His reasoning is that Yahoo (sorry, I’m not going to include the exclamation point) can be a gigantic-scale platform for developers.

Indeed, Yahoo is very big — bigger than most people realize. When I worked there two years ago, I would often shock Bay Area technorati types with basic facts about Yahoo’s position. Number one in email. Number one in news. Number one in sports. Number one overall page on the web (since eclipsed by Google.com).

Long forgotten by Sili Valley types who watched Google build an information empire and Facebook a social media kingdom, Yahoo remained and still remains a force across the world.

(Full disclosure: My wife still works there, editing their women’s site Yahoo Shine, which is itself immensely successful in reaching its core audience of young women. I also still have some very good friends who work at Yahoo.)

When I worked there, Yahoo was decidedly a company adrift. Bad news — China dissidents, the collapse of the Microsoft merger, high-profile attrition, leaked discontent — seemed to overwhelm senior management, who themselves weren’t rah-rah types conditioned to keep the rank-and-file engaged.

But in spite of the consistent ugliness, Yahoo has soldiered on and even improved some of its best assets. The new, bolder Flickr is a huge improvement for the broadband age. The home page, stocked with great editorial and optimized to the user, still makes it nearly impossible not to click on something. My Yahoo is still the default home page for millions. Yahoo News and Sports are still the very best editorially-driven experiences in those categories. Yahoo has powerful market share in many emerging and established global markets. And Yahoo’s loyal user base across mail and IM remains its greatest asset. All those properties (except Flickr) are chock full of ad units, keeping everything comfortably monetized. So there’s a lot of goodness coming out of Sunnyvale.

Is Yahoo going to be a powerful developer platform in 2015? Maybe. Maybe not. While Yahoo’s scale, neutrality, and brand trust are undeniable, the expectations of Yahoo’s user base is still significantly different in character from those of Apple or Google or RIM. And hiring the right people to do this kind of thing — building out and managing a development platform — is crazy-hard in 2010. Double-digit unemployment doesn’t apply to web and mobile technologies; just check out the job listings at any big tech company for the evidence.

It may not even matter. Yahoo never developed a serious RSS reader. Did that matter? There’s still no evidence that people will want to run custom apps on a web page, Farmville be damned. (Facebook’s value is the social graph, not the web canvas.)

Either way, Yahoo is still huge. It can be bigger. It can be better. And Sili Valley is foolish to forget it.

(Click to enlarge)

That’s what it looks like when a trading error and automated reactive systems drive a stock from $40 to $0.01.

Somebody got fired yesterday. And somebody else got really, really rich.

So it was no surprise when I clicked on a HuffPo link my wife IMed me today, and saw this:

HuffPo is getting into the badge universe, adopting the game techniques that Jesse Schell so eloquently detailed last February.

Of course, the problem with social currency is the same as all currencies. Issue too much, and it devalues. Scarcity, and the competition such scarcity breeds, is key to a successful social rewards strategy. All social economies thus require a “Fed” to manage the currency supply.

NBC’s talk show lineup was doomed from the start. Its failure was less of a surprise than AOL-Time Warner, Terrell Owens’ tenure with the Cowboys, or Olestra anal-leakage potato chips. And the disaster is unrelenting for NBC, now with every personality on NBC — and CBS — taking shots at the cellar-dweller of the legacy broadcast network division.

This isn’t just a FAIL. It’s an EPIC FAIL. Let’s count the individual failures at work, and see what we can learn.

1. A failure of imagination. For its supposedly radical yet retro concept (a nightly talk show in prime time), The Jay Leno Show concept was shockingly conservative.  It assumed that America wanted to sit back and watch the same guy do a show every night, because that was the late night model for the prior 50 years. Now as NBC tries to fix its mess, it’s sticking with this conceptual model. How about moving Leno back to The Tonight Show and letting Conan host a prime-time variety/sketch show two nights a week? How about trying out something — anything – that’s really different? The times demand innovation.

2. A failure to think about competition. At 11:30pm, a talk show has traditionally competed with other, similar talk shows, news, and syndicated reruns. The 500-channel environment and DVRs didn’t change that so much. But 10pm is still called “prime time” for a reason. It’s a place to showcase top-quality content that grown-ups watch on their couches, and against that, Leno interviewing sit-com actresses looked like piffle.

3. A failure to understand the customer. The ratings at the end of a late-night talk show is a fraction of that of the beginning of a show. After the initial monologue and comedy bits, people tend to bail out, flip around, or just turn it off and go to bed. At 10pm, audience retention is critical, since affiliates make all their money at 11 on the local news. And the real reason why Leno is being kicked out of the 10pm slot is because his show’s format didn’t retain its audience, thus killing NBC affiliates’ 11pm news ratings.

4. A failure to consider revenue. Tina Fey declared a few years ago that working in broadcast in the ’00s was like working in vaudeville in the 1960s. The old model has been disrupted by technology and choice — four networks, replaced by hundreds of networks plus iTunes plus web video plus DVDs plus on-demand, ad infinitum –  but the new models produce revenue, too. An hour-long drama can cost millions per episode, and failure is expensive. But success is also richly rewarded via syndication, DVD sales, and international rights. The Jay Leno Show is cheap but low-margin, and most episodes are nearly worthless the minute after it airs.

5. A failure to think downstream. The Leno-to-10pm move was in part a move to retain Conan O’Brien, who had toiled for more than 15 years at 12:35am. But with Leno sucking up the A-list in prime time, Conan got left with the B-list. A Friday episode of The Tonight Show used to mean a top draw. But a few weeks ago, their Friday lead guest was Jeff Garlin, a funny guy but not at the level you’d want in that slot.

6. A failure to plan for failure. The current ad-libbing on the part of NBC execs reveals that they never considered what to do next if Leno’s show were to underperform. It’s easy to cancel Knight Rider and find something else to fill its slot for a few weeks. But Leno occupies five hours of prime time, and even after returning from Winter Olympics programming next month, NBC simply won’t have enough content in the pipeline to deliver an audience to advertisers. Meanwhile, the treatment of O’Brien (and his Late Nite replacement Jimmy Fallon) makes NBC look like a network that doesn’t know how to handle its talent. Now who would choose to run a show there, over another network?

A year from now, this controversy will seem distant. Leno will be on at 11:35. Conan may be on at 12:05, or he may be launching the Late Night division at Fox.

But NBC will still be in fourth place.

DirecTV, which claims to offer “more of your favorite channels in HD than anyone,” does not carry AMC in HD.

Ironic, eh?

Google has been a laggard in behavioral targeting, on one hand because of a simple lack of capability, and on the other because of the deserved scrutiny they’ve received for their dominant market share in both search and display advertising following their DoubleClick acquisition.

Yahoo and others have been doing BT for a while. The skyscraper ad you see embedded to the right (click on it to see the whole thing) is one that rendered for me today on Yahoo’s IM web client. How did they know I wanted to go to Kauai? Because I searched for a vacation to Kauai (from San Francisco) on Orbitz a couple days ago.

The secret sauce, Google claims, is that users will have control over the buckets in which they get placed, once they find the Ad Preferences tool. But how will users know the tool exists? A user can also opt out of targeting, but this requires them to find the Google Ad Privacy Center, or to install a browser plug-in if they clear their cookies frequently.

That said, ad privacy is something that primarily riles people up in theory. Sure, maybe you’re uncomfortable with ad networks tracking your sites, but when you see an ad that interests you, do you really feel violated? Making a user feel okay about being targeted – especially microtargeted – is all in the execution. Transparency looks good in press releases, but most users will never set their preferences, or even know the settings exist. So the targeting must be subtle, the messages must be relevant, without being over-personalized.

If you over-personalize, or if you make the targeting too obvious, you get the in-your-face iris-scan Hell of Minority Report. And nobody wants that.

YahooVibes: Interview: Eric Meyerson, ex-SPM of My Yahoo!

Transcript: “The fact is, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they have gotten too big and too expensive to taxpayers. [Applause.] The McCain-Palin administration will make them smaller and smarter and more effective for homeowners who need help.”

How can we expect economic leadership from this ticket?

My beloved, beleaguered, bedraggled Dolphins released Zach Thomas yesterday.

The team is purging salaries now, which is really the only possible direction following its dismal, hopeless 1-15 showing.

But saying farewell to Zach is devastating. Over his 12 years with the team, Zach did his business with excellence — stuffing egomaniacal running backs, picking off ill-advised passes, turning tight end receptions into incompletes, and basically taking away the middle of the field.  He made every player around him better. He never went for the big hit or the big ad campaign, never got arrested in a nightclub, never said a discouraging word. He just racked up Pro Bowls (seven of them) and screwed up the plans of the league’s offensive coordinators.

He may end up with another team in 2008, but his Hall of Fame bust will say Miami. Zach, don’t go!