Ravi’s Blog

I discovered google charts api via jeremy’s blog. I have to agree with jeremy. This is a pretty cool api. I wonder how easy it is to hook up the google finance data to this api. I suppose like all financial data, the difficulty might be in the contracts relating to (re)distributing financial data and not the technical difficulty.

I started looking at code.google.com and found that they have tons of apis for various products. This is quite impressive. I like the Ajax Search API, Android, and Open Social APIs as well. One lesser known api that i wanted to use is Safe Browsing API. I always wanted to build a safe browsing plugin for firefox and IE. May be someday.

When i read the book The Alchemist, I felt a connection to the concepts/ideas presented in that book. The first concept is that of a personal legend - a path, a story that drives person’s life journey. Intertwined into this, paulo coelho’s hero - santiago - connects with various elements of nature as he wills the universe to guide/help him along his path. This is quite an interesting concept. The idea is that through your mind/soul you can connect with the elements of nature in a profound way that bends the laws of nature and time. This idea resonated with me quite a bit. Mind over Matter manifested not as creating things out thin air, but as communication with powers of the universe and results through that.

Now the idea is works very well with in the story. But, Is this real? I am sure a lot of parapsychology and/or metaphysics debates cover the validity or invalidity of these ideas in real world. I don’t have any expertise or knowledge in those topics. However, the idea about connecting with the universe and harmony with elements of nature resonates with me. I can look back in my life where i feel that some seemingly improbable things happened for no apparent logical reasons. I can only point to my faith, harmony i felt with nature and a energy i feel about myself and my life as the potential causes.

Personally, at one level all this seems hokey. All the indications i can see in my life as connecting with nature and achieving improbable results in my life can simply be attributed to chance. Other indications where i felt that i could see what’s coming is not really premonition, but simply an educated guess at what’s to come and some glitch in my brain synapses.

In any case, the idea of being in harmony with elements or people or situations around me, the idea of approaching life with a great positive energy and happiness and strength seems very appealing. It is hard for me not to have faith. Sure i can’t find a scientific explanation. But faith in this idea does resonate at a deep level with me.

Having said all this, I came across a new book - “The Secret“. The Alchemist presented these ideas as a story/fable and leaves it at that. Just a part of a story. The Secret however is more like the “Millionaire toolkit” that gets marketed on infomercials late at night. “I have this great system that can make you millions if not billions of dollars and all you have to do is spend $19.95 to get it. Of course, i am selling this system to make $19.95 instead of making the billions using the said system because the system doesn’t work. ”

The Secret, reveals the secret of people who seemingly have what they want, by just using your thoughts. It is a clear, simple, succinct, manual to think your way to great success. You can use your thought to get women, houses, money, jobs, promotions etc.
Of course, they recommend that you start with parking spaces

Despite the sleazy, money making toolkit like feel to this book, the core ideas presented here are very similar to that of paulo’s alchemist. There is a lot of wisdom presented in this book. Some simple ideas that i like are

• Like attracts like. The concept that one negative thought leads to other and one positive thought leads to other. Choose to think positive when presented with unfavorable circumstances.
• Meditate. Clear your mind. We are constantly bombarded with inputs to our brain all the time - work, email, tv, radio etc. Good resting focus time for brain helps.
• Gratitude. Appreciate what you have in life. Appreciate your family, friends and everything you feel you have.
• Focus on your goals. Too much time in life is spent just hanging out on the couch and wondering why one hasn’t achieved. We are all caught up in the daily grind doing things that we do and really thinking about goals and if we are actually doing things to get to our goals.

A lot of great ideas, a lot of great concepts. I find a lot of value in this book. I just have a hard time handling the format and tone of the book.

I posted about aamir khan blog couple of months back. At that time his blog was on lagaandvd.com. Since that time he moved his blog over to AamirKhan.com. Strangely, he ends his old blog without any reference to plans of moving over to new site. It took me by surprise, but i found his new blog.

Pretty ghastly news from hyderabad, India - my hometown. Approximately 12 hours ago, some unknown terrorists targeted crowded places in hyderabad. There were 2 bomb blasts, 10 mins and 4 kms apart, killing over 40 people. Quite a shocking news.
It is hard to think of reasons why Hyderabad is targeted for such attacks. Coverage from various sources

• NDTV
• Indian Express
• Rediff Photos

Past few years have been great for hyderabad. Economy has been booming, property values appreciating and people migrating into hyderabad. It is just so sickening to see madness like this perpetrated against families going to a park. What kind of terrorist would justify this action? Strangely, these terrorist acts targeted muslims (during the may 18th attack) and general public (yesterday’s), and it is hard to see religion as a motive.
What could be the motive? Why would anyone want to target happy families looking for entertainment? It is quite shocking.

While i am thankful that none of my family or friends have been affected, i feel quite uneasy about hyderabad and the security situation. I feel terrible for all the folks who were actually affected by this. Shocking

Recent days, i started queueing my blog reading. The good part about it is that i am able to get a lot more done during the week. The bad part is that i am missing cool news. One such news is that YSlow - firefox extension - was released late last month.
Y Slow is a great firefox plugin that analyzes a website and gives a report card. In this page, yslow creator outline what the thought process behind the report card is. When you install yslow and run it on a site, you get a grade for your site. For each of the 13 items you see on the “rules page”, there is a grade assigned in yslow and overall grade is a summary of those. This is a great tool, very valuable. I was able to look at various aspects of my website - www.nesteggr.com - and figure out what i can be doing better.

Couple of things to note. The scoring in these rules seems to be heavily biased towards 3 specific rules

• Rule #1 - Make fewer http requests. This one is obvious, the fewer the http requests, the faster your site will load. The usual culprits here are the css background images, css stylesheets, and javascript files.
• Rule # 3 - Add an expires header. For the static content, this is the right thing to do. The time suggested by yahoo is 10 years, but for most smallish website developers - especially ones still in development - months would be a better timeframe it seems. For me few months got an A on YSlow for this rule.
• Rule #14 - Configure ETags. The rules page posts an explanation of why Etags are bad for sites that have multiple webservers serving the same content. However, it never comes out and says that you should turn off ETags. But that is what they recommend. Turn off ETags.

I have few suggestions for improvement. For a smallish website that runs on one webserver, i don’t think that this scoring systems is fully useful. Most people won’t be able to afford a CDN, why penalize the score for that? Also, for folks running on a single server, ETags may be a better way to manage the browser side cache support (rules #3 and #13) instead of the “far future expires header”. With ETags, you don’t have to change file names, incorporate version control etc, to bust client side cache. On sites with multiple servers, using an ETag without the inode-time-stamp would also work better.

Here are ways ySlow can better

1. Have a check box to disable the CDN rule/grade as a not applicable to me
2. Recognize Etags as valuable. Dont just give an F for site with ETags. May be ask if the site is running on one webserver. If it is running on one webserver, etags should score higher than expires headers.
3. ask if the site is running on multiple servers, if so, user should specify how to hit different servers. May be then, CDN score automatically is included, and ETags are checked for consistency across multiple servers.

Overall this is a great tool. Hope they keep improving it.

About 2 weeks back, i discovered Aamir khan’s blog. Yes, - the bollywood star - Aamir khan. Surprisingly, i found his blog to be a good read. He reacts to the 100s of comments, delves into his thought process for some characters and blogs. Atleast for now, he’s posting regularly, talking about his upcoming movie (hindi version of Ghajini) and things going on.

For few months now, quite a few people have been calling for the removal of Terry Semel as CEO. While it may be justified for folks to call for his head, it was always unclear who would replace Terry Semel. What kind of leader is the right one for yahoo!? Who are the right candidates? Would they be interested? Getting rid of Terry Semel, it seemed would leave Yahoo! in as much of a problem - if not worse - as it is in today.

In a surprise press release, Yahoo! announced that Jerry Yang will take over as a CEO while, Semel stays on a Chairman. This is an awesome news. I have been a strong believer in the internet product vision, & leadership abilities of both the founders (David and Jerry). In some ways, i felt that they can take on more corporately significant roles in the company. It would be better for the company if they did so.
They were always active, but were content let the execution of business be lead by other business people. They have the vision, they have the appetite to take risks and more than anything, they “get it”. It was great to hear about david talking about keeping yahoo! directory open, yahoo! sports open (link to competitors) during the early days. There has been all this talk about “open” applications in the last cpl of years, but i felt that right up from the early days of yahoo! jerry & david espoused this open, free internet idealogy.

What more, with this move, they do retain Semel and hopefully, his business savvy will guide Jerry & David’s technology and product vision to bring yahoo! back to the glory days!

Congratulations Yahoo! Great Move!!

Wow! what a game!
Not only did the warriors make playoffs after 13 years but they win their first game!
on road!!
against a #1 seed!!!

Ever since i came to US in 1991, Basketball has been my favorite game to watch (and try to play). It’s easy to understand (unlike football or baseball), it’s fast paced, it’s exciting and Bulls - closest local team my univ - were winning. I loved the bulls and followed them. I came to bay area in Nov 1994. I was excited to find that big 10 player webber was on golden state, golden state made the playoffs the year before. I felt at home Another team making the playoff run. 2 days after i came to bayarea, golden state traded billy owens for rony siekaly starting off an era of failure and futility interlaced with the bizarre. Players known for choking coaches, management known for passing on kobe bryant for todd fuller etc.

My desire to support a local team (and support any team since the bulls 2nd era ended) made me support sacramento for few years.

But it’s great to finally see a good golden state team together, playing well. This playoff win is sweet. It’s not the championship, but it’s sweet. It doesn’t wash away the pain of all the 13 years, but it’s a good start.

I love basketball and i am enjoying being a fan of this golden state team! There, i can say it.

My recommendation - Go hug a warriors fan today It’s going to be a happy, joyous hug. Join the crowd at GSOM.

Yahoo! earnings report came out yesterday. I have to say, this was quite disappointing. Yahoo! earned 10c/share in this quarter missing the expectations by 1c. It seemed like they pulled all stops to meet/beat analyst expectations. Yahoo! bought back $595M worth of stock priced under $30/share through the share repurchase program. This took ~19M shares off the market during q1. Given that the final earnings were 142 million, this buyback has contributed 1.3c/share in earnings bringing the real earnings down to 9.1c. They also committed 250M$ to another share buyback program concluding in august 2007. While buybacks are good to indicate long term confidence in the company, in this case, they do indicate that the real business is weaker than what the street thought by a wide margin (off by 2c/share).

The yahoo leadership was clearly more optimistic in the last quarter or 2 than they have been in the past 2-3 years. Every few days there is an article in news about how sue/terry thought panama was doing. It seemed like the ship has turned around and beginning to accelerate.

Unfortunately not. Now the word is that things have turned around but the acceleration is yet to come. We are being promised that the acceleration is going to come. However, the promise is not backed up with increasing guidance for 2007.

Even for a former employee it is becoming hard to have confidence in the growth story being told. I am a shareholder and i will continue to be a shareholder for the long haul, however, i feel sad for a lot of my yahoo colleagues. The growth story may indeed turn out right and yahoo! stock may re-attain its past glory in the coming few months. But days like this can be quite de-motivating for an employee. There are a lot of talented folks at y!. Keep your spirits up and keep doing the right things you have been doing. This is my virtual-blog-hug to all of you.

I found out about the release of y! mail api from jeremy’s blog. This is really great news. Pipes came out, it is an innovative product and all, but y! mail is one of the top 5 properties for y!. I would say the top 4 properties for y! are Home Page, Search, Mail, Messenger. The 5th spot is open and there are several contenders (finance, maps/local, international etc). Which ever property/asset takes the 5th spot, it is safe to say that the top 4 are the above mentioned.

Right now, 3 of the top 4 properties have an api. This is awesome! Om Malik leads off with ‘what took them so long?’. I couldn’t agree more. But one should recognize that this is a big step for y! and folks like jeremy, caterina had to ‘evangelize’ for a long time for these changes to occur. My experience was that everyone would agree that it is a neat idea and then it would prioritized so low that there are hardly any resources provided for projects like these. Having visible champions who repeatedly assert the message in a positive inclusive way is the only way to go. It takes a while, but that’s the best way to bring about change in large organizations.

APIs are good for the company from a strategic pov because they give an opportunity to become the defacto platform. Becoming the defacto platform ensures that their products and services are indispensable (or atleast have a longer life) to the community. Company sells its products even when outsiders innovate. To be a successful commercial platform, you need several thriving for-profit 3rd parties leveraging your platform. Otherwise, these are resources spent down the drain.

From the community point of view, APIs from big company like yahoo! means that they can innovate on top of the hardwork done by yahoo/google. This often allows smaller players to spend their effort where it is needed most and play to their strengths -innovation.

So if this is the strategic basis of why Yahoo is investing in APIs, they have to be good enough to innovate on top of. are they?

Also, since Yahoo! is both a platform provider and an application provider, there is a small problem with conflict of interest. Microsoft, had no qualms about muscling its platform advantage to win the application world. The microsoft platform strategy is to create 2 apis. One for outside world and one for microsoft. The microsoft api is inherently better than the outsiders api thus ensuring that microsoft applications are better than those of competition.

Does yahoo!’s APIs follow the microsoft path? or are they truly “open” allowing other folks to create competing applications to the one that y! has?

I took a closer look at the y! mail api. It seems pretty neat overall, but i was surprised to note couple of issues. Y! mail designates two types of mail accounts - premium & non-premium. The api developers have an incentive to promote the premium mail product. This is all good. Now here is the kicker. The API has restrictions for non-premium users. The following are the calls allowed for a non-premium user per this page

ListFolders,
ListMessages,
DeleteMessages,
GetUserData,
BatchExecute,,
CreateFolder,
FetchExternalMail,
RemoveFolder,
RenameFolder,
MoveMessages,
EmptyFolder,

Note that one can list messages but one cannot read a message. Consquently, one cannot read attachments. Noticably absent is the “SendMessage” call for non-premium users. I can see some justification in doing this. Y! mail makes money from ads and effectively, these apis are going to remove ads. So, 3rd parties can only provide full email clients to people who paid for not having ads. It seems reasonable, but not good enough.

If I am an api developer, I can build a really crippled mail front end that cannot send or read messages (just list them) and hope to make some money by forcing people to upgrade to premium users. Alternately, I can build a good, fully functional mail client for premium users from who i don’t make any money. Overall, the innovation potential is moderate.

More over, Yahoo! mail client (the one in beta for 2 years) does not have these restrictions, making this api feel very much like a microsoft api strategy rather than a truly fair platform api strategy.

These problems are going to prevent meaningful 3rd party innovation driven by for-profit parties. What is the solution?
My recommendations are:

• Open up a full api for 3rd party developers irrespective of premium or non-premium clients
• Figure out a better draw for upgrading to premium other than lack of ads
• Open the apis for domain registration, management tied into mail
• Open up the enterprise version of email via apis
• Commercial Use of APIs must be allowed with some revenue share

Some or all of these are quite hard problems. But becoming a defacto platform is hard. The good news is yahoo! is more than halfway there. They help users manage a lot of user data on y! services. They just need to figure out how to create the right structure for others leverage their platform. Getting users is lot harder than the technical/business model problems they face.