Blog – Page 48 – Niall Kennedy

Wharton on Yahoo!

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! has industry leading small business services for merchants at Yahoo! Shopping as well as the best podcast search and news search. Yahoo! will market its search brand as better searching through people, leveraging its My Web backend and its 360 aggregation hub that Google or Microsoft currently does not offer. Better searching through people relies on a lot of user generated content, but Yahoo! may have the hundreds of millions of registered users to make it work.

I am more interested in the creation of new ideas and new business directions within a company the size of Google, Yahoo!, or Microsoft. Can giant companies cultivate innovative thinking or are they always stuck in maintenance mode with legacy code, process, and staff? I’m glad to see smart minds such as those at Wharton are taking notice and asking some tough questions.

Skype 2.0 – video and customizations

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 format is better quality over less bandwidth than the H.264 codec used by Apple’s iChat AV application or the Windows Media video streaming but that could just be marketing hype.

One big unanswered question is the use of CPU and memory resources by the new Skype application. Skype functions as a supernode, routing Skype data around the Internet while the application is open, even when you are not using its features. Skype is currently idle on my Mac while I type this post, yet is it consuming 5% of my 1.67 GHz G4 CPU across 15 threads and 40 MB worth of memory. I do not have a Windows machine to test with, but I am guessing peer-to-peer video consumes even more resources even when you are not personally active.

The new version of Skype supports contact groupings to separate your contacts or invite many people into a conversation at once. Every Skype user can also broadcast their timezone and mood to provide more information to other users before they initiate contact.

Still no signs of eBay integration, but Skype video chat could allow for live product demos or possibly personal product shopping video channels if one-to-many broadcasts are supported.

Skype has partnered with Logitech and Creative to brand webcams as “Skype certified.” The Logitech Fusion pictured above is a Skype certified 1.3 megapixel camera. Apple collects 10% of the wholesale price for products featuring its “Made for iPod” logo and perhaps Skype worked out a similar deal with hardware makers. Creative went a step further and introduced an Instant Skype Edition webcam.

Downloadable pictures and sound are provided by QPass and have been available for Skype users since version 1.4 was released in September.

Personalized avatars are enabled via a partnership with Scottish company Saw-You.Com and their WeeWorld visual identity graphics.

Tags: skype, skype2, skypevideo

PodSession on blogs, RSS, and advertising

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 elements from the RSS 2.0 spec, and showing Om how he can edit his feed to include advertising. Om experimented with the Yahoo! Publisher Network for four days before pulling advertising from his feed due to little revenue generation, few ads actually being served, and many user complaints. You can read more about Om’s experience with RSS advertising on his site.

I plan to include a Flash-based audio player directly on each podcast post. If you have a favorite single track progressive download Flash-based player — requiring Flash 7 or 8 is OK by me — please let me know.

Tags: blogs, podcast

Quotes from Oddpost source code

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 in a large public corporation such as Yahoo!

Tags: oddpost, source

Yahoo! Mail RSS

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 now have access to RSS directly in the information management tool they already use every day. The subscription list format encourages many more feed subscriptions than a crowded My Yahoo! portal page allows, and I expect the total number of subscribed feeds will increase for Yahoo! Mail users.

Yahoo! Mail is an advertising program. I expect Yahoo! will begin serving advertisements next to feed content once the service leaves beta.

The aggregator is integrated with Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! 360, and My Web 2.0. Users can forward any post as part of an e-mail message, include the post in a Yahoo! 360 blog post, or bookmark the URL using My Web 2.0.

The add feed window presents users with featured feeds taking up most of the display space. Users can enter the URL of a specific feed towards the bottom of the window.

Yahoo! Mail RSS featured feeds

Yahoo! Mail beta updates
New York Times
Sports Illustrated
Yahoo! News Top Stories
Braingle
Wall Street Journal U.S. News
News.com
101 Cookbooks
BBC News front page
Snopes.com
SportsFilter
Taquitos.net Snack Reviews
The Smoking Gun
Salon.com
Techbargains.com
Space.com
Travel plan idea blog
Digital Photography Review
DVD Talk
Gizmodo
Autoblog
Gardening Question of the Day
Wonkette
Reality TV World
Overheard in the Office

Tags: oddpost, yahoo, yahoomail

Microsoft to unveil listings service

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.

Sony PSP adds RSS support

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 installed his update and shared some of his first impressions on his blog.

Tags: gaming, podcasts, psp

Joyent acquires TextDrive

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. TextDrive also donates 50% of its profits to an open source web project chosen by the account holder.

I will have to wait and see how the acquisition changes the combined company.

Tags: joyent, textdrive

Happy birthday Technorati

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 a watchlist

Pictured above is the home of Technorati’s servers one year ago. I call it “the liquor store colo” because it has that back of the liquor store feel to it. I took a tour of Technorati’s new hosting facility, 365 Main, a few weeks ago. Technorati is now hosted in a converted tank manufacturing plant.

Building upon my summary of Technorati’s first two years, below are some personally selected highlights from Technorati’s third year.

December 19, 2004: Technorati Japan, is announced as Technorati’s first international endeavor.
January 17, 2005: Technorati tags introduced. Folksonomy applied to individual blog posts.
February 24, 2005: First web spam summit bringing together key search engine publishers and indexers.
March 31, 2005: One billion links tracked.
April 9, 2005: Related tags launched.
May 16, 2005: 10 million blogs tracked.
May 24, 2005: One million distinct post tags.
June 20, 2005: Major redesign launched.
July 27, 2005: Language-specific search introduced.
July 28, 2005: Technorati Mobile launched
August 2005: Technorati search results integrated into Newsweek article pages.
September 1, 2005: Blog Finder introduced. Tagging and folksonomy applied at the individual blog level.
October 24, 2005: 20 million blogs tracked.
November 21, 2005: Technorati Mini introduced, featuring updated results in a smaller window every minute.

[Disclaimer: I work for Technorati but this post was created from my own will and contains my personal opinion and perspectives.]

Tag spam and ranking at Tag Tuesday

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 we can attract a good sized crowd for this month’s event in Silicon Valley.

Tags: aol, tailrank, tagtuesday