Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

GoDaddy is being sold to Silver Lake

According to GigaOm:

Go Daddy, the largest domain registrar and a web hosting provider, is reportedly close to being sold to a group of private equity firms including KKR and Silver Lake Partners. The purchase price is about $2 – 2.5 billion, according to several news outlets.

That’s the same Silver Lake that helped so much to screw up Skype.  If you haven’t yet found an alternative to GoDaddy, you should be looking.  That reminds me that Automattic has become a domain registrar quite some time ago and I haven’t heard any updates on that.

Unstable company of Skype

While reading this article at GigaOm about the latest adventures of Skype, I came across this quote by Yee Lee, a former employee of Skype:

You can agree or disagree with the practice of re-organization, but I personally had never been part of a restructuring that ran so deep in a company.  During the year I was at Skype, the company:

  • lost a CEO
  • hired and fired a CTO
  • hired and fired a CFO
  • gained a CEO, CMO, CIO, and CDO
  • created an entirely new product development org structure
  • eliminated every Project Manager role
  • fired, re-interviewed,  and re-hired Product Managers
  • created a two new business units
  • combined two business units into one
  • dissolved one business unit
  • opened a new office and hired several hundred people
  • the list goes on…

I mean, these are crazy changes for any company to go through over the course of years.  To have that all happen within a short number of months was staggering.

Staggering indeed.

Social networks and referrer URLs

Pretty much every social network out there is building a custom front page for each user.  Such front pages are customized with preferences and previous activity of the user.  This is an excellent functionality.  But one thing such approach often breaks is a referral URL.  Have a look at something I saw in my statistics today morning (click for larger version).

This tells me that someone somewhere on Facebook linked to one of my posts.  I know which post was linked to.  But I have no way to figure out where exactly on Facebook the link is.  I’d like to do so very much – I’m interested to see the discussion and context in which my post came up.  I’ve tried Googling for the post, but that didn’t help.  I examined logs of my web server and that didn’t help either.  I think that’s broken.

And just to be clear, this problem is not specific to Facebook.  I’ve had similar issues with Twitter and other social networks.  Some of them make the discovery job easier than others.  But all of them don’t make the source obvious.  And I think they should.