Socialist Yahoo!?
Found this rather amusing comment on the Yahoo! profiles blog, regarding the feedback on the new Yahoo! profiles. It's amusing because it brings the S-word into picture. Wonder if he knows that a bunch of us blokes who built some of the Y! community stuff called ourselves "commies".
I would like to comment on, what I perceive as, a gross misunderstanding of certain English terms and ideals which underline the preceding responses to this blog entry. To start with, Yahoo! uses the term “open social”, which is just a fancy way of saying socialist. The primary principle to socialism is the total eradication of individualism. Therefore, in order to achieve a “more open and social Yahoo!” it must do away with those aspects which focus on the users as individuals, like the old profile system that let the users interact the same way on Yahoo!, as they do in real life.
When I joined Yahoo! back in December of 1998, I did so because Yahoo! openly opposed such socialist giants as Microsoft, and America Online. Back then Yahoo! was proud to be American and unashamed to stand tall on the principles of individualism and liberty. One of the ways Yahoo! did this was through the alias system, users could give as much or as little information as they felt comfortable with, and do so in various settings, just as we as individuals do in the real world.
That, I think is the fundamental reason the new profiles system is so unwelcome by many. It contradicts the vary nature of what it means to be human. As of now, it’s not nearly as personal, or individual. Instead of interacting they way we do in person, through aliases, now we are told by Yahoo! that it wants us to socialize in a matter that it dictates to us, the way it’s competitors always have.
http://www.yprofileblog.com/blog/2008/10/31/recent-updates-to-the-profiles-service/#comment-2603
BTW, I don't have much of an opinion on the matter. I found aliases a weettle bit confusing and difficult to manage. I also prefer multi-processing and shared-nothing architectures but I suppose there shouldn't be any correlation between them and the profile vs. alias debate ;-)
As for Yahoo! being socialist, it might just be a case of the author aliasing [no pun intended] "evil" with "socialist" like those blokes in "Born on the 4th of July" movie.
I would like to comment on, what I perceive as, a gross misunderstanding of certain English terms and ideals which underline the preceding responses to this blog entry. To start with, Yahoo! uses the term “open social”, which is just a fancy way of saying socialist. The primary principle to socialism is the total eradication of individualism. Therefore, in order to achieve a “more open and social Yahoo!” it must do away with those aspects which focus on the users as individuals, like the old profile system that let the users interact the same way on Yahoo!, as they do in real life.
When I joined Yahoo! back in December of 1998, I did so because Yahoo! openly opposed such socialist giants as Microsoft, and America Online. Back then Yahoo! was proud to be American and unashamed to stand tall on the principles of individualism and liberty. One of the ways Yahoo! did this was through the alias system, users could give as much or as little information as they felt comfortable with, and do so in various settings, just as we as individuals do in the real world.
That, I think is the fundamental reason the new profiles system is so unwelcome by many. It contradicts the vary nature of what it means to be human. As of now, it’s not nearly as personal, or individual. Instead of interacting they way we do in person, through aliases, now we are told by Yahoo! that it wants us to socialize in a matter that it dictates to us, the way it’s competitors always have.
http://www.yprofileblog.com/blog/2008/10/31/recent-updates-to-the-profiles-service/#comment-2603
BTW, I don't have much of an opinion on the matter. I found aliases a weettle bit confusing and difficult to manage. I also prefer multi-processing and shared-nothing architectures but I suppose there shouldn't be any correlation between them and the profile vs. alias debate ;-)
As for Yahoo! being socialist, it might just be a case of the author aliasing [no pun intended] "evil" with "socialist" like those blokes in "Born on the 4th of July" movie.