Thanks for letting me share. Have you cleaning out your “I should blog about that” folder lately?

Case in point: today GoodRec launched – my former co-worker Mihir Shah gave an amazing demo at TechCrunch 50 and it really made me want to use the service. It really seems slick and I think they’ve got a nice user experience approach to the problem. So I did what all users do to validate such a service: looked in my own neighborhood first to see how good it was. And sadly, I saw listings for 3 businesses that closed over a year ago and one that closed 2.5 years ago. Ugh – that’s a horrible first impression of their product and I’m guessing its not their fault – just licensed data from somewhere.

But how, as an industry, do we solve this problem? There are a bizillion little startups like mine and like GoodRec and we all have the same problem: how do you stay up on all these businesses? CitySearch and Yelp have gotten enough users to keep up to date on it, google tries to crawl their way around it and other businesses (like mine) just try to stay super focused and instead of listing every last place, only listing the biggies and places recommended by users.

Is there a solution? Should there be an “open directory” of local businesses? The big guys certainly see their database as being an asset to be guarded, but what if every site could leverage a giant database for free in exchange for giving data updates / closure reports back to the collective? Then couldn’t all these local services win or lose not on data, but on the community or quality of the service they offer.

What do you think? Is there an easy solution? The people that license this data have so far proven they can’t keep up – so how do we solve this?

Cutting the fruit wasn’t a big deal to me – I wasn’t eating healthily, but for those that did – what a bad message to send.

But the real loss was Bagel Day; a great tradition – every Tuesday AM you would find people from all over the company surrounding the little wagon full of bagels. It was great and I got fat eating multiple bagels. But what was most fun was the social aspect. Lots of people chatting while waiting for a spot in the toaster. It was more than just free carbs, it was a way to connect. Ask any old Yahoo about bagel day and you are likely to get a smile.

Google has it’s own share of traditions, but one of the most publicized is how well they take care of employees. Free food, healthy snacks, drinks, candy and good childcare. They put a priority on making their people feel special.

Over dinner with a Googler (a father of a newborn), I heard frustration that he couldn’t afford the new only-for-the-millionaires childcare (that Valleywag covered here).

And today, also on Valleywag, I read about Google’s food cutbacks. The cutbacks make sense on paper, just have dinner in fewer buildings – why do you need 10 dinner choices. Valleywag again: Perks: Dinner saved for Google’s geeks. But I see this as the first step on a long road – utilization studies of which snack stands get the least usage, a charge for “premium” food maybe – doesn’t really matter. It’s just Google saying to their employees “our good treatment of you has its limits”.

Now, I’m not saying Google’s going out of business anytime soon, but I think it’s another inflection point in their growth. We’ve already seen lots of “the first wave” leave to do their own thing. Now, somebody is actually being “fiscally responsible” and looking for places to trim excess costs. Give it a couple of years and we’ll see more and more people complaining that “it’s just not as fun to work there anymore”. A natural evolution in any company, but a sad day for Googlers.

With GayCities we’re developing the most comprehensive, user-friendly online travel community and city guide for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. We want to be the place to share invaluable insider information on where to go, eat, and stay wherever your travel.

I started the site after being disappointed in the lack of information online for the gay traveler. On a trip to Boston, I wanted to stay in a nice B&B in the South End and find out the most popular bars for gay men about my age. For the B&B, I turned to TripAdvisor only to be frustrated that there was no easy way to filter by “south end B&B”, and then when I did find places, I found it difficult to find opinions of people like me. Sadly, I even found a number of reviews that had veiled negative references to the clientele or owners. And when looking for nightlife I found almost nothing online and what I did find was out of date. And for a city the size of Boston, that shocked me. As I dug into it, I found that many cities suffer this same problem.

So GayCities was born. A gay city guide with comprehensive, up-to-date info about gay bars & clubs, restaurants, gay friendly hotels with reviews, photos, maps – all the stuff you’ve come to expect.

While reviews are the backbone of the site, today we’ve rolled out a bunch of great features. I’ll let you read about those over on the GayCities blog.

I’ve focused on bootstrapping to get to this point, but now I want to grow the site, add richer content and tell the world about it, so I’ll be seeking a round of friends/family/angel funding. If you are interested in participating (or know someone who would be) in this round, let me know.

You all have been so supportive to me through this process, and for that I am very thankful. There’s one more favor I have to ask – help me spread the word. Pass it on to your LGBT friends and link to http://www.gaycities.com/ from your blog or site – you know how Google/Yahoo love sites that are heavily linked to.

and P.S. over on the GayCities blog, I link to some of the press we’ve gotten (washington post, sf chronicle, techcrunch)…

Basically, my new site has a header element, that if you click open, it drops down like a drop down menu (floating over the content below) and fills itself with an iframe. Here are some mockups:

If you’re one of those guys/gals that finds this stuff super easy, can you give me a holler? I’ll buy you dinner if you can help me get unstuck (I’d much rather go to dinner than spend cash on a stranger). Comment here or drop me a mail at sgatz AT yahoo

I got married – Well, technically, Craig and I were “registered as a domestic partner under California state law” (maybe one day it’ll be called marriage). Even though we have been together for 15 years, we thought now would be a great time to make it “legal”. Craig and I spent the better part of the last few months planning a party for a small group of family and friends up in Napa. We had the most amazing weekend, the weather was spectacular, the food & wine was out-of-this-world and most important our closest friends and family joined us and had an amazing time. I wish I could re-live it every weekend.

I’ve been traveling – New York (2 times), Philadelphia, Baltimore, Palm Springs, and tons of weekend time up in Napa. I love to travel and to catch up with old friends, and I’ve been able to do that a bunch. While these trips have been mostly work related (see below), I made sure to add weekend time onto each trip to enjoy some quality time. And when you work on the internet you can work from anywhere. Have laptop…will travel.

Starting my own company – I’ve been working on and off since January on my new company. I’ve taken lots of meetings (including a number of excellent ones about partnerships), gotten lots of good advice and have solid progress on building out the site. It’s been fun and challenging and now that the wedding is over, it’s finally time to work full-time. My next steps: a launch in the next month or so and raising a friends/family/angel round to help prove out the model. More to come soon.

Taking care of myself – I’m finally going to the gym again and I hired a trainer to help me through it all. I already feel healthier, now onto looking good too!

I keep saying that I’ll be blogging more here and I really hope to as I work through the next phase of my career. I’ll keep sharing my thoughts, but more importantly, I’ll be asking questions and (hopefully) participating in the conversation.

Dave and I often do walks around South Park for our meetings. In our Sunnyvale office, I’ve done a few meetings walking along the top of the old garbage dump (it’s now a nice hill with a running path). Thanks Caterina!

Today though, I had the topper. Bradley and I met while sitting on the swings in South Park. I swear there was a four year old giving us dirty looks for using the playground for business purposes.

Where’s the wierdest places you’ve had meetings?

So, my coworker Mike and I attended Clickz’s Video Advertising conference today. This is clearly a field that isn’t figured out yet, so I thought it might be one of those “get to hear early insights” kinda days. Boy was I wrong.

I had low expectations for the morning sessions (the interesting sessions were set for the afternoon) but even those expectations were missed. On both morning panels, there was only one clueful guy who actually seemed to be aware of what was going on on the web (there’s this thing called myspace, and another thing called YouTube people). I sat through excruciating demos of million-dollar budget “interactive websites” that looked like they were an artifact of 1999. And what was worse, these people were giving advice to people in the audience. “People want slick, professionally produced, immersive interactive experiences”. (never mind the lack of authenticity, the slow download time, etc). Someone later in the day even demoed a downloadable app that played a custom video. How smart.

Anyway, I stuck it out in the hopes that the Yahoo speaker and the Google speaker would rescue the day. Usually google’s speakers run rings around everyone. Didn’t happen.

Then, my absolute favorite moment of any conference EVER happened. There was a panel of people demoing “new technology” in the space. Nothing was really new, each panelist more boring than the last. Then a presenter said that he wouldn’t be demoing anything. And then, it happened, the conference organizer and moderator sarcastically said:

[I paraphrase:]
Well, this panel couldn’t get less entertaining if it tried.

Wow. I guess she knew this wasn’t going well. I left shortly after that. I hope my next conference is better…

As you may remember, I run a group called Advanced Products at Yahoo!, and I’m lucky enough to be in the position to hire a lot of people. We’re looking for passionate, execution-oriented people who love to build great products (at the version 1.0-level) and who have the experience, skills and smarts to make our team even better than it already is. We’re looking for all types:

• Engineers – you have great experience launching products, love working on bright team and have the technical chops to go with it. We code in all sorts of ways (depends on the project), but we do a lot in AJAX/HTML/PHP/MySql.
• Designers – you’ve designed and launched products from idea generation and prototyping to understanding users, designing wireframes and creating visual design comps. You should have a strong understanding of user-centered design principles, excellent visual design skills and an entrepreneurial approach to designing, building, and launching products.
• Product Managers – you’ve launched products big and small and now you are ready to roll your sleeves up and be part of an entrepreneurial team. You get excited about products and how to market them and can’t wait to launch your next big success. We need someone to guide the product from end to end – idea to launch to eventual handoff to our business units.

And it’s not just my own team looking, its all of the Advanced Development Division (Bradley’s team) so you can work alongside the people that brought you Mixd, Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo! Podcasts, Hack Day, Flickr, and many more kickass products.

Drop us a line using this address: add-jobs [at] yahoo-inc [dot] com

Back in October, I asked our mobile team here for a Windows Mobile phone to do some testing. Their response “oh, here’s one take it”. It was a Treo 750. While I love gadgets, I hadn’t read about the 750, so I didn’t even know it was an unreleased demo phone I was using. I thought it was just a new phone that I didn’t know about yet. Kinda cool that I got a three month advance on everyone. Thanks Yahoo!

Well, anyway, I have to say I instantly fell in love with the Treo 750. I own a 650 and the 750 seemed to fix all the things that annoy me about my 650. It is lighter, it has a rubberized case, so I don’t have to get an extra “skin”, and it is slightly thinner. All of these things accompish my number one goal: make it fit in my pocket more easy. The phone I used had Windows Mobile on it, and while it was fast and reliable, I really do not like Windows Mobile. Microsoft continues to misunderstand the market completely. The start menu is a horrible way to change apps. Palm does it much better and I’ve seen others do it much better (Blackberry’s scroll wheel comes to mind). Using this phone made me realize that I will never use Windows Mobile.

Now, I’ll just have to wait for the 750p with Palm OS, and then I’ll be lining up at the store…

Last night the New Orleans Saints played their first home game since Hurricane Katrina in the newly remodeled Superdome. I think it is very important the world see that New Orleans is (slowly) coming alive.

I went to New Orleans over the Labor Day weekend this year; friends and I had planned to go last year at this time, and when Katrina hit, we all made a pact to come to New Orleans this year. What I found was a city that was (like NYC after 9/11) a bit conflicted. New Orleans relies on tourist dollars for a large part of its economy and it was clear that they really need us to come back.

• About 90% of the businesses/restaurants in the French Quarter are now open. Damage in the quarter and the Marigny wasn’t very bad, and some of these businesses took the time to remodel or otherwise improve during low traffic times. On Canal St. the ratio was more 50/50 and as you reached the outskirts, we drove for miles without seeing any businesses open (we saw a McDonalds in a pile of rubble, a frame of a supermarket and a Pizza Hut with the roof blown off). Other friends actually drove to East N.O. and the now infamous 9th Ward and reported seeing miles and miles of devastation. But, truth be told, when you visit N.O. you would never have visited those areas anyway.
• I arrived on Thursday night and found the French Quarter to be relatively quiet. Bourbon St was pretty empty and I could imagine businesses are suffering. I found many stores had little signs “open only Fri, Sat, Sun”. As the weekend progressed, the quarter came to life, but it was still less than when I’ve been there in the past. For example, finding restaurant reservations was really easy.
• I met a guy who’s been living in a FEMA trailer with his parents, and his brother and sister-in-law, 5 people in a teeny metal box. He described it: “it’s like one of those trailers you go take for a weekend camping trip, except that we’ve been living in it for a year”. The surprise was that he was resigned to it without being sad about it “it is what it is”. The good news for him and his family, they were in the process of painting and furnishing their home. Probably as I write this they are moving into their rebuilt home.

Photo from flickr: smiteme
• My favorite story was talking to someone about Halloween last year. All around New Orleans, all the buildings have spray painted X’s on them marking the date the building was searches, survivors found, and any animals inside. (BTW, we spent a lot of time drinking in a place that had 3 cats after the storm). So, this guy and his friends all dressed as houses. They got T-shirts, dipped them in brown dye (to about 1/3 of the way) to look like a water line and then painted the fema markings on them. A fun costume that made light of what had to have been a very difficult time. It was this spirit I found in a lot of people, and it makes me believe New Orleans will come back.

So, I’ll tell you what I’m telling everyone. The areas that tourists visit are back in gear or on their way back, but they need YOU. Without the dollars to support the businesses, they’ll go out of business.

Book a trip to New Orleans. Contribute your dollars to their economy. Go and have fun, listen to Jazz, have jambalaya and listen to people’s stories. It is still a fun place, the people are still strong and high sprited. But as we said about NYC after 9/11 – it’s time to come back.

If you’ll be there, let me know and at least say hi. I’ll try to do some booth duty at the Yahoo! booth and you’ll find me lurking in all the interesting panels.

I didn’t hear the question, but the person I knew must have asked something like “can I actually get a desktop computer that isn’t muddy”…

And the IT person (my assumption) said:

Well, let me ask my manager and manager’s manager to see what we can or can’t do

Funny enough, I was on my way down to the post office on campus to mail my taxes – I dutifully filled out four forms to mail off my check to the IRS & California. Hopefully that’ll be my last big company moment today.

You might think that the SWA gates would be a madhouse, but in fact they are very orderly. People arrive and begin to lineup into three lines (A, B and C) in a quite orderly fashion. People in each row are cordial to each other asking “is this the line for B to san diego?” and exchanging niceties and often that question allows people to break into a friendly conversation. If you were to look at the gate area from above, you’d see what looks like three branches on a tree, they curve around the furniture and the walls, but they are a line.

Contrast this with what I saw at an America West Gate. A throng of people surrounded the doorway to their gate, each trying to push past each each other so they could get to their seat earlier (even though they know they are guaranteed to sit in the same seat no matter how quickly they board). If you looked down from above, it’d look like a half circle completely filled with people.

It struck me that this is a lot like community on the web, if you give people a little guidance and a benefit, they’ll actually organize themselves just fine. On SWA, the benefit of being orderly is a smoother travel experience and a good seat and the guidance is telling people where they stand — those that are in line C know that no amount of pushing will get them good seats and those in A know that they are gonna be in a seat they like no matter what. On AW, they don’t ask anything of the traveller, they don’t trust the travellers to line up, they treat travel as a solitary experience “every man for themselves”. And it shows.

On the web, we’ve seen some really interesting communities grow: flickr, delicious, craigslist. All of them give benefits to people in the community (tags make it easier to find stuff, the tools allow you to connect with friends or meet new people or sell stuff, etc) and all give a simple amount of guidance “to get those benefits, we’d like you to tag, post, rate, report bad stuff, etc”. And you know, the community organizes itself. Those communities police themselves a bit. There’s abuse (“people cutting line”), but its buried deep down in the site because the community won’t rate it or will report it. Those communities help me find where the good stuff is, because, that’s what they’d want someone to do for them. And the sites actually ask people to do it and reward people for doing it right. Really quite simple.

So if you are working on an online community, are you trusting the community to organize itself? Are you giving them a clear benefit? Are you simply asking for what you’d like to see? When you see good behaviour, do you email the person and say “thanks?”. If not, go take a flight on SWA, then re-think your answers…

 I had WP set to email me when I got comments.  I got no email, so I just assumed you were all a quiet bunch. 

Turns out when I got upgraded to WP 2.0, somehow the email thing got shut off.  So I apologize to all you great commenters who talked about my previous posts.  Those comments are now live. 

BTW, I only got three votes for yesterday’s rant (including one from my dad) – all said they want more “angry scott”.   What do you think?

Well, I have been really busy and the holidays took a bite out of my free time.   But the real reason I haven’t been blogging lately is that I promised that this blog wouldn’t be a negative one.  It wouldn’t be a place where I diss Yahoo or its competitors.   But lately, all thoughts popping into my head have been a bit on the negative side.   Here are some subjects for posts that I wanted to write, but didn’t:

• Upon the launch of Google’s Mobile Homepage their Product Manager can’t find anything good to say about his own product, so he disses Yahoo and just makes shit up.   Be proud of your own damn product, talk about that! He mentioned the word Yahoo in the press more than his own company.  And the press/analysts ate it up without checking the facts.
• Google takes a faux stand – The DOJ enforced subpeonas for search records. Most search engines complied with the court order. Google didn’t. Their excuse: it’s proprietary info for their company.  The press (not Google) calls it protecting privacy.  Search engines gave up info WITHOUT user info – no privacy violation here, move on.   BTW, have you ever been to google’s lobby? They project what people are searching on the wall.   The DOJ just wanted that.  Maybe the DOJ should go sit in Google’s lobby for a few hours.
• Real Player needs to rethink their music service – I won $15 of free music on Real’s music service.   Cool!   So, I download the service.   2 days later I finally worked through all my installation issues.   Then I go to use the service.   Gosh, maybe I’ll just give up that $15.   The process is far from seamless.   Even though I don’t think iTunes is awesome, they clearly got the easy to buy thing down.  Real isn’t even close.

I also have a bunch of more positive and/or constructive blog posts in my head now, so I plan to start blogging again.    But I need your comments.  Do I allow myself to rant on this blog – do I write those posts above?  You tell me, post a comment!

While a lot of blogger attention was paid to those Mountain View guys, I think people missed the real gem about Yahoo! Go (for the record I don’t love the name, but I love the concept).

Now if you saw my keynote at Syndicate (preso online here) you know that I was hinting at what was to come: give the consumer what they want, when they want, where and how they want – whether that’s on their couch, on the beach, in the car, wherever. And that’s the strategy that Terry, Dan and Marco laid out at CES. And that’s cool. BUT…that’s not the real exciting news announced on Friday.

The real exciting news is the Yahoo! Go app itself. This is one of those products that only comes along once in a while and words cannot do it justice. It’s one of those products that you see and say “oh, that’s how it always should have been” or “wow, now it gets interesting”. So why am I so excited? It seamlessly syncs your mobile phone with the web. Your device is just a live input to the web.

• Take a picture with your camera – it shows up on Y! Photos. That’s it. No sending to an email address, no waiting to upload. Just point, shoot, and its shared (I can’t wait til they add Flickr support)
• Meet someone, type their phone number into your phone, it shows up in your Y! Address book. No syncing, no cables, no button to press.
• Works in both directions – this is the killer one for me. I manage a lot of my addresses/phone numbers on the web and I always forget to sync. Also the idea of me being able to get all my favorite family photos on my phone without having to upload them to my phone rocks. It’s a slideshow in my pocket without having to every plug my phone in.
• IM & Mail too – you can do Voice IM on your phone. Your email box is totally in sync (kinda like IMAP for your phone)

I realize in writing this how excited I am about it, but how hard it is to explain why. If you have a Nokia Series 60 phone, drop everything and go get it. If you don’t, find someone who has one and get them to try it out and show you.

It’s amazing and I hope this bodes well for the future of mobile and living room devices. As an industry we have to make these things incredibly seamless. My better half’s eyes glaze over when I say “OK, to get the pictures off of your phone, you need to plug this cable into the computer, then open the software program, then click Import and pick a place to save, then find them in Explorer and double click the image, then….” No one does that. But soon I can say: “Just take a picture and go to My Yahoo and you’ll see your pictures.”

Now that’s worth getting excited about.