Gawker: valleywag, chad dickerson

And in the end the stock you take is equal to the mess you make

Owen Thomas — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:00:00 EDT

How many ex-Yahoo managers does it take to reproduce a classic Beatles album cover? From left to right: Salim Ismail, Chad Dickerson, Scott Gatz, and Bradley Horowitz. All four were, at some point, responsible for parts of Yahoo's advanced-products group, including the Brickhouse incubator in San Francisco. The band reunited last night at the 21st Amendment bar in San Francisco's South of Market district to bid Dickerson farewell; he is leaving Yahoo to become CTO of Etsy, the Brooklyn-based marketplace for hipster-friendly handicrafts one must nod politely about. Ismail is attending to Confabb, the startup he failed to sell before joining Yahoo; Gatz is now running GayCities, a queer-travel website; and Horowitz is now at Google. Can you think of a better caption? Leave it in the comments The winner will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: Naughty Jason L. Baptiste, for "One bubble Pete Cashmore would like to pop."

The unhappy death of the Blogger Appeasement Group

Owen Thomas — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:40:00 EDT

In what seems like another age, my predecessor once wrote about companies' "blogger appeasement groups" — units dedicated to generating buzz, not bucks. With Chad Dickerson leaving Yahoo Brickhouse, the troubled company's troubled incubator for new ideas, I think we can declare the delusion of blogger appeasement groups safely over. The self-appointed punditocracy of the blogosphere never was a real customer — nor even a twisted proxy for a real customer. Playing to the echo chamber only generated noise — a specialty of former Brickhouse head Salim Ismail.

Dickerson, his successor, was a solid if stolid executive best known for greasing the sticky wheels of Yahoo's bureaucracy. He has been replaced by someone even more unremarkable. Brickhouse was Yahoo's corporate version of an attention whore, an object we pay attention to because it demands we pay attention to it. I wouldn't be surprised if it's shuttered soon. If it is, will we even notice? (Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Yahoo Brickhouse head to leave, again

Owen Thomas — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Chad Dickerson, who has been responsible for Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator since December, is leaving the company to be CTO at Etsy, an online handicrafts retailer. We hear Google, where former boss Bradley Horowitz now works, had been heavily recruiting Dickerson. With this move, Dickerson has deftly dissed both Web giants. Well done, Chad! [TechCrunch]

Yahoo hires controversial Twitter architect for troubled project

Owen Thomas — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:40:00 EDT

Whatever side you're on, everyone agrees that Twitter's problems with downtime come down to one man: Blaine Cook. Cook's advocates claim he was hobbled from fixing the site by incompetent managers; Cook's detractors say his decisions as Twitter's chief architect led to its frequent outages. We'd heard he left Twitter with plans to relocate to the U.K. Instead, we've learned, he took a job at Yahoo's Brickhouse, the troubled San Francisco office meant to incubate new projects. He's believed to be working for Chad Dickerson, who recently listed a position for a software engineer experienced in the Ruby programming language — one of Cook's specialties.

Cook, typically a verbose sort online, hasn't mentioned anything about his new job on Twitter or any of his other frequent outlets. Could he be abashed about his new assignment? Yahoo is no one's employer of choice in the Valley these days. But given his noisy departure from Twitter, it's not likely he had many options. And neither did Yahoo.

Will Yahoo's Fire Eagle burn out at ETech?

Owen Thomas — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:41:12 EST

Facing a takeover bid from Microsoft, Yahoo has pinned its hopes on new product launches from its best and brightest. In less than 11 hours, one of them, developer Tom Coates, will take the stage at ETech, Tim O'Reilly's conference outside San Diego. His mission: to roll out the long-delayed Fire Eagle, a system for announcing your physical location to other websites. Possibly. This evening, Coates has been announcing his location, and his situation, via Twitter. He's in Carlsbad, the site of the conference. Things are not going well: "Listening to Chopin. It is not calming me the fuck down. Grr!" In other Twitters, Coates moans about the number of tasks left to do. While he doesn't specify, it's hard to imagine he's doing anything but fixing bugs

Much rides on Coates's tail. His previous boss, Salim Ismail, was fired, in part due to Fire Eagle's delays. His new boss, Chad Dickerson, has flown down from San Francisco to watch the launch.

The Microsoft takeover comes down to this: Bill Gates & Co. think they can outcode Jerry Yang's minions. Can they? Or does Yahoo actually know what it's doing? Coates's presentation tomorrow will form part of the answer.

Yahoo Video relaunches, and hints at video on Flickr

Owen Thomas — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 01:06:42 EST

Yahoo Video has soft-launched a new website, in a move which speaks to both the potential of Yahoo and the company's utter disorganization. It has all the necessaries in the age of YouTube and Hulu: clips created by amateurs and professionals, playlists, and "exclusive" content. The latter, if true, is refreshing: Thanks to syndication deals which allow the endless regurgitation of video from site to site, most of the Hollywood-born clips on the Web are numbingly similar. The site also has a tantalizing promise: Video on Flickr.

At the bottom of the Yahoo Video page, there's a section titled "More With Video." Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield promised Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site, would add video "soon" last summer. But his promise was empty: No engineering work had started at the time, and Butterfield himself would soon leave Flickr to go on paternity leave. (We hear he's coming back to Yahoo in another role, but not returning to Flickr.)

Still, video's long been seen as a natural extension for Flickr. The same digital cameras which take still photos almost all now capture video too, as do cameraphones. Why force users to go to two websites for the output of one device?

Which raises the question: Why did Yahoo Video relaunch with user-generated content? The rumor I'd heard was that Yahoo Video would become a showcase, much like NBC and News Corp.'s Hulu.com, for professional content, while the amateur stuff moved to Flickr. The obvious conclusion: Flickr's video features aren't finished, while Yahoo Video's were ready to go.

One would think proper leadership would have sorted this out. But of the managers in Yahoo's advanced-development division, one, Bradley Horowitz, just left for Google; another, Salim Ismail, was thankfully laid off; and the last, Chad Dickerson, had just been installed in his job before he got handed the management of what's left. It's no wonder that even when Yahoo manages to launch a promising new site, mismanagement haunts it.

Dickerson draws short straw, takes over for Gatz at Yahoo

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:20:53 EST

As we reported first, Yahoo's Scott Gatz confirms he's leaving. Chad Dickerson will move from the Yahoo Developer Network to take over running Advanced Products. This is hardly a promotion for Dickerson; we hear he had a falling out with his boss at the developer group, ex-Microsoftie David Sobeski. Dickerson is now in charge of someday making Fire Eagle a real product. He also gets to work oh so closely with professional conference attendee Salim Ismail. And that brings us to our career advice for Dickerson.

Next time, throw paper. According to the World RPS society, it's got a 3.73 percent advantage over rock or scissors.