Oodle: Fail

I like reading Uncov, it almost always makes me smile. Harshness is fine its own right, but it's always better when mixed with technical harshness. So in that spirit, let's take a look at Oodle 2.0.

First, a disclaim: Oodle and eBay are (or at least were) partners. Obviously everything here is my opinion, and has nothing to do with eBay. I'm not going to comment on their business, just a few things I saw in a browser...

Now I came across Oodle because they are hosting a Lunch 2.0 in a couple of weeks. I got the Facebook invite from Terry, and started poking around Oodle. They've supposedly re-done their entire site and made it very Web 2.0-ish, hence the launch of "Oodle 2.0."  So what's the secret to their new UI? Let's find out.

I opened up Firebug on a page and saw 7 HTTP requests for JavaScript files. That seemed excessive. I started opening up each JS file that was coming across. Here's the start of the first one:

/*Copyright (c) 2007, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Code licensed under the BSD License:
http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt
version: 2.3.1
*/

Alright, so they are using YUI, at least they didn't re-invent the wheel here. I kept reading this file and one line 11 I see:

/*Copyright (c) 2007, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Code licensed under the BSD License:
http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt
version: 2.3.1
*/

Fail. But wait, there's more.  Starting at the end of Line 18 we have:

/*Copyright (c) 2007, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Code licensed under the BSD License:
http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt
version: 2.3.1
*/

I'm seriously not making this up. See for yourself: http://img.oodle.com/jaml/autocomplete/1196308267

Ok, so that file is pretty bad. What about the other six? Here is the contents of another JS file (see it live in all its glory at http://img.oodle.com/jaml/focus/1195340840) :

function focus()

{

	var focusElement;

	if (document.getElementById('home-what'))

	{

		focusElement = document.getElementById('home-what');

	}

	else if (document.getElementById('search-what'))

	{

		focusElement = document.getElementById('search-what');

	}

	else if (document.getElementById('email')) 

	{ 

		focusElement = document.getElementById('email');

	}

	else if (document.getElementById('sender'))

	{

		focusElement = document.getElementById('sender');

	}

	focusElement.focus();

}

addDOMLoadEvent(focus);

That's right, an HTTP request for 20-freaking lines of JS. FAIL! There was also three CSS files loaded for a single page. The ten combined external files are all loaded in the first 20 or so lines of HTML. It's like these guys are trying to make their site slow...

I looked at their house listings. You can click a "see details" for each listing and it makes a slick XmlHTTPRequest call. How very Web 2.0. The response to this is XML. What year is it? Haven't you guys learned about JSON? You would think using YUI they would have figured this out.

Here is one the URLs to a search: http://sf.oodle.com/housing/rent/home/-/bathrooms_2/bedrooms_3/bedrooms_4+/-/95118/+5/.
That looks very Ruby on Rails-ish (or maybe Django.) I looked at their cookies, including their session cookie, but nothing cried out RoR there. Still RoR would fit well with their slowness strategy.

Lunch 2.0 @ Facebook

Or should I say Lamebook... This is not my first Lunch 2.0. You can't help but compare these things a little, and Facebook does not fare well in any comparison.

First, they did a "happy hour" which meant beer and finger foods. So what you say? It's Lunch 2.0 damnit, not Snacky Snacky 2.0. The food matters.

Next it was very crowded and hot. Now I know that's partially just because so many people wanted to go to it because it was at Facebook. It's also because it was an inside event. Very limited space and lots of people = hot, noisy, sweaty, stinkiness. I'm sure this was the largest space that Facebook has available to it, but that's just another flaw in their based in Palo Alto logic (more on that later.)

Bad food, bad environment, what could save the event? How about some cool schwag! Oh wait, how about no schwag... You would think a company so obsessed with its collegiate roots would at least give out some t-shirts or knapsacks. Oh well. Simply Hired is still the king o' schwag.

Well what about the crowd? Well this was a decidedly younger crowd. I saw a lot of folks who had written on their nametags their names and their college. What the hell? Since when did Lunch 2.0 become Frat Party 2.0? Heh heh, I've become such an old fart. The crowd also had a lot more A-listers... Not sure if that's good or bad. I wonder how many of those folks will be at AOL next week. All in all, not as geeky a crowd as usual.

All that being said, I had a great time for one simple reason. I met up with an old Caltech classmate of mine, Robert Johnson, who's an infrastructure guru at Facebook. It was cool to catch up and talk about ye olden times. It was also cool to hear about some of the scale issues that Facebook has faced and things they're going to do about it, especially since we've faced and solved many similar issues over the years at eBay.

So that brings me back to Facebook, the company. I was really surprised to hear how they have three different buildings scattered around downtown Palo Alto. These guys really need to get a big space somewhere. Maybe they need to IPO or something to afford that. Seems unlikely they'd be able to do that in downtown Palo Alto. I know they are so in love with that area because of its ties to Stanford, but guess what guys. You're not in college anymore. Remember when you were in college and alumni would show up to hang out and pretend they were still in school? Remember how lame you thought those guys were? Umm...

Lunch 2.0 Pics

Not only did I somehow wind up in some pics from Lunch 2.0 @ NetGear, somebody even tagged those pics with my name.

Who I Met at Lunch 2.0

I met several interesting people at Lunch 2.0 today @ NetGear. Maybe the most notable was Jessica Mah. I sat across from her while I woofed down the free BBQ (which was only good because it was free.) I thought she looked familiar, and I then remembered reading an interview with her on Valleywag. In retrospect, the interview on Valleywag is a fairly good representation of what it's like to talk to her in person. The biggest difference would be that she curses a lot more in person. Jessica is a future billionaire, though, so I had better be nice.

She had another 17-year old friend who met her there that was more interesting. She was more concerned with figuring out what to major in, so I guess she's not heading up any companies.

The whole experience reminded me a lot of college. Way more men than women, and yet all I remember are the women.

Lunch 2.0

I'm going to a Lunch 2.0 event today @ NetGear. Terry has been trying to get me to go to one for a year, and now that they're famous, I figured it was time. Plus NetGear is serving BBQ.