A merger sort of week

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

msft-yhoo-amzn-adbl.jpgWow, what a week to be in the media industry. Yesterday with Amazon picking up Audible, and today with Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo!. It’s consolidation-for-growth time.

Audible is Apple’s provider for Audiobooks. Having Amazon, a primary competitor to Apple, pick up the company makes for some interesting times ahead of us. Will Apple continue to use Audible as its audio backbone? How about Amazon’s plans for Audible content and its distribution? What is the industry response? The conversations amongst my team and co-workers didn’t stray far from those questions yesterday.

And now today, with Microsoft finally taking the plunge and offering real money for Yahoo!, Inc, we’re in for some more great questions. Yahoo! has more users than any other service on the Internet. That part is interesting and you’ll see plenty of articles on the sale being all about Microsoft trying to compete with Google, but I’m more interested in Microsoft’s use of Yahoo! Music and their massive amount of users for that service.

Ian Rogers heads up Yahoo! Music and is accurate and honest about the direction the music industry is headed. If Ian’s views are as accurate as I think they are, and if the rumors of Yahoo! Music moving towards offering music for free are true, there are certainly more game changers coming.

I’m excited as hell for this to come true (if and when it comes true.) iofy corporation is a technology company which builds the backbones for delivering content. These changes are going to offer great opportunities for us as a small and agile company.

What a great way to end the week!

Posted in Audiobooks, iofy

In the name of Twitternomics and style

Posted on by Sol Young with 1 Comment

http://twitter.com/solSo I got to thinking the other day about all the peeps on Twitter who have slick, short, names. Most I follow on Twitter follow this convention (ev, al3x, jack, biz, dick, iofy, to name a few). It’s not just a status symbol on the service, but also a matter of resource utilization.

I switched from solyoung to sol. Easier to remember and less to type (special thanks to the Twitter guys for help with that.)

Each message on Twitter is limited to 140 characters. As of yet there isn’t a Twitter application which handles the @user feature. Thus, a response to a longer name both costs time and characters. Another Twitterer I follow (you should too, he’ll change your life) is braverydanger. That’s thirteen characters (or fifteen including the @ and a space.) A response to jack or iofy with the @user feature costs six total characters, allowing 6.7% more room for a response.

This becomes even more important on a mobile phone when typing the extra characters could cost an additional twenty or more seconds (assuming a typical numeric keypad w/out T9 input.)

The switch meant losing all my previous followers (name changes are bad news for brand recognition.) It also meant getting my tweets over to the new account. Both are worth it since I’m young in the game of blogging.

(note: Twitter’s API saved the day. To copy the tweets from the old account to the new account I screen-scraped the old posts and wrote a shell script that imported the scraped posts in reverse order with do/curl/while. Fifteen minutes of coding.)

Now… If only the guys at sol.com would let me pick up that domain for less than the quarter million they quoted last time ;)

Posted in Blogging, Etiquette, Twitter

XMPP stands for scalability

Posted on by Sol Young with 3 Comments

XMPPCart sent me a link to Matt Tucker‘s latest blog entry over at Jive Software, “XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services.” Matt is right. Cloud architectures and large systems are moving away from the current HTTP / web services integration.

M1 AbramsMonstrous servers and clusters banging on each other, effectively pulling web pages in order to deliver another web page elsewhere, is like having M1 Abrams tanks outfitted with BB guns instead of cannons.

At iofy we’re using web services with HTTP. We don’t like SOAP, but we’re RESTfully clean. Our web services API is unintentionally somewhat like Twitter’s API. However, there is a key difference. We use callbacks.

Callbacks allow partners to integrate with iofy’s web services without having to poll for updates. Both Yahoo! and Flickr do this for integrating customers.

We’re similar to Yahoo! in that the stores we power, such as The Language Stop, do not require persistent connections and would be inconvenienced by needing to implement anything larger than web service integration.

In order to keep things simple and fast (and not destroy your architecture with a polling only API) offer callbacks on top of polling. Any mid to large partner, or technically savvy smaller partner, will prefer the callbacks.

Posted in iofy, Software Development