by date and by location in Kansas. There are some pretty cool pics in there that definitely remind me of living in Kansas, where within 30 minutes the sky can go from clear and sunny to pitch black.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/09/timetube-the-timeline-that-youtube-should-built/

Blammmo!

This was made with Dipity on Facebook.
Check it out and tell me what you think.

Well, it looks like Yahoo! is about to be acquired (no wait, taken over) by Microsoft. Oh, it’s certainly in the best short-term interest of shareholders, but it’s foolish to think that Yahoo! couldn’t flourish again on it’s own. I was there in 2001 and we did flourish again in 2004.

Yahoo! is profitable and they are still the biggest single website on the Internet. It seems to me that the company has become rather weak-minded and weak-willed and I wish they could stop that without selling off to Microsoft. All they need is a forward thinking leader, like a Steve Jobs but for Yahoo!. They need someone who can upend the entire organization, focusing in on a set of big future goals. My understanding of Jerry Yang is that he’s a nice and smart guy, but he spent the majority of Semel’s tenure playing golf rather than plotting out the future.

Yahoo! also has to stop rewarding mediocrity. One of the reasons I left was because we had a whole bunch of cool technology for letting users make My Yahoo! modules on their own (Like iGoogle!), but some bone-headed exec would never let us release it. Most of the people I worked with left for greener pastures over the past two years.

Maybe a way to start is to not have a front page that looks graphic-for-graphic the same as the AOL front page. Even when I was at Yahoo!, AOL was considered the lowest of the low.

Yahoo’s Front Page:

AOL’s Front Page:

I saw this awesome image of the Windows Mobile 6 home screen. It so makes me want one of these wonderful feature-rich devices.

I especially like the part labeled “iPod Killer” above. It’s the middle bar that seems to be for playing music. Apparently all I have to do is click there to play music, but which music?

I also like how all the controls are being shown (Play, Prev, Next, Volume Up, Volume Down) even though obviously no music is playing or has been selected. I’m glad that they contracted a different designer for the shiny blue oblong Play button versus the other controls which are some sort of shiny metal without a background.

All this innovation, on such a tiny screen.

This is the gift to get, this X-mas.

See here..

This is great news. Everyone agrees that using Webkit sucks, especially on an EDGE connection.

WeatherPop with Radar for iPhone, no?

The latest version of Feedable has finally been released.

What’s new in this version:

• Now uses clucene open source search engine (much faster and better coverage)
• Brand new streamlined UI is faster and easier to use (compare to the old UI)
• Various browser fixes and other improvements

Please check it out and tell me what you think in the comments!

Feedable is out. It’s an RSS reader designed for more mainstream type folk. The biggest piece is that Feedable automatically finds the most popular stories in 9 different categories.

Check it out and tell me what you think.

Posts about Feedable:
Micropersuasion - Feedable Puts a Memetracker in Your RSS Reader
Pulse 2.0 - Meet Feedable, A Slightly New Web 2.0 RSS Consolidator
More to come…

Over the last 9 months or so, I’ve been working on a special software project.

It’s been a difficult process. There are a lot of ups and downs that come from working alone on a massive project with little interaction with the outside world beyond a handful of friends. In a big company like Yahoo!, building software is partly about building consensus and getting everyone moving in the same direction. In my one person world, it’s about thinking you can do it and not looking back. Even after coming up short 50 times. Maybe we were just emboldened by the success of WeatherPop. Or My Yahoo with RSS.

Anyhow, this new product is the result of all that effort and industry. It’s ready today for YOU to test it.

Feedable Reader is the name of this new project. It’s an RSS reader with an AJAX interface that goes far beyond all the other readers out there. You can sign up to test it out here. I’m sorry that I can’t say more or show screenshots today. If this test goes well, we should be able to open it up to anyone pretty soon.

I’d like to thank our very early testers: Misa, Pablo, Mim, Chaz, Spaceman, Ben-Chavez, Edsarkiss. They suffered through all the times I just changed things around for seemingly no reason. Thanks also to Dave for designing our themes and collaborating on the visual style of the chrome as well as our very early logo (above).

My goal with all of this isn’t money. Or status or whatever. Right now, it’s just to make something that people like using. Something that’s undeniably great. And we’re making a hell of a lot of progress.