Yahoo! released version 3.1 of its Widget Engine today including a new widget that displays the latest headlines from your My Yahoo! feeds. The new widget, Yahoo! My Headlines, allows you to see the latest headlines, source feed, and publish time of your My Yahoo! feed subscriptions….
Category Archives: Yahoo!
Yahoo! CFO surrenders to Google
Yahoo! Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker recently told Bloomberg News Yahoo! does not intend to gain market share in the search space. “It’s not our goal to be #1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.” (via Steve Rubel) Decker says Yahoo! will instead improve advertising on its search results pages to bring in more revenue. The comment may have been made on Decker’s appearance on Bloomberg Morning Call last week, but I have not been able to find the video. Yahoo!’s stock price is up about 2% this morning after a 20% slide…
Toni Schneider joins Automattic
Toni Schneider has left his position at Yahoo! to become CEO of Automattic, the corporate side of WordPress. Toni was previously leading Yahoo!’s API team and his move to Automattic comes less than a month about six months after his golden handcuffs came off from the Oddpost acquisition of June 2004. Om Malik broke the story of Tony’s departure this evening on his blog….
Yahoo search and Firefox
Yahoo! is not the default search engine for Firefox browser in the United States but they have specially coded their page to help users change their preference. When you first visit Yahoo.com a small box appears to help you switch from Google search to Yahoo! (as pictured above). Pretty smart! I’m surprised the other search engines bundled with Firefox such as Amazon and eBay have not done the same thing for their power users even if they cannot be a replacement for all things search. Tags: firefox…
Yahoo! Podcasts adds vidcasts
Yahoo! Podcasts now supports feeds with video content, or vidcasts. You can add a video series to your personal subscriptions, tag a vidcast, as well as rate and review vidcasts. Videos can be played inside your browser window using either Windows Media 9, RealPlayer 10, or QuickTime 7 players configured through a Yahoo! cookie. Eric Rice’s videoblog is one example listing. Even though the site now supports video all of the text and images on the site seemed focused on audio content. Audio content from the Yahoo! Podcast directory could be integrated with Yahoo! Music and hopefully vidcasts will make…
My Yahoo! feed API
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! launches podcast subscription center
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 Widget Engine
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! buys del.icio.us
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…
Submit site feeds to Yahoo! Search
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…