Posts from November 2005

Professors from the Wharton School of Business analyzed Yahoo!'s many business lines in a recent article featured in Knowledge@Wharton. While Microsoft and Google duke it out Yahoo! may remain friendly to both and emerge a winner. Google is known for being good at search, and it is argued that while Yahoo! is certainly in a lot of different areas it is not a product leader. Most of the "Web 2.0" goodness mentioned in the article comes through acquisition of other small companies like Oddpost and Flickr that might be able to shake up a large media company. I think Yahoo!...

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Tonight around midnight Skype will release version 2.0 beta of their popular peer-to-peer voice and instant messaging client. Version 2.0 adds client support for video, customizations such as avatars and ringtones, . The new version is currently available for the Windows platform only. The video transmission uses the On2 Truemotion VP7 compression format which is easily throttled for bandwidth differences and was designed with video conferencing and dropped packets in mind. The video format appears to only support the Windows operating system and could constrain any plans to expand Skype with video to other platforms. On2 claims their video...

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The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. Om and I sat down at his apartment last week to talk about blogs, RSS, and advertising. Om asked most of the questions, focusing the discussion about how to make the right choices in blogging software and services to become a better blogger. Full show notes are available on the Om and Niall PodSessions site. This week's podcast is 21 minutes in length and a 9.7 MB download. After the podcast I gave Om's RSS a makeover including switching his feed to FeedBurner, adding more branding by utilizing more...

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The basic Oddpost JavaScript is broken up between a few JavaScript files including new code from Yahoo! with comments dated throughout the past couple months. Part of the new Yahoo! Mail is a straight drop-in from Oddpost, including some developer fun in the "SubjectOMatique" complete with references to He-Man, The Simpsons, and Zoolander. BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL! Get out of my dreams, get into my car. Up ahead! It's a DONUT HUT!! When Lawyers Attack Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadu Hold me closer, Tony Danza The Dreaded Executive Spousal Review It's funny to see old jokes live on even...

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The next version of Yahoo! Mail includes a feed aggregator as a sidebar option. The front-end is based on Oddpost's blog aggregation technology and the front-end code even includes Oddpost copyright statements and comments. The back-end is the same as My Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Mail feed aggregator supports RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom 0.3. The aggregator does not support enclosures such as podcasts. Screenshots and analysis is based on Yahoo Mail 0.3.0 build 176. Yahoo! is the first major webmail provider to integrate a full-post aggregator into the mail client. Millions of Yahoo! Mail users will...

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Microsoft will unveil a new listings service and marketplace within the next few weeks according to eWeek. The new service is a competitor to Google Base and will be integrated with Windows Live service offerings. Windows Live Fremont is currently only available to users with a Microsoft.com e-mail address. Microsoft plans to integrate listings submitted through its Windows Live service into MSN Search results as well as Virtual Earth map visualizations. TechCrunch dropped a teaser about the project yesterday....

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Sony's PSP gaming device now supports RSS feeds. The RSS Channel is presented to users above the web browsing option in version 2.6 or above of Sony's PSP system software. Users can add feeds by clicking on a link to an advertised feed in their web browser. The mobile RSS aggregator is specially designed for downloading podcasts in MP3 or AAC format. The channel list and streaming media is saved on Memory Stick Duo media. Only the RSS 2.0 syndication format is currently supported. Sony has a special page for developers documenting their aggregator's handling of RSS. Russell Beattie...

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Joyent, a groupware product that launched six weeks ago, has just acquired TextDrive, a 18 month-old web hosting company. Joyent was struggling with its infrastructure and TextDrive wanted to become more involved in the hosted applications space so the acquisition makes sense in that context. The announcement definitely seems like a case of startup synergy from two cash-flow positive businesses. I host my sites at TextDrive and received a 1 GB bump in my storage allocation this morning. TextDrive offers cutting edge developer features including the latest versions of Apache, Lighttpd, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Ruby on Rails....

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Three years ago, on November 27, 2002, Technorati was introduced to the world. Technorati started as a way for Dave Sifry to track who was talking about his blog online and the project eventually grew into a company of 30+ employees. The blogosphere often gets caught up in the buzz of the moment, so here is a little history from Technorati in 2002: The first Technorati 100. Scripting News was on top with links from 598 blogs and Boing Boing was #4 with links from 408 inbound blogs. 12,739 blogs watched in its first week. $5 a year for...

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Tag Tuesday takes place this Tuesday, November 29, at AOL's Mountain View campus starting at 6:30 p.m. Tag Tuesday is a developer-focused event with lead developers of products and companies involved in tagging come together to share their experience, code, and best practices. Edwin Aoki, chief architect at AOL, will talk about tag spam and some of the existing spam countermeasures at AOL. Kevin Burton, founder of TailRank, will introduce us to tagging of news items within his ranking system for blog posts. Some food and drink will be provided. Our past events have been in San Francisco and hopefully...

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