Julio’s Musings Around Columbia County, New York

I have been experimenting with Yelp’s User Rating and Review product over the course of the past few weeks.

Here is an url to my reviews. Julio Miyares Yelp Reviews.

Strangely familiar to what AOL Digital Cities had many years ago in a product known as Local Experts. I am talking the 2000-2002 timeframe which in the Web world is a long time ago.

In a familiar refrain, we had no followup and allowed the product feature to die on the vine. Social networking in the local space?? User contributed content?? What is that?

[tags]Julio Miyares, Yelp, Ratings and Reviews[/tags]

Just returned from San Francisco where I and some of my colleagues from AOL attended the 2006 Future of Web Applications. Also picked up a wicked cold while I was there. I think I was under-dressed for the SF Giants game on Wednesday night and it was cold and breezy. Anyway, Interestingly enough even though AOL was a sponsor and its logo can be seen on the Summit agenda, references to AOL from the scheduled speakers was basically non-existent. There were some negative references to the bruhaha related to the release of Search query logs and references to the small time pissing contest going on between the new Netscape site and Digg. The issue centers around the fact Netscape communicated that it is “paying” high profile prolific users.

What is interesting to me is that there were not only speakers from Yahoo and Google which are behemoths probably of the same size as AOL but that the other speakers from much smaller companies made many passing references to Google and Yahoo and from time to time Microsoft. Some of the references were joking in nature at the expense of the larger company nevertheless there were plenty of favorable mentions of work in the Web 2.0 space by those large companies.

Therefore it is not company size that contributes to the lack of respect AOL garners in the space. The community of Web geeks gets off on cool things or what it considers cool such as Zonetags from Yahoo that allow for submissions from a cell phone to be tagged with the location coordinates. Though this is in research mode, the presentation from Mor Naaman, Research Scientist from Yahoo! Research in Berkeley was well received. Furthermore it tied in nicely with Flickr’s presentation about the new geo tagging of photos and the fact that over 5 million photos have already been mapped to lat/long coordinates. Though Flick uses a different technology then that presented by Mr Naaman, it clearly presented an apparently coordinated approach by Yahoo to make it easy for users to geocode submissions on Web Sites.

I am sure there could/would be a debate about the relative merits of being considered “hip” by the Web 2.0 Intelligentsia. I opine it does matter and is helpful for various reasons not the least of which is as a recrutiting tool for Web technologists which Google , Yahoo and some of our other competitors make maximum use.

[tags]AOL, Julio Miyares[/tags]

Todd choking AndyOriginally uploaded by julio.miyares.

Slowly or rather quite quickly, another one of my colleagues is departing AOL. Todd Ague longtime Yellow Pages and all things Local Product Manager is calling it a day at the world’s still largest ISP for greener pastures further south.
In the attached photo, Todd is seen choking DCI Andy (Local Data Guru) for some perceived slight at the Ague going away party. Not sure if it was related to a woman, or his manhood or a disagreement surrounding the treatment of some esoteric data element in LocalDB. Whatever the reason, they were quickly separated and the party continued to the wee hours of the night.

[tags]Todd Ague, AOL, Yellow Pages[/tags]

Last DaysOriginally uploaded by julio.miyares.

I caught Jim Davidson by surprise with the camera this past week as he worked in his AOL office in Dulles, VA. This may become a historial photograph (though came out somewhat fuzzy) as Jim will be leaving AOL with his last day being September 11,2006.

I reported to Jim Davidson for many years at AOL. By extension I had the good fortune of being integrally involved in the transformation of AOL from an insular,controlled and client centric view of the internet to a full blown portal trully competing with Microsoft,Google, Yahoo’s of the internet space. To think that just happened by mandate from above is folly. It took leaders like Jim to organize teams of technically competent and fearless (there was plenty of resistance) individuals to work under tremendous pressure and outside micromanagement and second-guessing to transform the technical underpinnings at AOL to make possible products like the recently released (on August 22) Video Portal
Jim had no direct role in the Video Program but many of the individual Software Engineers and managers had been groomed under his direction and played major roles in its successful and widely aclaimed implementation. Furthermore much of the technical infrastructure used sprung from either Jim’s direct involvement in AOL Server as a lead Software Engineer or his subsequent years of managing the evolution of that platform within AOL which culminated in it being the predomninant publishing system that serves the AOL Portal and its related channels.

That is the mark of a true leader in the end. Not what you do directly but how you influence a large group of individuals to do the right thing.
[tags]Jim Davidson,AOL,AOL Server[/tags]