No Batteries Included - Shreyas Doshi's blog

Recent experience at the Nike store

I recently walked into the Nike store at the Great Mall in Milpitas to return a pair of shoes. What I saw next was brilliant because it was so simple and obvious once I saw it. Along with my return receipt, I was handed a coupon for 20% off one item - valid for 2 hours only. And since I was at the Nike factory outlet store (theoretically with already lower prices on many items), I felt a compelling urge to browse through the store to use this coupon. Not only that, I felt "special" because this coupon was just for me - the other shoppers walking in through the doors (without a return item) could not avail this generous discount.

The brilliant thing about this is that the folks at Nike used a simple incentive to convert me - someone who only wanted to return an item that day - to an actual buyer. This is the first time I have seen such an incentive, though I wouldn't be surprised if it has been tried elsewhere. Anyway, the point is that most people would probably end up at least browsing the store to find something worthwhile to buy with the coupon. And many of those would probably end up buying something (I bought 3 items - the discount was for one item only). Regardless of whether Nike ends up overall net positive with this incentive, and whether they continue running it or not, this is a great example of doing something different with an annoying experience (i.e. returning goods), which is pretty much the same EVERYWHERE.

There is some inspiration in here for product managers - especially those working on web products - after all, can you think of experiences that are pretty much the same (i.e. universally bad) everywhere on the web? How about account creation or SMS code verification as examples? But there is hope. Tatango provides something different and better to the tired experience of creating an account. Twitter generates a code that employs only the first letters of each triple-tap key on a normal mobile phone (i.e. 'a' from 'abc', 'd' from 'def', etc.) - so that, wait for this... you only have to tap once for each letter in the verification code!

What are you doing with your product thats equally brilliant?

How parenthood changes you

Becoming a parent changes everything. Much more than getting married, moving to a new country, getting a new job, going to college and many other things that happen to us over our lifetimes. My friends who are not parents (pretty much all of them) often ask me what its like being a parent. In one sentence, it is life-changing. No matter how much you've told yourself that things won't change, they will. After all, you have to know that your life has changed when you:

1. Hate Velcro products with a passion
2. You can drive to the nearest Babies R Us in your sleep - and you often do
3. Finish all your meals in 1/4th the time
4. Realize at the end of the day that you washed your hands 40 times that day
5. Find yourself offering Purelle to everyone who comes within 2 feet of the baby
6. Notice for the first time how bumpy your neighborhood  sidewalks are
7. First thing out of your mouth when you meet other new parents is "does yours sleep through the night?"
8. Take 1000 pics of your baby but don't find the time to ever filter them or post them online
9. Crave for some "alone-time" with your spouse, but when you do get it, you talk about what the baby must be up to - THE ENTIRE TIME!
10. Your back hurts. A lot
11. You finally understand why your friends used to say that, after having children, they had not watched a single movie in one sitting
12. In spite of all this, you discover that nothing could bring you more joy than that first faint hint of a smile from your little one

On leaving Yahoo! and my next gig

If you have been following me on twitter, you probably know that I am no longer at Yahoo!. My last day at Yahoo! was Friday, June 13 2008. Since then, I have found ample reasons to procrastinate on writing this post. As my temporary break from The W2 Life ends very soon, I can procrastinate no more. So, for those of you who don't already know, I am excited about joining Google next week (more about it in a future blog post).

I was at Yahoo! for a little under 2 years and I can say without any hesitation that I have never had as much fun at any job as I did as a purple-loving Yahoo. I was lucky to have led some high-impact platform product initiatives and to have worked with an amazing group of people both within and outside of Yahoo!. Yahoo! is a great company, with compelling products that touch the everyday lives of an astounding number of people. There are only a handful of companies in the world where one can improve the web by positively impacting 100s of millions of users (which, btw, is a really fun product management challenge) and Yahoo! is clearly one of them.

It was a hard decision to leave Yahoo!, but after carefully thinking through my medium- and long-term career goals, it became apparent earlier this year that this was the correct next step for me. The initiatives I started at Yahoo! are in very good hands and the time is right to start a brand new adventure!

facebook-happy-birthday

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Originally uploaded by santhoshreyas

It felt a bit weird that Facebook was second to wish me a happy birthday today (after my wife) ;-)

IIW2008a reception - Internet Identity Workshop

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Originally uploaded by santhoshreyas

We sponsored the reception at the Internet Identity Workshop.

Prove ownership of your MyBlogLog profile. Now!

A neat feature of the OpenID technology is that it allows you, the developer, to verify that the user indeed has ownership of a URL endpoint. I had stated earlier that lifestreaming services are going to find this feature very useful. Services like FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse (and of course, MyBlogLog) can enable users to verify ownership of their various online identities/profiles, thereby promoting more authentic activity feeds and eliminating the impersonation scenarios that will inevitably come up.

More generally, once a user has proved to your service that he owns a particular URL endpoint using OpenID, interesting things can follow. Your service could retrieve (you should do this under user consent and control, of course) user attributes that lie at the verified URL endpoint. The retrieval is significantly easier if the attributes are marked up with the appropriate microformats. I am sure people will come up with many interesting features by combining this simple, yet powerful, capability with technologies like YADIS, FOAF/XFN, MicroID.

Now, for the big news of the day. Today, we rolled out support for MyBlogLog profile URLs as OpenID identifiers (Ian Kennedy's post on the MyBlogLog blog). With this change, we have also eliminated the only-one-custom-OpenID-identifier per-account restriction. This means that you can select both your Flickr photostream AND your MyBlogLog profile URL as your OpenID identifiers, in addition to creating a pretty me.yahoo.com identifier. Simon, we heard you loud and clear. :-) This change is especially exciting because the folks at MyBlogLog have been awesome about implementing support for hcard, XFN, FOAF, in addition to hosting a pretty rich profile complete with the New With Me activity streams feature. We hope that you will find this change useful and that it can act as an enabler for more fun applications of the OpenID technology in the future.

To set your MyBlogLog profile URL as your OpenID identifier, start here (requires logged-in state).

T-shirt Front view

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Originally uploaded by santhoshreyas

(btw, this was posted using the new Share This button on Flickr - good job, Kellan and the Flickr team)

The Yahoo! OpenID t-shirts are here

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Originally uploaded by santhoshreyas

Yahoo! announces plans to adopt OAuth as part of the Yahoo! Open Strategy

If you've been following some of the posts on this blog, you've hopefully drank the kool-aid on the view of identity standards like OpenID and OAuth as the fundamental building blocks for more interesting and interoperable apps on the web. At Yahoo!, we've been thinking hard about the value of adopting open standards instead of pushing proprietary products that have been in existence prior to these standards. We have also been talking to and working with the OAuth and OpenID communities on technical, business, and legal fronts. To put our money where our mouth is, in January 2008, we launched the public beta of the Yahoo! OpenID Provider, with an emphasis on significantly improving the OpenID user experience and allowing users to have the convenience of a single identity without the burden of understanding the technical underpinnings of OpenID.

Today, Ari Balogh (new Yahoo! CTO - see video below) publicly announced the broader Yahoo! Open Strategy at the Web 2.0 Expo keynote session (see Cody Simms' post on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog for the juicy details). A key element of this announcement is that, in the not-too-distant future, we will be supporting OAuth as THE STANDARD for authenticated API access for 3rd party developers that want to innovate on top of Yahoo!'s incredible assets and diverse array of services. This auth mechanism will work with web applications, thick-client (installed) applications, and embedded applications! For those who are not familiar with OAuth, it is a community-driven standard that allows 3rd party developers to securely access APIs that expose user data residing on services like Yahoo!. This is done in a way that:

• the user doesn't have reveal his Yahoo! password to the 3rd party application - A good general practice
  
• the 3rd party application only has access to the stuff that is necessary for its use, and nothing else (eg. only access my Address Book, and not my Mail or my billing information) - Scoped access is better than global, unfettered access to all my data
• the user can easily revoke access if he no longer trusts or uses the 3rd party application - User is always in control

If you are familiar with Yahoo! BBAuth, you can think of OAuth as a standard way of doing what BBAuth enables. As a developer who's building interesting things on top of Yahoo! APIs and APIs of other companies that support OAuth, you will not need to write a whole lot of custom code to integrate with 'N' different authentication APIs which all essentially do the same thing. Besides, you can take advantage of open source client libraries for OAuth to reduce the time to implement the auth component of your service or mashup - instead, you can focus that time on building features that really delight your users.

Our announcement today represents a big win for the OAuth community's efforts and is a harbinger of even more interesting things in the near future. As always, stay tuned for more...

Updates:

Heres a video of Ari's Y!OS announcement:

Techcrunch coverage of The New Yahoo!

See Neal Sample's post on Yodel Anecdotal

Heres Neal's talk at Web 2.0 Expo:

See Charlene Li's write-up of Yahoo!'s Open Strategy announcement

Test Test Test

Posting to my blog from Facebook using Blog It - created by the folks at Six Apart.