skylarwoodward

In September, I became an official employee at Kiva. People have asked me almost every day since then, “How is going? Was the transition from a big company hard? What’s it like being at a, well, non-profit now?”

The answer is, things are awesome. It’s not necessary about the specific cause or the product, and it certainly has nothing to do with PHP or a 3-year-old legacy code base (which for, yes, I’m partially responsible). It’s because of this:

http://www.fredr1c.com/kiva_in_cambodia_comic/Comic.html

People. People like Sopha who are worth discovering but are otherwise isolated in the most remote and poorest places in the world. People like Zvi and Matt who can’t stop smiling every day they come in the office. People like John who quit their job after 10 years to pack up, ship out to Cambodia for months, and revel in applying their talents to connecting lenders to borrowers.

Once you know people and their stories, your motivation to evoke change becomes an unstoppable human response.

Way to go John. Welcome to the Kiva family.

After 3 years of hiding out in the campuses of Yahoo! it’s good to finally have something external to show for it. Most exciting is the release of BrowserPlus, a software and software distribution framework that allows device developers (desktop, mobile, etc.) to seamlessly bridge the browser programming environment (DHTML, JS) to any component they can dream up (VoIP, image manipulation, data caching, etc.). Some time ago we created a platform team to focus on device software at Yahoo! and this is what has emerged amidst the quickly shifting strategy of the mothership. The 1.0 release of BrowserPlus is intended only for use by Yahoo! sites to enhance customer experiences; however, in the coming months, developers might expect the ability to use components on their own sites. (If you’re interested in this, send us feedback). In the meantime, you can hack the framework on your own system after you’ve installed it to start experimenting. You can experience BrowserPlus currently through the PhotoDropper module on Mash, though direct installs are available for mac or pc. A hearty three cheers for the guys that made it happen – Lloyd, Gordon, Dave, and Steve.

Also this week was the official external launch of Fire Eagle, a platform for sharing your physical location in the world, to developers. This is the second public-facing project to launch from the team we started in San Francisco back in late May, Brickhouse. (The first was BravoNation.) Dopplr is one of the first sites to make use of Fire Eagle, updating your location to Fire Eagle once a trip begins or ends. You can expect wider exposure of Fire Eagle in the coming weeks as more developers ready their apps for the service, creating a complete ecosystem of location-sharing apps – from geo-friend-finders and SMS location updaters to location savvy search tools. Finally, location apps don’t have to be a closed system solutions. The whole team (Jeannie, Sam, Kevron, Rabble, Simon, Seth, Phil, Marc, Mor, and Salim) will be celebrating and evangelizing in SXSW this week, though a special congratulation is in order to Tom who carried the product from skunk works to research prototype, and delivered it at public launch this morning.

An interesting parallel between these projects, aside from their timing or my contributions, is that both employ Ruby in significant ways – significant, not necessarily to the scope of the app, but to the future of the language itself. Fire Eagle is the first Ruby on Rails application to be publicly launched at Yahoo! (a technical stunt on all fronts, indeed), and has the potential to be the most significant test of scale for the Rails platform on the Internet. BrowserPlus is making use of Ruby through an runtime engine component that allows for other components to be written in Ruby rather than compiled OS-native languages. That is, load the Ruby Engine component into BrowserPlus, then write your own component in Ruby that leverages any gem on the planet to offer up new functionality to your applications in the browser. It’s all super easy to do, but we are getting ahead of ourselves in suggesting you write your own at this point. Still, it’s all exciting for the world of Ruby.

Both BrowserPlus and Fire Eagle will be easier to get your hands on in the coming weeks, but if you want to play with one of them now it’s best to go through Mash for BrowserPlus and Dopplr for FireEagle – so you have a chance to see each platform working in practice. If you need an invite to any of the above, just post a comment to this article with your email address (no worries, it won’t be exposed).

Last Wednesday was one of the happiest days of my life. There were many good things about Wednesday, but the dominating glow came from seeing Kiva on the Front Page of Yahoo!. Ever since Daily Kos spiked traffic to wipe Kiva clean of inventory, I’ve been waiting to see the day when the impact of Kiva justified a place in the most visible real estate of the Internet, and when we were able to handle the load such attention would present.
Perhaps more importantly, years of anticipation were fulfilled in seeing two of the most influential spheres in my life run tangent at the most significant of points. I’ve been begging groups at Yahoo! to do something meaningful with the audience, cause, or even spirit of Kiva for well over year. Only in our wildest dreams did we think that Yahoo! would give Kiva real estate on the front page (and certainly not the feature story). As it turns out it is more rewarding to see that the eventual intersection had nothing to do with my interactions in Sunnyvale and everything to do with the work that is going on in the Mission and in the partner countries. There were no favors done, no presentations acted on, and no compromises made on either side. Kiva was presented before the largest of all populaces solely on account of you, the viewers and the lenders. You voted with your clicks and love won.

Today I depart for India. In fact, I’m halfway there – halfway to halfway around the world – the farthest I’ve ever been from home, though I have a feeling it won’t feel quite as remote as Morrocco did, not at least this time around. It is a short trip and just looking through the travel books I know I want to stay longer than I can. I’m hoping this is a great preparation for spending weeks or months in such a vast and diverse land. I’m also looking forward to having perceptions changed from those that I have taken for granted during my limited but steady exposure to Indian culture and Indian natives through Silicon Valley and the tech industry.

I’m waiting in the lounge for Gate B20 in Frankfurt’s Airport. There are two power outlets here, and along with the man next to me, I’m lucky to have snagged one and tapped into a hotspot to get a quick Internet fix before the next 9+ hour flight. Even though the trip is long, I think the layover is actually a welcome interruption. It is not nearly as painful as the 13hour non-stop flight from the West coast to Austrailia’s East – or at least it doesn’t seem that way so far. Perhaps I should wait until I finish the trip before making a judgement.

This morning before my flight (or I suppose it was yesterday morning) I made three quick errands all over the neighborhood on the Veloce in under 30 minutes. It was fantastic. Here in Deustchland, reminants of the Weltmeister are still in the air.

So I had entirely no intention of blogging about the absurd event on campus today, but after getting tagged into the corporate photostream I felt inclined to make mention. (Thanks to June and Warren for propogating the myth.) I was entriely amazed at how quickly so many people posted so many pictures so fast. Almost 400 hundred pictures were posted and tagged to flickr in the hour after the occassion, and at least as many have been posted since. Forget about the government ruining your privacy – we’re doing it to ourselves. Immediately after the event I though about how though security was tight and the auditorium was well cloaked, visuals and details on the otherwise private event were about as public as once can find – the most popular flickr tag for the day is even ytomcruise thanks to the saturation of the site’s users on hand. Pictures that you might be hard pressed to catch at a regular press event, such as close up of Katie’s ring or a hollywood kiss are easy pickings amidst a sea of trigger-happy well-connected cameraphone owners.

All that said, it seems ironic that the same photo that captures me at the event also documents a conversation that Mike and Naveen started by questioning the effectiveness of photos to prove one’s attendance to some momentous ocassion or amidst fame. At first it seems a digital photo really means very little in this day and age where bytes are easily modified to suit personal pleasure and there’s no original celluloid to help tie the owner to the print. Naveen suggested that perhaps video was the answer to that age-old authenticity; however, a community documenting relationships of this visual data appears to do more than any one photographer could to prove his association to his location or subject (in this case, Tom). In fact, it is not even important that the photographer actually took the photograph, but that someone took a photograph of the subject, a picture was taken of the person wishing to be associated with the subject, and that those two pictures are related together in time and location in a meaningful and credible way. In this case, I had rather not cared to be linked to today’s event in the short time I was there, but any photo of Tom on stage plus a candid and tagged photo of me is enough to have me incriminated in the court of unproductiveness for the morning. Also, pictures like this one don’t help.

Tom Cruise came to campus as a part of our Influentials speaker series, though while I’m sure many people have had their lives deeply affected by Mr. Cruise, the other Toms who have visited have left more lasting impressions. However, irony rears its head again this evening to suggest that while Yahoos are looking to Hollywood for influence, our ever proximate neighbors continue to be influenced by us. With Google Finance in place, it is hard to take the mutterances of “It’s not a Pohr-tal!” seriously anymore. Regardless, once weather.google.com launches, the transition will be final. Done, and done.

With every new “don’t leave our domain” product Google launches into the marketplace, the community, understandably, responds with less and less enthusiasm. I have to think it was like this for Yahoo! in the early days as well. The directory blew their minds. Finance was really really cool. Mail allowed some people to use a completely new service that was previously inacessible to them. Groups got everyone asking “Do you Yahoo?” Yahoo! Pets were kinda fun. Auctions were, hmm, done already. Bookmarks were… wait, is that still a property? Likewise, every new feature Google introduces further dilutes their identity to the rest of the Internet. In the beginning, everything they touched was gold because of the strong reputation built on their search services and it was novel to see their strengths applied to new problems like email and printed materials. Many at Yahoo! were pressed to imitate and incorpate their innovations, or at least felt guilty for the appearance of imitating, but in the process a lot of sleepy people woke up and a lot of talented people got the opportunity to do something new. Stepping back, the unfinished portait suggests that all along they are really imitating us. Certainly, some of the details in their execution are cooler, but at some point users will stop asking “what has Google done today?” and “hey why doesn’t this Google thing do what the other portals do?” (In which case Microsoft will respond, “Look over here! Where do you want to go today?”) In the end, the flattery turns cyclic. Since we’ve already identified ourselves with users (for better or for worse) as “the site that does everything,” we can collect cool points for integrating the good ideas and making the most interesting stuff really clever. And for that, it is good to know that in lesser known parts of the blogosphere, not every part of the company is drooling at Hollywood.

our sister group at work had a new product launch last week and as part of the celebration, fantastic little nerf darts were distributed throughout our floor and the number of people stockpiling ammo grows daily with each spontaneous battle.

at first I thought the proliferation of flying foam projectiles was somewhat of a stressful nuisance – work no longer becomes a peaceful place when everytime you stand up or walk outside your cube you have to worry about getting slammed in the head. so in that respect I thought I could sympathize with the thoughts of all those in Iraq that might be fearing the dangers of any attack on their own nations. i mean, imagine having to worry about walking outside your cube and getting nuked.

but today i realized that war is really fun. at least if you’ve got targets and something to hit them with. now i can understand while all the world leaders are itching to unleash all the toys stockpiled in their own military divisions – i bet saddam is just as eager as any of them. but maybe we can convince them they’d have more fun if they all just play with Nerf weapons… at least no one would die. let’s get those Iraq and US troops hovering on the boarders some self-firing darts and let ‘em go at it for a couple hours. when all is said and done everyone will have had a lot of fun, released some stored up agression, and most hopefully of all see how similarly created they are in their inmost being. maybe then they can all march up together to the Baghdad castle and kick out the pyscho there… or at least convince him to come out for a couple rounds.

okay, so i’m being quite idealistic. but in summary, dart wars seem to be doing more good than harm, at least on the home front.