The Insider

With all of the recent noise in the market about the Microsoft’s bid and Yahoo! rejection not sure how many of you thought that Yahoo! should accept the takeover but I am definitely on the otherside of the river, and I believe many of my fellow Yahoo!s also dint want it to happen. What is so much negative about Microsoft? Well I guess its not the -vity towards MS but its more of the Yahoo!’s culture that we Yahoo!s dint want to miss.

A bid for $42Billion USD for Yahoo!, a $31.00 USD per share, hmm well may be its good for the price on the previous day’s market close which was $19 odd, but definitely not good for all of those employees and shareholders who have been with the company for year’s together and must have bought their shares for $44 USD as well. Left apart the shares, what about the projects and the platforms coming up.

Set aside all of the above mentioned, if you have a look at Yahoo!’s local market in Australia, its a joint-venture between Yahoo! and Channel Seven forming Yahoo!7 and Microsoft has JV with Channel Nine forming Nine MSN. So given that both the channels are bitter rivals, which one is going to get ditched? And if so, then what would have happened to the existing projects that have already launched and requires maintenance, and also the upcoming projects. Telecom NZ has left MSN for Yahoo! forming Yahoo!Xtra in New Zealand. So with the takeover what would be the fate of Y!Xtra?

So what would have happened to Google if this happened? Between all of the confusion, Google started rolling its dice and expressing its worry by throwing a statement about Microsoft’s Monopoly and also offered to help Yahoo! should it decide to stay as an individual company. Internet is ever changing and takeovers and Joint ventures are a common thing in the industry. No doubt, Google’s position in the market is equivalent to “Bourne Supremacy” but it fears that the takeover would result in Microsoft’s “Bourne Ultimatum”.

I understand the shareholders concern as I am one as well, but definitely, I think Jerry needs some more time to clean up the mess. Since Jerry Yang has taken up the charge, both him and Sue have spoken about “big bets” and how we are going to achieve them. I and my fellow Yahoo!s believe strongly in Jerry’s leadership and are proud of being called Yahoo!s. With the laid plans and the work going ahead, I think its heading towards right direction and an year could overturn the company’s fate.

I was having a look at a few of the “famous sites” on different current topics like sports, news etc. and I have noticed an annoying thing; many of these sites use meta-refresh tags. For all of you novice to Web development, meta-refresh is a tag that can be used inside the html to automatically reload the page at specified time intervals.

Eg..

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="30">

Now that would automatically reload the web page once every 30 seconds.

Now there is a possible answer. I have seen this kind of reloading mostly on current affairs sites like the news, sports, finance etc. So a decent argument would be to present to the user the most latest and updated content. Now though that seems to be quite true but I would not 100% agree with it. With the latest trends in technology, AJAX and similar technologies are on their pinnacle and they can be used in a state-of-the-art way to achieve the same purpose. AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript Technology And XML) is a way of programming for the Web that gets rid of the lag time that happens in page reloading to update the content on the web page.

In traditional web development, when the user clicks on a link there is request made to the web server. The server now responds and the response is then carried along to the browser and eventually the content is displayed to the user. But all this while the user is waiting for the content. But in AJAX, its all asynchronous. The AJAX engine can hold most information in the engine itself, while allowing the interaction with the application and the customer to happen asynchronously and independently of any interaction with the server. So in this case, when the user clicks on a link, the Javascript loads the content, without reloading the page, as it is aleady being held by the AJAX engine.

So, if the real use of the meta-refresh tag is to present updated content, then I always wonder why wouldn’t one use AJAX? Well, there are a couple of answers I can think of. One could be, “Time constraint to AJAXify a page” which I agree as most of the companies have resource and time constraints. So an easy way for updated content can be a meta-refresh. But the other, in my opinion not so nice answer could be, the Internet ratings. Companies like Nielson, Quantcast, ComScore rate the Websites depending upon their number of Page Visits and Unique Users. So, when the web page reloads once every 30 seconds, each reload is counted as a Page View. Thus the companies end up with high number of page views, hence good rating and obviously more money from the ads.

Now if those could be a couple of the possible reasons for the refresh, if I am on a page that reloads automatically, I would rather not revisit that page. I dont know how many of you guys agree with me, but I, quite frankly get annoyed to see that my firefox crashes cause I left a auto-reloading web page open.