Reflecting back (and from the inside), I don’t think that Yahoo! Open Hack Day could have gone any better. It blew past my personal best-case expectations. The biggest problem is where to take it from here. But that’s one of those good problems. 🙂

There are a lot of good and bad things about big organizations, and in the day-to-day, a lot of people can get hung up about the latter, but the organizational hacking is to figure out how to leverage and finesse all those positives with the right vision and approach. (hooray Chad and Bradley!)

• Yahoo Hack Day is on! – Gordon had an introspective writeup
• All Women Team Takes Yahoo Hack Day Top Prize – Mike, who MC’d has a writeup of the results. Blogging in Motion, the winning hack, was definitely the right pick (sewn hardware hacked in a day!)
• Flickr: hackday06 – almost 3200 photos tagged hackday06. And more than a third of that, over 1000 photos tagged to the Upcoming event. (wow, that’s a huge surprise to me)
• Too many blog posts to mention. I’ve been tracking over the weekend with technorati, icerocket, and blogpulse

Some more awesome writeups from Yahoos:

• Yahoo Open Hack Day: Hell Yes! – Bradley has a great writeup about the whole thing
• “We can’t control the puppets but we thank you for your understanding” – Yahoo Hack Day ’06 – Ian Kennedy also puts some more of “what it was about” into words
• Beck Plays Surprise Show at Yahoo! Hack Day – Schiller, DHTML Ninja and apparently mega-Beck fan (sorry we had to keep you in the dark, but it all worked out in the end 🙂 has an awesome review and more links
• HackDay: Thoughts on how Yahoo got there and what it all means – Susan is “speculating” but gets a lot of it right on. My personal favorite naming option for “Open Hack Day” was Hacking Man. Maybe next time try to use the Volleyball court to make a gigantic burning yahoo-guy bonfire

The new version of Google Reader is light years better than the previous (read: actually usable). The scrolling/loading is still a bit clunky, but that’s just implementation niggles that I’m sure can get filed down. It also starts to include a full stream view (although the filtering seems to have taken a step back – there’s just no grouped/labeled feeds?) It also doesn’t seem to have any sort of real aggregation (collecting things into piles).

The absolutely worst thing though is expressed in Chris’ video message though. I can understand the pitch of Reader as an “Inbox for the Web,” but I already have an Inbox, it has big numbers and things to unbold, and it doesn’t do that by itself – the last thing I need/want is more to be deluged and responsible for. The Inbox metaphor may work for those who have a few sites they read, but how does it let me sample/prioritize for hundreds or thousands of feeds? (Simple answer: it doesn’t!)

It’s worth taking a moment to reflect… Are things getting better or worse?

(I don’t claim there’s any easy answer, it’s complex and multifaceted, which may be why it’s worth thinking about.)

This week was an interesting one in terms of privacy, and there are some great writeups for 2 of them:

• Sex Baiting Prank on Craigslist Affects Hundreds – Gordon and I came up with most of the headline for this (ours was a slightly more gripping “Sex Baiting on Craigslist Destroys Lives” – now, if I can get a nickel for each time someone uses sex baiting). The mechanics of this is pretty simple and doesn’t differ much from phishing or 419 scamming (using fraud to engage victims) except that instead of financial gain, the main goal seems to be hurting other people. I believe of all the commentary the best description is that of sociopath (one interested only in their personal needs and desires, without concern for the effects of their behavior on others). Like Andy, I think that some of the immediate effects will be a profound change in how communities treat the way they interact with strangers over email (a good thing), but I fear that in the long-term this will only contribute to continued degradation of the norms of our expectations of confidence when interacting with individuals (ie JigSaw, which a few years ago would have been a parody-dotcom not a real site)
• Facebook’s “Privacy Trainwreck”: Exposure, Invasion, and Drama – danah writes up her thoughts on the Facebook changes and subsequent backlash with her regular keen insight and spot-on metaphors. Cam’s write-up earlier this week mentions that Upcoming.org (that’s us!) introduced a similar feature at the beginning of the year to much less fuss. That point wasn’t lost on me when I first saw Facebook’s announcement, the differences in implementation help illuminate what’s at the crux of the backlash. The primary differences with our Activity Log is that 1) this information isn’t displayed globally on profiles, but serves as a personal tool only on the dashboard, which I believe has an effect on comfort levels and more importantly (and to Cameron’s point) 2) the information we display is either point-to-point (notifications of a message, etc.) or information that is not only expected to be public, but central to the point of the site (comments/attendance of an event you’re watching, etc.). It’s not a technical issue to show changes to profiles, group membership changes, etc., but it’d be “icky”, largely irrelevant, and a disservice to the community.

One other privacy story that hasn’t gotten as much play is the HP boardroom scandal (“pretexting aka social engineering aka lying; more ongoing) which actually ties very closely to the sex baiting in terms of MO, but because of its more traditional context perhaps isn’t as controversial. We’re not talking about any changes in actual/perceived social architecture, just business as usual.

Looks like there was a publishing hiccup, so this is a dupe. Since I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say at the moment, we’ll leave it at that.

Interrupting this silence for pimpage. We released a huge update today on Upcoming.org. This is without a doubt the biggest frontend update we’ve made since our acquisition, and starts to take advantage of a lot of the big behind-the-scene changes we’ve been toiling away on.

Be sure to check out the landing page and it’s geotargetting. It’s way cool.