Joseph Bou-Younes

I've stopped using Posterous and am now blogging at http://joseph.by . See you there!

-J

Programmers write code, QA specialists (really just a specialized kind of programmer) make sure that it works, designers create flows, layouts, copy and graphics, and sales people sell. Sure, someone needs to keep an eye on costs and revenues, and manage the business - but that's not what most product managers do.

So do we really need product managers? Or do we just need someone to make sure that someone is leading the team and taking accountability for delivering something that consumers want and customers pay for? This seems to be the approach that Facebook takes.

Yahoo is like your yuppie friend who takes up triathlons. He just keeps spending money on fancy gear, thinking that it will make him them competitive. But then the gear just sits in the garage for years until his wife finally makes him sell it on Craigslist.

1. I need something that could accomodate things longer than 140 characters.

I haven't written a blog post since August. When I do write something, my posts tend to be short - I try to call out a trend that I've noticed, give some context to a new piece of data or article, or simply elaborate on a link or photo that I enjoy and think others would find useful.

The integration between posterous and twitter feels more natural. With blogger, I had to conciously decide if something was a tweet or a post. With posterous, I'll try creating everything on posterous first, so that there's no limit to the length of the content or the amount of structured data or rich media I attach to it.

2. blogger is ugly

Google left blogger to seed years ago. True, it's possible to snazz-up your blog by creating your own template, or loading in one of the many that you can choose from, but I don't feel that it's worth the work. If I had years of posts, or thousands of readers, then perhaps it would be worth the effort.

I post for fun; I want to enjoy the experience of writing something and sharing it with the world. Posting - when I do post on the web - should be a pleasant experience. blogger isn't.

3. blogger feels like work

Whenever I clicked on "New Post" I was faced with a gaping maw of an edit box, into which I was expected to pour hundreds of words of brilliant, cogent writing. With posterous, I feel that much less is expected of me. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing, but it's closer to what I feel I need.

Also, in blogger I found that I was constantly struggling to manage media - coding links, creating thumbnails, etc. Posterous feels much lighter - almost disposable. If I don't like what I posted, I can always just delete the post - much like a tweet that I don't like.

And that's why I decided to give posterous and tumblr a try.

To be fair, there is nothing inherently wrong with the dull extended, bold sans serif that has been introduced but it represents a kind of corporate stubbornness to not admit that a perfectly decent extended, bold sans serif already exists that works perfectly with the word UNITED. Why create a poor man’s version of that is somewhat incomprehensible and then to tout it as “Ooh la la, it’s custom, baby” is gratuitously sans merit.

They loosened the paywall, added more daily content updates, and moved the site away from being simply an online reflection of their print publication. You can read a description of the new design on their site. Here's my view.

We're building a new kind of web UI on top of a lot of complicated technology platforms (location detection, a content management system, etc.). It's a fun change from my last two prducts (Yahoo! Toolbar and My Yahoo!), which both required engineering rebuilds of existing products with big audiences. We're working with great design teams - both external and in house - and are building something very, very pretty. Given where we are in the project, a few posts seemed really relevant.

On Tuesday Chris Dixon wrote a great post on Pivoting. He talks about the "Bridge over the River Kwai" problem, where entrepreneurs fall so in love with their engineering project that they lose site of the bigger mission. I've seen the same thing with engineering managers, product managers, and designers. Frequently. The only solution is to keep asking why and to listen to the answers. When you inevitably screw up because the product guys misheard the engineering manager, or the engineers misunderstood the designers, remember to solve the problem with better communication – not longer specifications! Overly-detailed specifications are usually a sign that something is very, very wrong with your approach to building software.

That's all. Time to crank through the rest of Friday before retiring to my deck with a book and a pillow.