Yahoo! has developed a backend infrastructure that can be easily deployed across various applications online or on the desktop with full synchronization and feed parsing handled on its servers. Developers could tap into the Yahoo! backend and develop new feed-aware applications quickly and easily on a robust platform already used by millions of users. Yahoo! just needs to publicize the code and make sessions a bit easier but I reverse engineered their code and I'll give you a primer. Aggregator developers spend a lot of time dealing with issues such as proper parsing, feed storage, and at later stages…
Yahoo! just launched My Subscriptions, a new area on Yahoo! Podcasts where users can manage their subscribed podcasts and listen to these audio files online from their browser window. Users can also rate and review each podcast and its individual episodes. The online audio player uses the Windows Audio format and redirects the stream through Yahoo!'s servers allowing for some additional services as the middleman. I am currently on a high bandwidth connection and Yahoo! is offering me podcasts at 56 Kbps. Yahoo! passes the audio file location to a JavaScript file to create a new audio stream. Here is…
Yahoo! just released a new version of Konfabulator, now known as Yahoo! Widgets Engine. The new version includes new default widgets for Yahoo! search, maps, notepad, address book, and mail. Also included are improved widgets for Flickr, Yahoo! Photos, Calendar, Weather, and Finance. According to Toni Schneider of Yahoo! there have been 1.5 million downloads of Konfabulator since it was acquired by Yahoo! in August. Downloads are currently about 90% Windows, a low number considering Apple's latest operating system features a very similar application, Dashboard, already built-in. 50-100 widgets are submitted to the widgets gallery every week. Yahoo! Widgets…
Yahoo! has bought social bookmarking site del.icio.us for an undisclosed amount. Joshua Schachter posted an announcement to the del.icio.us blog and mentions Yahoo!'s ability to help del.icio.us scale and keep pace with it's growing user base and site usage. Jeremy Zawodny welcomed the del.icio.us team on the Yahoo! Search blog and notes Yahoo! properties My Web and Flickr are natural matches for Joshua and del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is based in New York and received its first round of funding in April 2005 from a variety of investors including Amazon.com. The site now has about 300,000 registered users and 10 million…
Yahoo! Search allows any user to submit a list of pages for submission in Yahoo!'s search index. You may submit site feeds to Yahoo! formatted as RSS 0.9, 1.0, or 2.0, Atom 0.3, or a text file with one URL per line. You can automate the process if you would like with just a few simple steps. Start with the base URL of http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request?pass=1&class=1. Parameters pass and class are required. Add a url parameter, setting the value to the URL-encoded location of your feed. Example: http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Ffeed.xml Submit via HTTP post. Sending a ping to blo.gs might eventually accomplish the same…
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!…
Yahoo! launched its blog search product tonight as a sub-property of Yahoo! News. Here is a results page on Yahoo! Blog Search for "Bush" for example. The content is also exposed on Yahoo! News Search result pages. Here is a results page on Yahoo! News search for "Bush" showing 4 results in the right sidebar. Yahoo! branded the new search as "Blog search" but it is obvious from the results that Yahoo! is currently focused on one file format: RSS. Every search result in my test searches includes a link to the source RSS feed. Yahoo! Search blog notes the…
John Battelle interviewed Terry Semel this morning at Web 2.0. Below are some select quotes I found particularly interesting. If you look at Google as being more than search, "as a portal [Google] would probably be rated #4." "So far [Google] seems to have no real plan, but maybe they do." "We think the big change on the Internet is not just to get more and more unique users. As we go forward it's more about a deeper experience, more time spent, and a deeper experience for users and advertisers." Almost every session is mentioning Google even though there are…
Yahoo! just announced they have acquired events site Upcoming.org and the three-man team of Andy Baio, Gordon Luk, and Leonard Lin. Upcoming is an events message board for individuals and companies, providing a way to publicize and discover events. Upcoming has a database of venues supplied by users, tags for events, as well as information about what events its members are attending and watching. Upcoming recently added a groups feature to allow private events and recurring distribution lists. Upcoming and its team will be integrated with Yahoo! Local. Yahoo! Local has a database of venues complete with reviews and merchant…
Yahoo! plans to lease 200,000 square feet of office space in San Francisco according to the San Francisco Business Times. The new office is located at 475 Sansome Street, near the landmark TransAmerica pyramid. Yahoo! currently has a HotJobs office in San Francisco and is currently hiring for two account executive positions. I wonder what teams will be located at this new location. I have thought about working at Yahoo! in the past but the commute to Sunnyvale is just too much for city dwellers like me or people living in Marin or the East Bay. 200,000 square feet holds…
Yahoo! announced quarterly results yesterday and gave us a peek at what's been happening for the last 3 months. The Yahoo! Music service seemed to cause the most excitement among analysts on the conference call and Yahoo! plans to fully release the service by the end of September. Terry Semel said over half a million publishers are submitting feeds to My Yahoo! and over 4 million sites have "Add to My Yahoo!" buttons on their pages. He also mentioned the relevance of personal content producers using Flickr and blogs during the recent London bombings. Yahoo! had 3.14 billion average…
Yahoo!'s new RSS search site was introduced to the public domain this morning. Yahoo! RSS Search is no longer exposed outside the firewall so don't be surprised if you are redirected to Yahoo! Search when you follow the aforementioned link. This early version of a future Yahoo! search component appeared to restrict searches of Yahoo! Search's index to only include content published as a feed. I presume Yahoo! will use RSS as a generic term referring to feeds including RDF, RSS, and Atom. A search for "Niall Kennedy" returned 205 results on Yahoo! RSS Search compared to 565 results…
Social search is here. Yahoo! introduced My Web 2.0 beta this evening, the first step towards personalized and social search online. I have been exploring the new service for the past half-hour and I am impressed. Personalized search and extending that search to a network of friends is an intensive computational operation and I am surprised Yahoo! has pulled it off. What can you do with My Web 2.0? Each search is limited to your saved bookmarks and the bookmarks of your friends my default. Every bookmark has an option for one or more tags and Yahoo! will suggest tags…
Jim Winstead just announced Yahoo! has purchased blo.gs. The cloud interface will still be available for general use. What does this mean? Yahoo! now has a ping beacon that is already built-in to most weblog software as well as a database of blog posts from the past few years. The cloud technology allows Yahoo! to easily share content update notifications inside and outside the firewall, allowing for easy sharing between blo.gs and Yahoo! Search for example. Jim originally planned on pulling the cloud interface offline at the end of last year and it is good to see the continuation of…
Groxis, a data visualization company, converted its Grokker desktop software to a Java applet and is demonstrating the ability of its software using Yahoo! search results and advertisements. I tested it out with an ego search of course. I am able to see generalizations of how Yahoo! search users might view me based on the size of circles. You can adjust the starting date and number of search results through the tools on the bottom of your screen. Overall a very clever way to show off what Grokker's technology can do for other data sets.
supposedly purchased Flickr last week and will make an official announcement on March 1. I have heard similar chatter and frequent Flickr sightings on the Yahoo!
You can control the minimum delay between accesses for Yahoo!'s Slurp crawler by adding a "Crawl-delay" line to your robots.txt. User-agent: Slurp Crawl-delay: 20 Thank you Yahoo! Search Blog!…
Russell Beattie will join Yahoo! on Monday as a consultant in corporate development and strategy. Congratulations, you held out and waited for something good to happen, and did a lot of thinking about what works best in your future. I commute from San Francisco to San Mateo every day, a bit short of Sunnyvale or I'd be up for a carpool. Yahoo! needs to compete with Google and get their own magic bus. My first thoughts? Russell needs a gadget budget so he can play with new phones, services, and operating systems….
Yahoo! has a new advertisement for Yahoo! Local featuring Howard Dean (listen to the MP3). Howard Dean lists some of the states he visited on his book tour. (via Yahoo! Search blog)…
Martha Lagace of HBS Working Knowledge summarized some of Yahoo! CEO Terry S. Semel's experience with acquisitions. He talked about Yahoo!'s acquisitions of Overture and Inktomi, differing methods of negotiation, and knowing when to walk away when the deal gets too expensive. Semel spoke to members of the Harvard Business School Negotiation Club on September 20, 2004. [Inktomi] was scalable, and we also thought we could make it better by putting our engineering talent behind it. I knew as a negotiator—and my team knew—that we had to have this….
Jeremy asks about web services I would like to Yahoo! offer. How about being the my online storage and synchronization center? I could add an entry to my OS X address book and the entry is reflected in my Yahoo! Address Book. I could easily add photos to Yahoo! Photos from my desktop. Notepad becomes a general note center and I can even download the contents to an iPod. Briefcase can store some documents. Yahoo! makes money by selling extra storage….
