Tag Archive for 'yahoo'

Del.icio.us rolls out new (Yawn) features!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 14/3/2008
in social bookmarking
. 0 Comments

Del.icio.us, the original Social Bookmarking site is now starting to look long in the tooth and distinctly jaded beside newcomers such as Ma.gnolia.

However, all is not lost. Despite it seeming that all the innovation was sucked out of Del.icio.us when it was purchased by Yahoo! (what new functionality have they rolled out since the acquisition?), it now appears that Del.icio.us is about to launch a new look to the website and do away with the full-stops!

Seriously though, a site re-design and getting rid of the full-stops is the best they can come up with in terms of feature add? Oh dear!

Ma.gnolia, Del.icio.us has just confirmed that I made the right decision to move to you (and use your import tool to bring my Del.icio.us bookmarks with me!).

Yahoo! indirectly upping the cost of acquisition for Microsoft?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/2/2008
in Microsoft and yahoo
. 0 Comments

Microsoft made an offer of $44.6bn for Yahoo! recently which Yahoo! rejected saying it “substantially undervalues” the company (personally I think it waaaaay overvalued Yahoo! and Microsoft caught a lucky break that the offer was spurned).

The New York Times is reporting today though that Microsoft are determined to follow through on this.

However, both the New York Times and News.com have published a story today that Yahoo! have offered golden parachute to all its remaining employees (it terminated around 1,000 of its 14,000 employees in the last week).

According to the News.com report, the package:

will kick into effect should that employee lose his job within two years after a new owner takes over, should she get terminated without cause, or if the employee decides it’s time to leave for “good reason.”

…The golden parachute also includes health and dental coverage for the length of employees’ severance awards, as well as reimbursement of outplacement services up to two years, or a maximum of $15,000, depending on job title

In any significant merger there are necessarily layoffs (particularly of people with similar job functions) - this seems like a cynical ploy on Yahoo!s part to up the price indirectly for Microsoft while grabbing some goodwill headlines at the same time.

Foxmarks to launch next great search engine?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/6/2007
in Search Engines
. 2 Comments

Google had a great idea. Order your search results based on the number of times a site is linked to. Brilliant! A link to a site is counted as a vote of confidence in the site’s quality/veracity. And it works because people generally only link to interesting sites.

Foxmarks is a nifty little Firefox plugin which uploads your Firefox bookmarks to a central server, so you can synchronise your bookmarks across machines. Again brilliant - if you typically use more than one computer (one at home and one at work, for example).

I read today on TechCrunch that FoxMarks is going to use the bookmark information which users of the plugin have uploaded, to create a new search engine. Privacy concerns aside, I love it!

This is the 1,157th blog post on this site. I don’t have any numbers on the amount of outward links I have created in those posts but I imagine two per post would be a conservative estimate. So I have created, in the order of 2,300 links on this blog. And I write in and contribute to other blogs as well. Let’s say I have created (again conservatively) a total of 2,500 links.

Now how many sites have I bookmarked? About 160. Therefore, any site I go to the trouble of bookmarking, must be significantly more important than one I simply link to.

Foxmarks are taking the Google model of a link as a vote of confidence and replacing it with the bookmark as a vote of confidence. Will it work? Well, according to Mike Arrington, who got a demo recently:

it definitely has a “wow” factor. Searches for most things ended up with incredible results.

Foxmarks also shows if the results appear on Google and Yahoo, and on what page in the results they appear. For many of the queries, the top result on Foxmarks was quite obviously the perfect result - but it appeared, if at all, deep on the result set for Google and Yahoo. Terms that are likely to have a lot of SEO pollution (ecommerce in particular), the results were strikingly better on Foxmarks v. Google.

Having said all that, Google have their Google Browser Sync application which has similar functionality to Foxmarks currently, so fine tuning their search results with bookmark info should be trivial for them.

I hope they do because getting 1,210,000 results for the search term “Microsoft Hotmail deletes email” is just ridiculous, even considering how bad Hotmail is!

Salim joins Yahoo!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 16/3/2007
in IT@Cork and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

I see Salim reporting that he has started a new job with Yahoo! Congrats Salim.

Salim has been hired to head up Yahoo! Brickhouse - a new semi-autonomous Yahoo! R&D house which will create new apps for Yahoo! or to be spun off. Yahoo! Pipes was a Yahoo! Brickhouse project, for example.

Salim has been here in Cork several times, most recently speaking at a number of it@cork events (including the now infamous it@cork Web 2.0 mini-conference) and before that Salim lived in Cork for a year or so while he was involved in setting up BUPA Ireland in Fermoy.

I can’t wait to see what he does with the Brickhouse - an interesting project, led by an even more interesting guy.

Yahoo! releases Pipes - online programming for dummies!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 8/2/2007
in Technology
. 3 Comments

Yahoo! released Yahoo! Pipes today to almost universal acclaim! What is Pipes?

According to Yahoo!’s Jeremy Zawodny it is:

a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line

Yahoo! Pipes visual interface

Okaaaay.

Put another way, Pipes is an online app which allows you to visually remix RSS and intelligently filter and output the results!

Even better, you can take Pipes that others have created which you like, clone them, tweak them slightly and re-publish them as your own. Creating apps on the web has never been so easy.

I created a quick pipe here which searches for my domain through 6 RSS search engines, filters unique results, sorts and outputs in a number of formats including rss and json! This pipe also allows you to edit the query so you can enter your own search term.

Yahoo! Pipes output

I love Richard MacManus’ comment:

The UI seems a little geeky and kind of reminds me of Ning (not sure if that’s a compliment or not, as Ning never took off). But I’ve long thought that RSS remix feeds are the future of RSS - and certainly one way to try and filter information overload

It is my understanding that this is what Jeff Nolan’s Teqlo is all about as well - this is going to be an exciting space to keep an eye on.

[Disclosure - I'm not that good a programmer, I simply took an example pipe and modified it!]

UPDATE: The site is after slowing right down in the last hour. I guess they are getting hammered with interested traffic.

Yahoo’s open hackday

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/9/2006
in Web 2.0
. 1 Comment

Yahoo’s first open Hackday is starting this coming Friday (29th) in Sunnyvale California. Upcoming.org has more details including details on how to register.

Michael Arrington is MC’ing the event and good friend Salim Ismail is one of the judges.

Apparently there is a surprise band showing up as well - no I can’t confirm it is U2!

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