Here are the details:
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

The official date for the launch of Firefox 3 is June 17, 2008. Join our community and this effort by pledging today.

Yay Firefox! It truly is a great browser. And I love the built in spell check!

Google, along with several consumer groups, pushed for the open-access rules in the auction for the 700MHz band, which many wireless experts see as spectrum that’s suited for long-range wireless broadband services. Google pledged to bid at least US$4.6 billion on the C block, but the company lost to Verizon’s $4.7 billion bid.

Technology needs this type of open access to move forward. We learned this lesson way back in the day when AT&T tried to stop the “Hush-A-Phone” attachment.

…. by 1948, the Hush-A-Phone was doing well — which was when AT&T, the operator of the US phone system, decided enough was enough. At the time, AT&T owned not just the network but also every telephone connected to it, and it had the right, it claimed, to ban “unauthorised foreign attachments”.

Hush-A-Phone fought back, and a legal battle dragged on for several years before a court found in the funnel-maker’s favour. “To say that a telephone subscriber may produce the result in question by cupping his hand and speaking into it, but may not do so by using a device which leaves his hand free to write or do whatever else he wishes,” the judge concluded drily, “is neither just nor reasonable.”

In this case the AT&T phone was the equivalent of the 700MHz spectrum. If it was closed to third party development, we might not even have the internet at this moment because AT&T would have had the right to not let you connect your computer to it!!

You see where this is going. Open access is key to innovation. It helps to maintain a competitive market place and stops monopolies. I understand why Verizon wants it to be closed. There is nothing like monopolistic business practices to pad the bottom line, but let’s hope our regulators have their heads on straight.

But is an open social strategy really going to help keep folks away from Facebook? I’m not so sure that it is. Why you ask? The reason is tied up in the brand. Now, I know, it has been a long time since I talked about brand strategy, but as the web becomes “whatever you want” on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Netvibes, etc. The value of the brand becomes even more important. Ask yourself this question. What does Google’s brand stand for?

That one is simple, search.

Now ask yourself what does Yahoo’s brand stand for?

In my mind this one is a little muddy because I think of a portal which means “anything”. And this is part of the reason why Google was able to place it’s stamp on search and claim it as a verb.

Now think about Facebook. People ask “do you have a Facebook?” And for those of us that do, having a facebook means something. It means, yes I have a social profile online where you can get some information about me, check up on random things I’ve posted, and contact me. It is like having a little online interactive yearbook where you can communicate with your friends.

Why is this important? Well in terms of brand perception that doesn’t happen with either Google or Yahoo. People don’t say “do you have a Google?” and they don’t say “Do you have a Yahoo?”

They do say “Google it”, and Yahoo has tried to get people asking “Do you Yahoo?” although no one can tell me exactly what that means.

My point is this. Google, Netvibes, Yahoo, etc can build social into everything, but until they have the brand perception it isn’t going to do much to stop the Facebook’s and MySpace’s of the world. I imagine the best approach would be to purchase Facebook or MySpace and build your services into one of them rather than dilute the value of your own brand. By Google going social platform with profiles it becomes less about search and this creates a bit of opportunity. What happens when Google becomes a diluted portal like Yahoo? Well, in my mind there comes an opportunity for a new type of search engine. Maybe something even more powerful than Google’s search that has some 2.0 features. Something that is focused on search, but learns from the web community. Not necessarily social with profiles etc but Maybe it could learn slang, or allow people to flag inappropriate sites, tag them, rank them and re-categorize them. Or hell, maybe they could flag advertising that is not appropriate or has nothing to do with the search and give companies honest community ratings along side the search. I guess this is similar to Digg, but rather than just be about headlines, it should be about the entire web.

Anyway.. To answer the question– Will an open social strategy get more people to visit? It will get some initial buzz and in the short term should get people to at least check out the new features, but as a long term strategy, as a reason to abandon the MySpace’s and Facebooks it faces some serious challenges.

Elements are the basic structure for HTML markup. Elements have two basic properties: attributes and content. Each attribute and each element's content has certain restrictions that must be followed for an HTML document to be considered valid. An element usually has a start tag (e.g. <element-name>) and an end tag (e.g. </element-name>). The element's attributes are contained in the start tag and content is located between the tags (e.g. <element-name attribute="value">Content</element-name>). Some elements, such as <br>, do not have any content and must not have a closing tag.

I assume that if you are looking at a CSS tutorial, you probably have an idea of what HTML is. However, if you are just trying to get a feel for things because you maybe said something like “yeah, I’m familiar with CSS” in a job interview then this is a good place to get a basic understanding.

Anyway… back to HTML for a quick second. So, HTML is made up of tags that create the basic page structure. It is separate from design. For example, a basic HTML page would that look something like this:

<html>

<body>

<p>My HTML Page</p>

</body>
</html>


Everything in between the body tag would show up in a web browser. In essence, HTML is the building block of the page and in order to learn CSS you need to know HTML first.

If you want to get a more detailed description you should check out Wikipedia’s entry on HTML:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML

Now that we’ve got that out of the way we can talk about CSS, or in other words – Cascading Style Sheets.

So, what is CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. A style sheet is simply a text file with some rules that define how the elements of a page will be styled and what the layout will look like. For example, you can style text by assigning fonts, determining line spacing, and justification. You can style images by giving them boarders and padding, setting the size and providing them with mouse over effects, and you can control the layout of a page by positioning elements on the page.

Before CSS nearly all of the presentation for web pages was housed within HTML markup. This created all sorts of problems for folks. For example many people chose to use “font tags” to specify which fonts they wanted to use across their site. They would place these tags in each page and as the site grew and became outdated they soon realized they wanted to update their site. This created a problem because simply updating a the font across the site became a very big task. CSS solved this by allowing a single “style rule” to control the font across the entire site.

The concept to grasp is the CSS controls page appearance, while (x)HTML controls the basic structure. When creating websites you always want to separate form from content or in other words, separate the appearance from the structure. In the coming tutorials I’ll take you through the basics of the language, help you to learn how to construct CSS rules and by the end you’ll be well on your way to designing beautiful websites.

<p>Paragraph Element</p>

You will construct a rule that tells it what to look like on the page. A rule is made up of two main parts. The selector and the declaration. The selector determines which elements are effected, and the declaration says what is going to happen.

For the above example lets imagine we wanted to make the paragraph blue. To do so, we could construct a rule like this:

P { color: blue;}

In this case the selector is “P”. The declaration is held inside the curly brackets and consists of the property/value pair “color:blue”. It is important to note that the property/value pair ends in a semicolon. This allows you to place multiple property/value pairs inside a declaration. So for example, you could also give the paragraph a border:

P { color: blue;
border: 1px;
}

And if you wanted to get really fancy you could also give it a background color. How about red:

P { color: blue;
border: 1px;
background: red;
}

Looking at this in a browser we get something really ugly

When creatign style rules you need to always remember the semicolon between the property/value pairs, however just like with HTML you can be very relaxed when it comes to how you write the rules. For example this code:

p {color: blue;}

Works the same as this code:

p {
color: blue;
}

You can add spacing and returns to format your code and make it readable.

And that is it for tutorial 1. You now know how to construct a style rule.

- Cole

For those of you who simply want to download the complete files. You can get them here:
Flexible, Three Column Layout Template HTML
Flexible, Three Column Layout Template CSS

To get started building we’ll first build the basic HTML page.
<html>
<head>

</body>
</html>

So far, this is just like any other HTML page. It has a head element with a title, and a body. Next we’ll want to link this page to a style sheet. We’ve called our style sheet style_sheet.css. To link to the style sheet we use the link tag:

<link href="style_sheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Notice that the link tag targets the style sheet (style_sheet.css). The “rel” attribute defines the file as a style sheet, and the “type” attribute has a value of “text/css”.

We place the complete tag in our HTML page just under the title tag in the head of the document.

<html>
<head>

<title>Three Column Layout</title>
<link href="style_sheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

</head>

<body>

</body>
</html>

Next we’ll add some div tags to give the page structure. Working like divs is like working within little boxes. Some boxes contain content and some simply contain more divs. Essentially the goal is to use CSS to organize the boxes on the page in a way that helps you achieve the layout you would like. To get started well need to first create the boxes we’ll use to organize the page. These boxes including a container, which houses the page, then a header, then a main content wrapper, then the content, the left sidebar, and the right sidebar, and finally the footer.

The code looks something like this:

<html>
<head>

<title>Three Column Layout</title>

<link href="style_sheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

</head>

<body>


<div id="container">

     <div id="header">
	<h1>The Header</h1>
     </div>

     <div id="wrapper">

		<div id="content">
		<h3>Your Content</h3>
           	<p>this is your paragraph content</p>
           	<p>this is your paragraph content</p>
        	</div>

        	<div id="left-sidebar">
          	<h3>Sidebar Nav</h3>
	  	<ul>
		<li>nav link 1</li>
              	<li>nav link 2</li>
              	<li>nav link 3</li>
		</ul>
        	</div>
      </div>

		<div id="right-sidebar">
      		<h3>right sidebar</h3>
	  	     <ul><li>nav link 1</li>
              	           <li>nav link 2</li>
              	           <li>nav link 3</li>
           	                 </ul>
      		</div>


<div id="footer">
    <h3>Footer</h3>
</div>

</div>
</body>
</html>

Now that we have the divs in place lets take a look at what we want to do with our CSS. The following diagram is an illustration of how each div will fit together on the page and also which way we need to tell the content to float.

Looking back at the HTML you’ll notice that each div has an ID that pertains to the boxes on the illustration. These IDs are essential to the identification of each div with our CSS. What we’ll do next is create our style sheet and write a style rule for each of the IDs, floating the content right and left, assigning widths and even background color.

First lets create the style sheet. Open a plain text editor and save the file as “style_sheet.css”. Looking at the code you’ll notice that this is the name of the file you linked to in your HTML. Now, lets create our first rule.

body {
       font: .8em verdana, arial, sans-serif;
        }

So far so good. What we’ve done here is set a default page font. It is made up of the “body” selector, and the font property/value pair. Next we’ll add styles for container.

#container {
	min-width: 660px;
	max-width: 880px;
         }

For this code, we set a min-width of 660px and a max width of 880px. Next we’ll want to style the header.

#header {
	background: #cff;
	}

Since I want you to be able to see the header and know where to put any additional property/value pairs I added a background color.

Next we’ll style the wrapper. If you look at the diagram above you’ll notice that it floats left, and to get it to fit in the appropriate space we’ll make it 70% of the total width. That will make some room for the third column. The code looks like this:

#wrapper {
	float: left;
	width:70%;
	}

Next we style the main content. We want it to float to the right, and have a width of 60% of the wrapper div. Remember, this div takes it’s width from the total available width of the wrapper container, which is 70% of the page container. So the code looks like this:

#content {
	float: right;
	width: 60%;
	}

Next let’s add code for the left and right side bars. We’ll go ahead and give them a background color as well.

#left-sidebar {
	float: left;
	width: 30%;
	background:#f90;
	}

#right-sidebar {
	float: right;
	width: 30%;
	background:#c00;
	}

You’ll notice that the left sidebar floats left and the right sidebar floats right. The last bit of code we need to add is for the footer.

#footer {
	clear:both;
	Background: #cff;
	} 

Notice that the footer has one additional property/vlaue pair. That is the “clear” property. What this does is ensure that the footer doesn’t bounce up and down above any of the divs before it in the HTML code.

Finally, when you put all the code together you get this:

#left-sidebar {
	float: left;
	width: 30%;
	background:#f90;
	}

#right-sidebar {
	float: right;
	width: 30%;
	background:#c00;
	}

You’ll notice that the left sidebar floats left and the right sidebar floats right. The last bit of code we need to add is for the footer.

body {
	font: .8em verdana, arial, sans-serif;
     }

#container {
	min-width: 660px;
	max-width: 880px;

         }

#header {
	Background: #cff;
	}

#wrapper {
	float: left;
	width:70%;
	}

#content {
	float: right;
	width: 60%;
	}

#left-sidebar {
	float: left;
	width: 30%;
	background:#f90;
	}

#right-sidebar {
	float: right;
	width: 30%;
	background:#c00;
	}

#footer {
	clear:both;
	Background: #cff;
	} 

Feel free to copy and paste the HTML and CSS for your own stuff.

Enjoy!

Cole

For years it seemed like the personal home page was dead in the water, and then came iGoogle, a MyYahoo re-launch, Live.com, and a surprisingly familiar mantra “Customize this page and make it your home page.” I had to ask myself, haven’t we been here already? The answer, to my surprise is yes… and no….

Yes and no you ask?? How is that? Well, yes –we have had a personalized portal, but it was not until recently that we had the ability to publish our personalized pages to communities, follow the activity of our friends, and watch twitter feeds all day long. Something changed in recent years. In a world of Facebook and MySpace where people follow friend activity, share music and videos, rate headlines, and create media online, all of a sudden we are no longer simply pulling information out of a cloud. Instead we are actively participating in the creation, organization, and distribution of media– and the big guys are trying to position themselves to be the platform of choice for doing so. Hence, open application interfaces, the modularization of content and applications, and a renewed breath of life for the personalized home page as the place where this can all live.

As we become more and more involved with the internet the personalized home page is changing. It is becoming the place where we follow our twitter feeds, our friend updates, our YouTube videos, and even a place where we publish our content. We’re beginning to see it as a place where we go to store online files, manipulate and re-create media, and access online applications. It is no longer just a personalized view of the internet. It is not just about getting information, instead it is also about creating and interacting with information. It is a ground movement that has caused the personalized home page to evolve into something much more than it has ever been. The new personalized home page has changed. You can now follow your twitter feeds, you can see your buddy information, there are applications that you can interact with and all of this cool stuff is being organized in your personalized home page. In short, your personalized home page has changed, it is no longer just a home page. In short it has become more of an internet dashboard. It is a place where you can access your entire online life. You can pull information from the cloud, you can see your friends activity, you can publish, you can create, and you can organize your life.

Now, if we could just get some file storage, all creative suite apps and MS office applications integrated into the dashboard so that I can stop storing files on my hard drive, and stop spending thousands each year to update software. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google… which of you are going to do it first? The fighting bell has rung, let round two begin!

In March, Google captured 54 percent of Internet searches, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Yahoo had 22 percent of the market and Microsoft’s MSN/Windows Live Search had 10 percent.

Google, the search juggernaut, has had an advantage online because of its ability to monetize search. This has allowed the company to create a variety of other services that all direct and drive search traffic.

Microsoft’s advantage has always been its dominance of the software market. Because its software is inescapable (even on a Mac you probably have MS office), it has significant opportunity to direct customers to its own online properties and services.

Yahoo, the darling of the dot com era, has a very significant offering of games, community tools, IM, news and entertainment, making it a very valuable property. Just imagine how many people use Yahoo’s fantasy football tools. Those people are checking into Yahoo 20 times a day!

In addition to battling with each other all three face a variety of smaller, yet very significant challenges online, social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook are real threats, and even Google decided it was better to purchase YouTube rather than try to build its own video site. For Yahoo, the rise of social networking sites led to the purchase of Flickr, and Microsoft , well it has teamed up with Facebook.

The challenge for all three of them is monetization of traffic. And at the moment Google has the advantage, but a Yahoo Microsoft partnership is a major shift. Microsoft will obviously benefit from Yahoo’s experience and expertise online. It’s only a matter of time before they are monetizing traffic direct from the desktop and from within applications, and with the ability to leverage Microsoft’s unique software market dominance the new Yahoo/Microsoft will have a very real advantage. Google will have to pull some new tricks out of the bag to keep up.

In my wildest dreams this partnership will push exciting new things out of each company. Eric Schmidt is already sitting on Apple’s board and it’s only a matter of time before they are further connected. Maybe we are close to finally seeing an always connected virtual PC or MAC, with all the software and storage that you would need, accessible from anywhere and 100% connected to all the social activities you desire. Imagine having the information and power of the internet integrated into all of your software applications. Things like urban dictionary services integrated into Word so that the program could understand slang, or video services being integrated into PowerPoint, or a real selection of royalty free art providers integrated into Photoshop. The possibilities are endless.

So, is the partnership desperation or a stroke of genius? If they have the imagination necessary to execute on an extreme vision then I would say genius, if they simply merge without figuring out how effectively innovate, well, then desperation isn’t what I would call it. It would be more like stupidity. And there is still that issue about neither Microsoft nor Yahoo being able to monetize search traffic as effectively as Google. That is something that will have to be addressed. But I do have to say, I have a lot of confidence in Microsoft and Yahoo. You don’t get to be the number one software provider in the world without knowing how to innovate. And you don’t get to be number one, two, three, or even four or five on the internet without being able to stay ahead of the curve. The fact that these companies are who they are, in the position that they have means that we can expect great things. Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are all great competitors, with very smart people, I’m sure they will do things none of us on our own could dream of. I just can’t wait to see it.

For more info check out what some of the pundits are saying:
Microhoo? Purchase of Yahoo by Microsoft Could Challenge Google’s Dominance

Running the Numbers on a Possible Yahoo/Microsoft Merger

Shock and Awe: Microsoft Bids $44.6B for Yahoo

Microsoft’s open letter : Breaking News: Microsoft offer to buy Yahoo!

“Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it,” writes Udi Manber, VP Engineering. “The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts to medical information, from geographical and historical to entertainment, from product information to how-to-fix-it instructions.”

Google Blog Post

As soon as this post went live on Google’s blog people started calling it a Wikipedia rival. Cnet’s Tom Espiner went so far as to say:

Search and advertising giant Google is developing a user-generated online encyclopedia that could rival Wikipedia.
Read Tom’s article

My problem is that looking at the functionality and the focus it seems more like a non-geek blogging platform designed to get people to write about subjects as if they were experts. If anything, it is more like About.com. It is hardly a Wikipedia rival. For those of you who may not have realized this, Wikipedia is a wiki first and an encyclopidia of knowledge second. What makes it “great” is the fact that it accounts for a “collective knowledge” rather than an individuals knowledge. It is the collective that writes each page. It is the collective to which each producer of content is accountable and without the ability to have the collective edit and re-work each page, it would not be possible.

But, let’s get out of web 2.0 for a second. Let’s go back to web 1.0. Remember Geocities? For those of you who don’t, way back in 1994 there was a tool for building personal home pages called Geocities. It was originally intended to give anyone a voice on the web by providing free web pages. Wikipedia has loads more information on it. What google has done here is said, “Okay, we want to have the experts write on the web using our platform, how can we do that?” So they took the Geocities concept from web 1.0, decided to organize it into something that they are calling an encyclopedia, made it possible for contributors have the option of revenue sharing for their articles, and took the ranking systems similar to Digg or Newsvine along with a few other 2.0 features and poof… you have Knol.

Some might call it genius. But I am skeptical. Don’t get me wrong, I think Google has done some amazing things, but this one seems off the mark. Why you ask? Well, without the community actually being able to contribute and edit each other’s pages what Knol will create is a mess. It will be a few of people writing so called “expert articles” and still more writing absolute crap.

Okay, some will say that Knol is way better than Geocities and this isn’t a fair comparison. Let’s say I give that to them, and instead we look at about.com. You may think about.com is a search engine, but that is far from the truth. About.com “is” the closest thing to Knol. It’s content is organized in logical categories and they attempt to have experts write about everything online. My issue with About.com has always been that the “expert information” lacks the depth needed to be anything of real value. Most of the time it is fluff. Which is to say there is just enough information there to have a light conversation but never enough to get any real work done. Where do I go for deep information?? Ahem.. cough- wikipedia.

So, is knol going to be an About.com killer? That may be the real question of the moment. But one thing we do know is that it is definitely not a Wikipedia rival.

In the case of My Yahoo! there is significant buzz around it’s latest personal home page but critics seem to feel that it doesn’t go far enough. Billing itself as a gateway to the user’s frequently visited pages in Yahoo! and the Web, we can agree that the latest version of My Yahoo! has taken a huge leap forward. User response to feature updates has been largely positive. Most notably users appreciate the ease of use and solid integration with other online tools such as email, and IM. Most negative feedback surrounds the placement of advertising, third party widget integration, and arbitrary limits imposed on customization.

Key features include (compiled list from sites mentioned below):

• Drag and drop content: with the click of a mouse users are able to select and drag content around their personal home page. This demonstrates adoption of 2.0 programming techniques (AJAX ) to make the page more interactive and fluid. These techniques create a pleasing user experience because pages do not have to re-load in order to update .
• Search is right at the top and easily accessible. This is important because the accessibility of search within the page limits the need to leave the site and go to an alternative search engine such as Google, or MSN search. It’s great for Yahoo! and it is nice for users too.
• My Yahoo is now analyzing known data about the user (zip code from IP address and the areas of Yahoo that the user visits often) to create a customized version of the My Yahoo page right at signup. This results in targeted category pages for topics such as cooking, finances, etc along with “content suggestions”. The analysis makes the page much more sticky. Users who see relevant content right up front are much more likely to stay on the page and begin the process of customization.
• Users can further customize their page with drag-and-drop modules, and new four-column and small search box layouts. The ability to customize layouts is key to providing users with the feeling that they have control over their online environment. Additionally, users who spend the time to truly customize their content are less likely to switch personal home page providers.
• Feed previews and a full post reader on the page. Users use RSS feeds to follow their favorite sites, their social networking sites, their blogs, and to receive news updates. Integration of this service keeps users at the personal homepage and limits the need to leave the page.
• Editable Personal Assistant with instant access to things like Yahoo! Mail, IM, horoscopes, local traffic, etc. This is a nifty feature that many smaller competitors are not able to offer because they do not have the range of services that Yahoo has to offer. Keeping users in contact with the range of services the Yahoo! offers helps keep users within the network while encouraging addoption of other network offerings.
• Redesigned modules from Yahoo! and select partners, with games, music, commerce, sports updates, weather, finance portfolios, TV listings, etc. This is a value add for users who want pre-defined content modules and a way to offer support for selected partners but fails to be as inclusive as many users would like because it isn’t openly available to sites that may or may not be viewed as “competition”. For example, there is not Hotmail module, but there is a Flicr module.
• Sharing feature, enabling users to send their My Yahoo! page or favorite modules to friends and family - note, this is very similar to Pageflakes’ sharing feature, only Yahoo says that their sharing service doesn’t require sign-ups. Keeps users connected to their friends etc. Demonstrates a push toward social interaction but still falls short on full social networking power. For example, it would be nice if connected friends could also receive updates when information, pictures etc where shared between users. It would also be nice if users were able to tag communication between friends as public or private within a connected network, essentially allowing public communication update notices to travel to other connected network user pages.

So far so good huh. I like the features but it isn’t all good news. Though most user reaction to My Yahoo! has been positive and there is general agreement that they have done a good job at not upsetting their core audience there are several weaknesses: The advertising on the page is way too big and intrusive causing many to mention that they will be looking at Pageflakes and iGoogle as an alternative. They also fall down on their ability to deliver open modules and widgets. Meaning they don’t have an open platform for developers and the modules don’t support the competition. From a business standpoint this type of behavior was understandable in web 1.0 but for those of us pushing web 2.0 this is a failing business modle. The reason is that the little guys are making modules and widgets that are completely open and that support anyone willing to develop (competition or not).

Here are just a few choice quotes from arround the web that demonstrate where My Yahoo! should be going:

“Functionally Yahoo should also start thinking about allowing their widgets to live anywhere, ie giving people the ability to embed their widgets anywhere…. Widget portability is crucial” — User response to Richard MacManus, Read/Write Web article. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/my_yahoo_web20_makeover.php

“There are a couple of areas where My Yahoo is still lagging competitors like Netvibes. Widgets cannot be added to the site, although that is coming eventually, the team says. Users also can no longer have bookmarks linked right from the main page - that feature has been moved to a drop down control panel. That makes some sense from a user interface perspective, but I’ll miss being able to access bookmarks with a single click. Finally, My Yahoo has a large ad unit on the site that cannot be removed - something none of the other services force on users.” – Michael Arrington, Tech Crunch. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/08/all-new-my-yahoo/

“The new My Yahoo is a step forward but misses the mark. It is more about Yahoo! and less about today’s users of the Web, who expect more from their personalized page. Their new personalization feature steers you towards Yahoo! services while restricting access to others like Google and MySpace. The new version limits user choice because it isn’t open to developers. Lastly, you can’t publish your personalized page on the web, or collaborate on your page with others.” — Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen (former head of MyYahoo). http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pageflakes_response_myyahoo_beta.php

Conclusions

Although My Yahoo! is doing better and is still the largest thanks to that “first to market” advantage back in the 1990’s, it still hasn’t fully commited to the core principles of web 2.0. I’m excited by the recent changes, but also am excited for the competition. There are a whole lot of things yet to be built into personal home pages and it is only a matter of time before someone does it right.