I implemented Yahoo BOSS as the backstop search engine for Serendeputy a couple of months ago.

When you do a search, I first look to see if I have a match among the pre-compiled topics. If you do, I bring you directly there. If you don’t have a direct match, I do a call to Yahoo BOSS’s news search and show you those results.

But now, Microsoft is handling all the search for Yahoo. What does this mean for the future of BOSS? I hope they keep it up and running. Here is the current news.

UPDATE: It looks like Yahoo’s developers don’t know what’s happening with it either.

What specifically does it mean for BOSS? Honestly the team is still absorbing the implications and we just don’t know. We can tell you that BOSS will remain live for the time being. There are many aspects still to be considered. Over the next several days we’ll be working hard to get clarity and will update the community as soon as we can.

Larry Cheng writes this morning about his affinity for “missionary CEO’s vs. mercenary CEO’s.”

Over this past year, I have come to appreciate why you invest in missionary CEO’s.  Despite one of the most challenging economic times in a century, all of my CEO’s exhibited incredible leadership, drive, and passion through thick and thin.  In the darkest moments of this past year, they all demonstrated unwavering commitment and enthusiasm that carried their companies through.  While I don’t know what the future holds for these companies or for the economy, I do know that I am very proud to be associated with each and every one of my CEOs.  They are all great leaders and even better people – worthy of being called missionary CEO’s.

I hope that I can qualify as a visionary CEO. I know what I want Serendeputy to be, and I’m keeping as close to that vision as possible. About 75 people are using it right now, and I hope it’s delighting them.

I’m going to try to be better about publishing my interesting links here. I’ve been putting them out through Twitter, but I’d rather have them somewhere I can archive them and not fear the memory hole. All links (of course) found through Serendeputy.

The Push-Button Web
Anil Dash does a great job outlining the next set of optimizations around notifications. My entire feed-fetching infrastructure may be obsolete by this time next year. And that would be a good thing.

Ask and it shall be given
Steve Blank on the need to ask when an entrepreneur.

Also, great comment that crystalizes something I’ve thought for a long time:

in a technology company it’s usually better to train a domain expert to become a marketer than to train an MBA to become a domain expert.

Does Silicon Valley noise detract from long-term value creation?
Andrew Chen writes about the differences between Seattle and Silicon Valley.

As an entrepreneur, I can’t help but look at the short-term choices that get made in an environment like this without some degree of disappointment. There are many brilliant people who could be trying to make the world for the better and really create long-term value, but instead they are engaged in a zero-sum game to extract as much value as possible from the world.

I’m desperately trying to stay focused on the long-term. The bank likes the short-term, though. We’ll see how it all turns out.

Maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule
This is the latest from Paul Graham, talking about how managers’ lives are ruled by the schedule and makers need unbroken blocks of time to accomplish anything.

This rings very true for me. When I was at Boston.com, I would often spend all day back to back to back in meetings. I used to come in at 7am in order to get a little work done before the day started. Now that I’m on my own, I’m able to block out two three-hour blocks a day for sitting and concentrating and building. It’s a luxury.

More: Antonio responds and the comments on Hacker News are worth reading.

Averse to change
Why do some people just never accept change?

Is it possible to live any sort of a life in these times without being in a near-contant state of flux? I don’t think I’ve had a good solid run of stability since the fall of 2002.

I could use a good rut.

But, one is unlikely to appear any time soon, so I might as well design my live to react well to unexpected change.

Malleability is a good strategy. Janet explains why.

As 20th century models falter and lose relevance, a question to ponder – one that may be more profound that how to save a failing bank or newspaper –  is what will happen as the gap widens between those who can change their minds and those who can’t?

I pulled all the private-beta hacks out of the system and launched the public beta of Serendeputy today. Hooray. It has shipped. No longer vaporware. A bit of relief.

Six months from idea to prototype. Six months from prototype to product. Now, hopefully six months from product to business. Or else, six months from product to get a damn job, already. I can’t wait to see how it all works out.

Now, it’s on to making it better every single day. I have a whiteboard full of things to improve and build. I can’t wait to get to them.

Quote of the day:

“If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.” – Reid Hoffman

Serendeputy should be pretty solid, but please make sure to give me your feedback. I need to make it much, much better than it is now.

The site is back up. Hooray.

One of the perils of cloud computing: if something goes wrong on the underlying hardware, you’re several layers of abstraction from being able to fix it. Ugh.

Anyway, one of the machines at Slicehost went down, which happened to be holding my web1 server. When the server went down ungracefully, it corrupted some of the files. So, I waited for Slicehost to rebuild the underlying machine, then I rebuilt my server. It wasn’t too bad: a little fsck goes a long way.

Thanks for your patience.

My hosting facility is having some serious issues at the moment, so the site is down. I hope to get it back up and running as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!