Author Archives for Scott
What happens when you design a product for everyone…
When you build a product, these are exactly the comments you hope to read: “Mind blowing!”, “wow”, “great”, “soooooo addicting”. When you are building any product, take a little effort up front to think of the different kinds of users - it is likely to pay off in surprising ways. [...]
Yahoo! Live from my (former) team
When I left Yahoo!, I mentioned that there were still two products from my team in development: Fire Eagle (still not launched) and an unnamed other one. Well, my team launched Yahoo! Live today.
Yahoo! Live allows anyone to stream their own live channel. If YouTube is what happened (past [...]
Technology should be like film editing
Bill Scott, a former coworker and web development rockstar, has a great blog post “Virtual Pizza Pie Chart: High Tech Chartjunk” about when a chart design/technology itself becomes the star - instead of the data. He shows a horrid example from CNN:
Bill says:
What I love is how the technology completely takes over. It [...]
Chase Bank doesn’t want to not spam me
So I’m a very loyal Chase Bank customer, and I have been for over 15 years. I like them 1000x better then the west coast banks like BofA and Wells Fargo that charge fees to me where they bear no / very little cost. Don’t get me started about how BoFA charges me [...]
Life After Yahoo!: Preface
After almost 10 years leading product teams at Yahoo, I’m moving on. I’ve been thinking for a while that I wanted to take some time off and press the “reset button” on my brain, but it has been a grueling coming to a final decision. And its complicated by the [...]
New Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin
One of my favorite features of Yahoo! Mail is that little hover that shows a map when you mouseover an address. There are bunch of those actions and in most cases they make Mail more useful.
Now there’s a way to add those things to your blog. The new Yahoo! [...]
Where yahoo is developing a voice…
I’ve been delinquent in blogging about the new Next* blog (at next.yahoo.com). It’s a place to launch new interesting yahoo projects that aren’t big enough or “official” enough to get a press release or a corporate blog mention. It’s also a place for things that would otherwise fall through the cracks (not [...]
Latest from my team: Y! Kickstart + $25,000
My blog has been a little quiet of late, mostly because my team has been heads down on building out three new products. You’ll hear more about the others (one is code named freeagle) in the coming weeks, but today is Y! Kickstart’s day.
Y! Kickstart is a professional network with a [...]
Where is the wierdest place you’ve had a meeting?
I like to have one-on-one meetings in more casual settings, and anyone who works with me has probably heard me say “let’s take a walk and get coffee” (meaning a walk to the local barista for a cappuchino).
Dave and I often do walks around South Park for our meetings. [...]
ZoneTag now works on fancy phones…
My team in Berkeley just launched a new version of ZoneTag for Nokia 3rd Edition phones. So, that means if you’ve got a fancy N90, N70 or whatever, your phone can now seamlessly upload geo-tagged photos to flickr.
If you don’t know about ZoneTag, you should. On its surface, it is a [...]


