Well, I’ve been working at Yahoo! Japan for nearly a year, and I’m proud to say that I finally have a release under my belt. I spent some time improving a few Apache handlers, and they are now available. They both provide ASX files to view video files. I know it doesn’t sound like much to just make something that outputs 300 bytes of data that nobody really looks at, but there were quite a few interesting points about it.
- Writing code that must perform quickly, PHP wasn’t gonna cut it, so it is written in C/C++.
- Guaranteeing that the servers will be up 24 hours a day/7 days a week.
- Working with other teams to provide an interface for them to work with the system.
All in all, it was a good experience and I hope to release a few more projects that I’m working. Anyways, if you are interested in seeing what I worked on, or if you are interested in watching news in Japanese check out these links. First we have Japan Weather Videos and then 10 different television networks providing Japanese News Videos. If you don’t understand Japanese, then you probably won’t be very interested in them. But if you are studying Japanese, it is good listening practice!
Hi Jon, I’ve always been curious as to why Yahoo is so big in Japan. As far as I can tell it’s bigger than Google, and there’s Yahoo Auctions in Japan but no eBay presence, for example. Why is that? Anyway, interesting work!
Yahoo! Japan started in 1998, before Google was even popular in the US. Google has just recently came into the Japanese market, and they are starting to get more of a foothold. But once a large company gets established as the standard, it is hard to unseat them. Plus you have Yahoo! BB, which is their ISP service that provides some extra features to the normal Yahoo! services.
Yahoo! Auctions is a result of Jerry Yang coming to Japan and telling the president here that he should start an auction service before any other companies do. Which was done and we have the largest Japanese auction service. The problems with auction sites is that you have to get many users to get more users. And if everyone is using one service, then they won’t go to other services. Which is why Yahoo! Auctions is still growing and you don’t hear much about the competitors.