jr conlin's ink stained banana

Let me begin by saying that when i first heard of MyBlogLog, i was unimpressed. Actually, i was damn paranoid about it because i recognized that adding it to a page meant giving them access to my traffic and visitors. At a tech overview, however, i radically changed my mind about it. Yes, there was some information collecting, but it was volunteer based (you had to sign in and be a part of MyBlogLog in order to participate, you could also "block" yourself from appearing on various sites, and all kinds of other goodness). What struck me in that meeting was that these folks were smart and got it. They understood the needs and concerns of both sides of that issue, and addressed them elegantly. What's more, MyBlogLog wasn't the main point that these guys wanted to do. It was just the very tip of what they had to offer. These guys were smart, aggressive, capable and could easily become major innovators at Yahoo!

So naturally, it was decided that they had to die.

What happened to MyBlogLog was a clarion call to me that i needed to leave Yahoo. That group was bought and then beaten with a shovel for purely political reasons. Why the hate? Partly because the parties involved in "transitioning the new acquisition to the standard Yahoo architecture" were threatened by just how smart the MBL guys were. Fun fact: the various architects at Yahoo had a buzz-word filled plan that would have filtered the sort of information and tidbits you'd see based your contacts, or more precisely, the contacts you actually had associations with (e.g. if you sent mail to Kent, checked out his photos on Flickr, IM'd him every day, and checked his blog, chances are you'd be more interested in what he's doing than Bob in accounting you last mailed in early April). They were projecting optimistically that the system would be in place and rolled out to a few select properties (mostly low traffic, article based, shiny crap properties like OMG and Canadian Lifestyles), within two years of the original estimate. MBL had it built and ready to go within three weeks of hearing about it. They weren't being dorks about it either. They built something that any property could have tied to in a day and used, and since it was hosted off a Hadoop cluster using spare cycles on lesser used machines, it already had scale for anything at Yahoo. What sort of bonus or SuperStar award did these guys get? The project was killed at the twelfth hour and they were threatened with legal action if they even thought about releasing it early.

MBL was the red-headed step child. Forever over-achieving in order to make the beatings of it's step-dad less brutal. Many of their most awesome tools were internal. They were top grade tinkerers and hackers.

i was working with Yahoo Developer Network at that point. YDN was having it's own problems, but one of the things i was doing was trying to solve problems like this. Granted, that wasn't part of my official job description, but since these folks were developers and had a huge potential benefit to external efforts, i figured it fell well within the scope of our group anyway. There were a few similar red-headed step children at Yahoo, and being similarly gingered myself, i tried to get those properties the love they needed, even if it meant going behind the back of the folks that "knew better". (Sorry, if you're cutting resources to a property you just paid millions of dollars to acquire because they make you uncomfy, that's your problem. i'm more interested in making sure the company makes back the money you just squandered.) As such, i tried to be on good terms with those guys. i'd like to think i still am, but that's probably just my delusions.

Eventually, i resigned, both mentally and in my employment. i realized that sometimes, no matter what you do or say, some folks are just compelled to become Darwin Candidates and the only thing you can do is start running the other way and hope the collateral damage is manageable.

And now, after thoroughly beating that gold laying goose, Yahoo has decided to just let it die. i can't even begin to describe how sad this makes me and what i've learned from it. i'm damn glad that the core MBL folks are all off doing even more amazing things. As for the folks who "knew better"? i still don't think they've launched that product.

A toast to MBL, to dynamic analytics, to Vitality, to OpenSign-on, to Skynet/Hadoop, and all the other projects that in some saner parallel universe would have made Yahoo! both popular and profitable. Let's hope that this draft will help wash out the bitter taste, or at least properly accent it.