Congratulations to all the folks at Yahoo! on celebrating their tenth anniversary on the web. I was at Yahoo for exactly half of those ten years and I have a deep respect for everyone who was there then and those who are still at it after a decade. They've really done a wonderful job since I left in 2002. To commemorate the anniversary, the portal is offering free ice cream and a "netrospective" of the past 10 years online.
The netrospective chooses 100 ideas, institutions, and events to highlight over the past 10 years. (Love the jammedtogether headings. That's so tag.) I suspect I know some of the people involved in coming up with this list, and I applaud them for a nice selection. Here are some comments from a former colleague:
1. incorporation - That photo is from way past 1995, as everyone knows. The fish is from the first Yahoo commercial (see #26).
4. jerrygarcia - I remember this pretty well, although I was still on the East Coast. Needless to day, Adrian was bummed. I think I sent him an email that day. Who put this news on the front page, anyway?
14. useless - Nice that they included this. Of course, didn't the actual Useless Pages get sold to Go2Net or something? Ah, yes, here it is. Big ups, Steve-O. I would've titled this entry "atemyballs," but, hey, that's just me...
31. weblog - It's nice that they put blogs in their proper time frame, pointing to Rebecca's history. I'm kinda sad that Offhand Remarks doesn't get included in lists of blogs that were around in 1997. That's probably because I redesigned too often and posted too infrequently. Still, for the record, this blog started on September 22, 1997. Aaron Bromagem helped my write the perl script that let me post entries without hand-coding. If only we'd kept working on it, instead of playing foosball, we might have become Six Apart. Woulda shoulda coulda....
65. buzz - I'm proud to have played a part in this one. Erik Gunther probably hates that I take any credit at all, considering he's poured thousands of hours of effort into the site over the past five years. Well, too bad, EG. I invented Buzz. And the Internet. And the Yahoo! News Octopus. Don't forget it. I'll fight you and KT any day. And get Foon working on that Buzz map. I'm still waiting....
100. whatsnext - I like the redesign of the front page for the Yahoo! Directory. There you'll find many of Yahoo!'s cool editorial features, including Yahoo! Picks, which has been going for almost a decade itself. It started on August 13, 1995. Hey Filo, remember the mailing list? Boy, that was a fun chore, removing dead addresses every week. I can't believe you spent your time doing that.
and, finally...
101. wheresgoogle - This omission is so glaring, it actually calls attention to itself. (I spent a good amount of time mousing over every square, just looking for it.) They mention Amazon, Netscape, eBay, and Half (!), but there's not a whisper of Google.
102. whoops - Thomas Rogers points out that #18 (my lucky number) is actually Google, under the guise of its little-known codename, Back Rub. Hmmmn. Very sneaky. Good catch, TR. I stand corrected.
Congrats to everyone in Sunnyvale. Keep on rockin'.
yr ex-editor,
H.
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