They both lost because Microsoft comes out of this deal proposal with a failure, while Yahoo will quite likely see its stock value plummet. This isn’t the only problem for Yahoo, though - they’ll still need to figure out a solid strategy going forward that will in fact deliver value to its shareholders. Personally, I don’t think cutting an ad deal with Google is the right way either because it only proves how their own ad business is not so good.

I guess we’ll see how things progress, but after thursday and friday’s news about meetings finally taking place about the acquisition, I thought we’d see a deal. And while initially my opinion was that a deal would be a bad thing, now I’m not sure, given how the future of Y! seems bleak. Well, at least this whole subject is done for, for now.

More coverage at Techmeme, Techcrunch, Microsoft’s PR, Yahoo’s PR. Image credit: Mr Gee at Flickr.

If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to learn Ruby on Rails, this may be it. Our team has recently opened sign-ups for our first public Rails training session, taking place later on the 19th, 20 and 21st of May in Coimbra, Portugal. We’ll be going from basics down to a few pretty advanced topics, so this should make you happy wether you’re a beginner or already know a little bit of rails.

For more information about the 3 days of training, check out our training site or get in touch with us at training@webreakstuff.com. We hope to see you there. There are discounts for students and for those people only attending specific days, so feel free to ask.

“Rails”, “Ruby on Rails”, and the Rails logo are trademarks of David Heinemeier Hansson.

The latest ALA is all about Everyblock and some of the things their team learned building the service. There’s some genius nuggets behind the way they build maps and a few suggestions for accessible data visualization using standards.

Alex Iskold over at ReadWriteWeb wrote a great post about the new ways of Business Development, focusing on leveraging the social media and new ways of communication. I wrote a post about the new ways to engage last week as well which you may want to read if you haven’t yet. And around the same area, Brian Solis has a good post on PR 2.0.

Mike Butcher at Techcrunch UK has an insightful post about VC in Europe which you should read if you’re an entrepreneur on this side of the Atlantic. Mike says europe is still in its adolescent years when it comes to Venture Capital, although things are looking a bit better. Still, Fred Wilson calls for a new path to liquidity in this post.

Not all is business, though! Github launched and Rails moved over - which is sweet. Oh, and mod_rails (also known as Phusion Passenger - fan of the project, not the name) has launched as well. Here’s to a new era of rails availability! Anyways, I’ll get back to the regular blogging programme really soon. Have a great weekend.

We need these small bursts of innovation to keep moving browser technology forward. It is interesting to see how Opera maintains their status of trying to hit these milestones first, and how Safari is keeping up better than other browsers (like Firefox) do. It is important to mention that IE8 is supposed to come packing with standards support as well, as announced at MIX08 earlier this month. Exciting!

New ways of engaging with people

We’re seeing something similar now but at a hyper-level, through different, specialized channels. Companies are now engaging with their costumers through micro-blogging systems such as Twitter - in fact, just a few hours ago, Peachpit Press started following me on there. We have twitter accounts for our projects like Goplan and Totspot, and always recommend our clients and partners to do the same, because we know our audience of early adopters cares that we’re close.

Being on Twitter allows companies to engage in short (but sweet) conversations about their products. To provide instant notifications when something is wrong, or - much better -, when something exciting just happened. A feature or product launch, maybe. The possibilities are endless when companies start seeing customers as friends. A subtle term change, yes, but it has quite the impact.

Not all about Twitter

It’s not all about Twitter, though. We’re seeing social networking profiles being opened on Facebook and Myspace for companies - and people actually befriending these and becoming fans. You become a fan of something when you really actually care, so you can imagine the value of having people who care about you and your products, that you can talk to and get opinions and ideas from.

If two years ago we were having “naked conversations”, I can’t imagine where we’re going with this. These are exciting times. Want to talk to us? Both me and webreakstuff (the whole company) are on twitter.

Now, before the video itself. The way Dr. Jill Taylor describes her stroke experience motivated some people at TED’s website to comment as to how these experiences could easily be recalled by someone under the influence of substances, or through meditation. That’s not the point I’m trying to make, or the reason why the video moved me to post about it. It isn’t about “finding Nirvana” (you’ll see what I mean when you watch the video). I’ve just always been fascinated by the human brain and this is a tremendously insightful description of how we think and process the world around around us. Enjoy:

Our brain is a fascinating thing, and if you see past the way the stroke experience is recollected, it’s moving (and exciting, or frightening) to realize how complex we are. Ah, I so need to read Mind Wide Open (Steven Johnson’s book on “The neuroscience of every day lives”) again.

Now I can actually see what my friends are saying (or creating) about design, userexperience or development - these are just examples, obviously. And I can do site-specific searches (something I also asked for) which is down right amazing. And (I just tried), I can get RSS feeds for these searches. Friendfeed people, you got me. I’m a full-on user from this moment on. You win - actually, I do, because my information overload is soon to be gone.

Note: I’m re-reading my post and it sounds like sales. Trust me when I say it’s not - I’m just pretty happy about this. Maybe as happy as I was when I joined Twitter back in 05, or maybe when I joined GMail. Wow moments are hard to get, allow me to ride me for a few minutes.

I’ve been using Friendfeed a bit myself and while I find it cute and somewhat useful - as you probably do, I like to know what my friends have been doing or working on -, it just isn’t helping. It’s became just another content stream where I am fed unfiltered information from people. Twitter was “hard” enough to keep track of on a busy day, but Friendfeed not only includes twitter updates, it also packs info collected from around 23 other services. Cute? Definitely. Helping? Heck no.

A couple of ideas

Filtering: Friendfeed needs filtering. If I already have Twitteriffic on, It makes sense to be able to filter out all Twitter bits from my friendfeed. If I’m in the mood for checking out photos from friends, I may want to see only photos on my friendfeed. If I’m looking for what my friends have been listening to on Last.fm, I might want to see only that.

Search, domain clustering: Why can’t I search for words in my friend feed? A term extraction algorithm + search could become a pretty good tool to know what the people I care about have been saying about, that’s say, “design”, “user experience” or “development” related. Now that would be useful.

The truth

Here’s the cold hard fact: I’m going to pay little attention to a service that only delivers more stuff. A few years ago, in order to get updates on people you cared about, you’d call, visit or email. Now you hear about them all day every day. Now that’s obviously not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong - it’s just that sometimes, it’s a little too much information.

We need these tools (Twitter, Friendfeed) - and tell me where to sign up if you’re building a product like this - to help us make sense of the data coming in by mining it, filtering it and giving it to us in a way we can consume it. I still want the ability to see and hear everything should I be inclined to, but I need (we need!), to control this flood of information we’re living with every day.

Update: Well (wow, rather!), that didn’t take long. About 24 hours after I posted this, Friendfeed announced search. The difference a simple feature like this makes is astounding.

This could be you, right?

My RSS reader keeps track of hundreds of feeds for me, and I’ve grown used to the fact that I’ll keep around 500 unread items there at all times (or I’d likely make no use of all that information because I’d just be skipping through it). My inbox is a constant source of distraction, with emails coming in at a crazy rate. Twitteriffic (when I dare to run it) notifies me every 3 minutes of the thoughts of around 200 people (I can’t follow more because I’d get absolutely nothing done, and I wouldn’t really be paying attention anyway).

Social networks keep letting me know that people want to get in touch: it’s either friend requests on Facebook, event updates, or new connections on LinkedIn. Last.fm keeps smacking me in the face whenever people I know recommend new music. Growl on my mac pops a notification several times a minute when any of these events takes place. The Adium duck keeps jumping on my dock because people come online, or go offline, or message me, or, I don’t know, some other apparently important thing happens in the never actually paused instant messaging world.

How do we make sense of it?

We take the next step - we create tools to clean up the mess that our current set of tools is building up. We create filters, that deliver only the information we care about, when we care about it, to our screens or phones or whatever we’re connected to the web through (our chumbys and ambient devices, our nabaztags and iphones, our buglabs or our fridges).

Our work as entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, craftsmen is to keep evolving a set of tools to relieve our brains from this huge mess. Lifestreaming, friend-feeding, micro-blogging, content-chunking, micro-formating is here to stay, but our brains can’t handle it alone.

Now do excuse me while I go clean-up my inbox, update my twitter and read up on some feeds. I think I’m still up for some information overload tonight.

Totspot started out as client work and it became our single focus for months - definitely worth it, for several reasons. One: it’s pretty cool to be working on something that’s usually not your core audience - as you may know, we build solutions for teams much like our own who work on, with and for the web. Second: it gave us an opportunity to engage deeply with an idea. As a team, we usually focus either on planning, or on execution - and we don’t often get the chance to deep dive into a product like we did with Totspot. It was good to get back to thinking exclusively about one core problem, like we had before with Bell Canada, and with our own product, Goplan. Third: kids are awesome.

So I’m pretty excited about this launch. Totspot is now in a private beta stage and we’re slowly inviting moms and dads to check it out - if you want in, head out to Totspot.com and leave us your email address (we respect your privacy, your email address is safe with us). There’s more exciting stuff to talk about really soon, so keep an eye out - I promise I’ll be posting more often (especially next week from Vegas)

Note: Mike over at Techcrunch wrote about Totspot too, and Techmeme’s caught up to the story, so head over there and read up on what people are saying. Oh! And obviously there’s the official Totspot blog, where we’ll post product updates - go check!