Flickr And Yahoo Mail

Those two need obvious work and are relatively easy to do.

Can Marissa Mayer turn Yahoo around?

Flickr

Make it free again. There should be no limit to how many pictures you can upload.

Give the option to embed. I should be able to embed a Flickr picture - not just mine, but of anyone who will allow it - into a blog post of mine.

Yahoo Mail

There is a need for cloud storage, like Dropbox, Skydrive, Google Drive. So all email attachments go to the cloud. Inboxes don't have space limits these days.

Yahoo Mail spam protection sucks. I can block email from an email address, and the next time I get an email from that address, it still gets delivered! Fix this.

Social Graph

Tap into them. Facebook has one. Twitter has one. LinkedIn has one. Google Plus has one.

Overlap these graphs onto my Flickr and Yahoo Mail.

Mobile

Go mobile on both.

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Head In The Cloud: Google Drive

Image via CrunchBase

If Disqus can do it, maybe Dropbox can do it. (Adding Disqus To My Blog Was The Easiest Thing) But cloud storage is quite a central experience and so is going to get a lot of attention from the Big G. Blog commenting is a sideshow by comparison.

Dropbox: 2 GB. Google Drive: 5 GB. Microsoft SkyDrive: 25 GB. Microsoft is the clear winner!

Google's Drive Adds to a Complicated Cloud

After roughly six years of rumors, Google has finally launched its own cloud storage and syncing service, called Google Drive. The service offers five gigabytes of online file storage for free and includes software that automatically synchronizes files between Windows and Apple computers, Android phones, and Google's cloud. ..... Users can pay $2.49 a month for an extra 25 gigabytes of storage, or pay more for larger blocks up to a maximum of 16 terabytes. ..... The five gigabytes of storage that Google now offers is more than the two gigabytes that's standard with a free Dropbox account, although Dropbox runs several promotions that make it relatively easy for a user to get five gigabytes or more for free. Dropbox offers 50 gigabytes of storage for $9.99 per month; a Google Drive user can get 100 gigabytes for half that price..... Microsoft yesterday upgraded the capacity of its cloud storage service, SkyDrive, which integrates closely with its Windows Phone software and the upcoming Windows 8. Users of that service receive 25 gigabytes of storage for free, and can pay for more....... Google Drive .. It is meant to be a place where you can work with data and documents, not just store them. More than 30 types of document can be viewed from the Google Drive site, including many video and image formats, and office documents can be edited there, too. Computer vision algorithms make it possible to search text in any images uploaded to Google Drive ...... build "the Internet's file system." ..... intense competition between Google, Microsoft, Apple, and smaller companies such as Dropbox.

Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist...... Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items. .... regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader. .... Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology..... Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive.

Just like there is room for more than one email service, there is room for more than one cloud storage system. I am not thinking 2 GB versus 5 GB versus 25 GB. I am thinking 2 plus 5 plus 25.

Edit videos in Drive? Wow.

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The Commandos Behind Facebook's Growth

Image via CrunchBase

If you are like me you though the massive growth happened on its own.

Chasing Facebook's Next Billion Users

The growth team was formed in late 2007, when Zuckerberg decided expansion was so important that it warranted a unit with its own resources. The site was approaching 100 million members, but its growth rate had cooled. ..... the growth team struck a deal with Google to let the search engine show Facebook profiles in its results. They also launched a feature called “People You May Know” ....... a companywide push to create a translation tool that let users in Spain, France, and Germany navigate the site in their native languages. Within two years of its creation, the team had expanded Facebook’s roster of users sevenfold, to 360 million. ..... a key to building more active members is spotting what she calls “magic moments.” That’s when a new user moves from thinking, “‘What the hell is this Facebook thing all about’ to ‘Aha! I understand, this is cool,’” says Gleit. Facebook tries to get users to experience this moment as early as possible by helping them find friends effortlessly. ...... her job entails wrangling with other teams at Facebook to highlight features on the site that improve engagement ..... “The next billions of people, we believe, are going to come through mobile” ...... governmental barriers like in China, and occasionally Vietnam, or competitive barriers like VKontakte in Russia ..... Quora, online storage company Dropbox, and Twitter now have their own growth teams

I was going to say Facebook's next billion will come from China. Zuckerberg's marriage to a Chinese woman, was that strategic?

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Twitter Should Open Up Its API ---- To Google

Twitter misunderstands real time.

Google Plus Plus Google Search

Real time is not just real time as it is happening right now. Real time is also real time as it happened in real time two years ago. But Twitter thinks only your 3,000 or so latest tweets are relevant. It does not destroy the old tweets, but it disallows access to them, which in my book is akin to destroying them.

My single biggest frustration with Twitter has been that I can not search through all of my own tweets. If I could, Twitter would be my Dropbox. But no, Twitter would not open up its API.

Twitter Is Seeing Rebirth
Twitter Asks
Being Able To Embed Tweets Is A Revolution
Twitter At Five: Not Spitting Out Well

Twitter opening up its API would mean Google being able to access all tweets without paying Twitter. Bad deal for Twitter? No. Like Jeff Jarvis says, do what you do best, link to the rest. Twitter does not do search right, if at all. My tweets belong to me, not to Twitter. At the least I should have access to them.

All tweets ever tweeted becoming fair game to Google Search would enhance the piece of real estate called the tweet tremendously. It is in Twitter's interests to open up. Lift the iron curtain. Mr. Dorsey, tear down this wall.

TechCrunch: Twitter Really, Really Hates Google’s New Google+ Integration