Hello161

Ironically considering the subject matter after about a dozen attempts last night this entry failed to post more than Zippy’s picture on the now utterly shambolic Yahoo. Readers I have remained fairly tight lipped about the 360 transition in fact I think these entries are the only mentions I’ve given it. I have kept quiet because I can’t imagine how me giving it a rake over could be a riveting read . Also as the owner of two 360 groups I don’t want anyone getting the idea that my own posts on this topic consist of anything more than conjecture and guesswork on my part. Believe me I’m not privy to more details than anyone else. However it’s about time Stu’s Blog had a say about all this so with a liberal dusting of words like caution, throwing and wind, I shall begin raking and whingebagging So how do I see it? Well let’s start with the recently dropped hot potato that they call Mash. Apparently Yahoo wants to open up and more importantly in terms of ad revenue be the main start and return to point for all your intertube needs Just as Facebook allow outsiders to add restricted and pre structured code to their site in the form of applications, Yahoo wants you to be able to see similar on your main web screen start page Note A . All this sort of stuff needs testing, one to check that consumers like it and two to see if developers are willing to work with it.…it appears where Mash was concerned that a resounding no was the answer on both counts. My guess is that Yahoo dramatically misinterpreted the market research and site data from 360 and the unprecedented number of angry comments about Mash and the fate of 360 spread all over every Yahoo property on the web genuinely took them by surprise. I think it was believed that 360 was just a quick drop in and out portal and the short attention span tea break type shallow content provided by Mash would be more than enough to satisfy 360 users as part of a ‘universal profile’ The recent decision to shut Mash down completely has in effect insulated the future universal profile system from the barrage of criticism and scorn that was directly aimed at Mash Note B I can’t believe that the feedback from Mash and 360 will be totally ignored, for the simple reason that Yahoo have actually shown some sense recently…hard to imagine but true. We were told that Yahoo groups would be moved over onto a groups beta system, I even created a test group on the new platform to get familiarised with it because they actually stated point blank that all groups would eventually be forced to swap over. In short people didn’t like it, it wasn’t all bad but you had to think why change? Why go to the trouble when the new system offered no real advantages over the current one, was buggy and ultimately might alienate a lot of users . What happened after nearly 12 months of beta testing was a change of direction, the beta test was scrapped and all groups that had been taking part or had been created on the new groups platform were moved to the existing (classic) groups format, with promises that what had been learnt would be incorporated in the classic groups in an ‘evolutionary way’…(but as yet I think even Mr C. Darwin himself would struggle to find evidence of any beta incorporation.) Similar things have gone on since the release of the new Yahoo mail, with a lot of people preferring the old faster (classic) mail it was kept going and now classic mail is being actively developed again... So I look at 360 and the fact that it should have transitioned in the early part of this year. We were told that it is no longer being ‘fixed’ or ‘maintained’ or worked on. Well newsflash for you all it is. Sizeable chunks of the 360 program code appear to have been rewritten. People say that the 360 mailbox is not working properly..I can’t send graphics anymore etc,, wrong. It is now working exactly as they intend it to because it’s using an updated mailbox program so the loophole that allowed you to add html is no longer there. My own exploit of the blast messages for iframes and animated themes which ultimately led me as far as full javascript injection and xss was also closed a couple of months later Note C . I am now asking myself why did they bother? Why work on 360 to address these vulnerabilities at all if it is being transitioned, why as the product blog stated add more servers to cope with demand, why introduce 360 plus for certain countries if everyone is going on to a universal profile? Further evidence of them ‘not working’ on 360 is evident this week. My footnotes and image positioning code is now being ‘sanitized’, so are slideshows and videos. In short the servers seem to be running a new stupidly tight or extremely badly written script when you view from the main 5 entries at a time page, but strangely enough not if you view through the single blog/comment/permanent link. Is it actually possible that they are listening to users after all and a lot of 360 will be incorporated as it is in to the new Yahoo. Have they got time to give us ‘plenty of notice’ if the second transition date is now 2nd half 2008? Dare I say it but could there even be room for a 360 ‘classic’? Like I said. Just my thoughts on it. Footnotes:- Note A Or your desktop or your cell phone, or your virtual reality glasses or whatever else you connect to the web on…The big difference though is whereas Facebook/Myspace et al are destinations on the web or places you go to Yahoo appears to want to offer all this stuff in the place you start from…I don’t really see much benefit to this grand plan to be perfectly honest, just because Yahoo’s site stats don’t show that I regularly return to the the UK and Ireland homepage from (say) Yahoo mail doesn’t mean I’m not using it, I am returning but I’m leaving the mail open in its own tab and returning in a fresh one…the same with groups and with 360, when I’m on the web these three sites are invariably left open constantly in separate tabs. I’m willing to bet that most people who use mail/360/groups/answers/my yahoo/chat/etc do the same, If I’m right a significant amount of user research data showing navigational paths and non referred hits are virtually worthless. Return to blog whence you came Note B Despite delusions of grandeur from the interns who were handed the task (assignment? project? workshop? teambuilding exercise?) that was developing Mash, I’d hazard a guess they believed it would eventually spectacularly morph into the backbone of the new UPS at a glitzy public unveiling of some sort, overwhelming hostility towards the whole thing soon made it obvious that it would probably only ever amount to an elaborate test bed for developer modules. Return to blog whence you came Note C At the time I was working with an anti troll and spam quick comments box add on that mapped visitors and added their ip address to their comment…Ok maybe that was pushing the privacy boundaries a bit further than Yahoo are comfortable with but never the less, serious recoding was done on the 360 servers to prevent me doing it. Incidentally I have since added the same code to my geocities guestbook with the result that it has stopped spam postings on that dead…From a constant 3 or 4 attempts a week over the last six months or so. (if you do follow that link by the way it will show you your ip address, however the only way anyone else will see it is if you actually post a comment. It’s not the same as the automatic ip address collectors used by a lot of page visit counters etc ) Return to blog whence you came Footnotes errr footnote. If you wish to make use of footnote links or see this post or any of my others as they are supposed to look be with full gadgetry and foolery your best bet at the moment seems to be clicking on the comments buttons so you are reading individual entries.