After working with the various frameworks, we believe that all the frameworks were very good and could be used to write applications with.
Yahoo announced its support of the OpenID 2.0 standard.
Yahoo, which counts its registered users at 248 million worldwide, says that supporting OpenID will mean that OpenID-compatible accounts are available to a total of 368 million Web users. When Yahoo's support of OpenID goes live, starting with a public beta launch on January 30, this will mean that a Yahoo ID can be consolidated into an OpenID account that will be valid at all partner sites.Big Web players like Google and AOL have already begun supporting this open identification standard and Yahoo is the next on the list. I believe that OpenID will have a great future. It's just a matter of time that Google will offer a full support of OpenID. To note that Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal and creator of OpenID joined Google last year to support the OpenSocial developer initiative.
OpenID 2.0 is finally a released specification. The announcement by the OpenID community yesterday stated:
It’s important to remember that this has been the work of many folks not only within the OpenID community but also the OpenID Foundation, AOL, Cordance, JanRain, Microsoft, NetMesh, Six Apart, Sxip, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Verisign and Yahoo!. Microsoft was instrumental in helping with legal support and guidance combined with the insight of Sun and Yahoo! with their joint work in developing the right language. This is great news as it means that today not only is OpenID 2.0 final, but all of the contributors have sent a strong message that OpenID must be freely implementable world-wide.Last week Google and Microsoft also showed their support of OpenID. In the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View CA, both Microsoft and Google included OpenID features in beta products. Google announced the ability to comment on Blogger blogs using OpenID and Microsoft Research announced an experimental Provider.
Yahoo is going to announce the shut down of Yahoo Photos in favor of Flickr that yahoo acquired two years ago though Yahoo Photos for years was the No. 1 or No. 2 most-visited photo site on the Web (more than 2 billion images are stored on Yahoo Photos and nearly 500 million on Flickr). In USA TODAY, writes:
Yahoo Photos will be shut down by the fall. Users will be directed over a three-month period to transfer their images to Flickr or other photo sites such as Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish or Photobucket. Yahoo says it will make the transition easy, with a one-click transfer process...Charlene Li, an analyst with market tracker Forrester Research, says Yahoo needed to make the change because photos on Yahoo couldn't be tracked in search engines.
Pasha Sadri and Jonathan Trevor from the Yahoo! Pipes team presented and discussed Yahoo! Pipes as part of Google Tech Talks.
ABSTRACT (Via Google Video)
"Pipes is a service platform for processing well-structured data such as RSS, Atom and RDF feeds in a Web-based visual programming environment. Developers can use Pipes to combine data sources and user input into mashups without having to write code. These mashups, analogous in some ways to Unix pipes, can power badges on personal publishing sites, provide core functionality for Web applications, or serve as reusable components within the Pipes platform itself.
Here's what Tim O'Reilly says about pipes: "Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output."
VIDEO
Yahoo announced a new beta version of My Yahoo. Here is a screencast. On the Read/WriteWeb blog, Essentially it's Yahoo finally upgrading its long-running personalized homepage, with a new design more closely aligned to yahoo.com, splashes of Ajax and dollaps of personalizationIt will at first be a private beta, with a limited number of users being offered a beta account at http://cm.my.yahoo.com/upgrade. Yahoo's plan is to gather feedback from those early users and then make the My Yahoo! beta more broadly available - with additional features - over the coming monthssome of the new beta features:
On the Yahoo! Mail Beta blog, Ryan Kennedy announced the integration of Yahoo! Messenger with Yahoo! Mail. Ryan also provided a "screencast that runs through how the integration works and what you can do now that Messenger and Mail are sitting side by side in your browser".
A nice article by Charles S. Knight and Richard MacManus on search engines. The authors write "Ask anyone which search engine they use to find information on the Internet and they will almost certainly reply: "Google." Look a little further, and market research shows that people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But in my travels as a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), I have discovered that in that .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines you have never seen. So many, in fact, that I have had to limit my list of the very best ones to a mere 100".
The authors have grouped the available search engines into different categories (e.g. clustering engines, recommendation engines, metasearch engines) and provided a list of the Top 100 alternative search engines. Well worth a look!
A recent Read/WriteWeb blogpost gives an overview on Yahoo's recent Web 2.0 acquisitions and points to the new Yahoo acquisition strategy: smart and cheap. According to the authors "today, Yahoo spends very little in acquisition when compared to the dot com era".
On Yahoo! Search blog, Tara Kirchner announced new features added to Yahoo! Answers. "Among the enhancements, the team introduced a new way for users to share questions that they find interesting on Yahoo! Answers, called "stars"", Tara writes. The starring concept is however not new. Google already has this feature in e.g. Google Reader.
Just came across the Yahoo! TV service, while browsing through the Ajaxian blog. Yahoo! TV seems to be based on the AJAX framework YUI.Yahoo! TV has had a face lift and it has a lot of the usual suspects from YUI: Nice smooth tabs, a carousel for picks, and a mini tv listings on the right side, the full tv listings show up on demand as you scroll down
On the Yahoo! search blog, Tomi Poutanen from Yahoo! Social Search posted "Today we learned that Google Answers is closing. That's a shame because some great knowledge was created on that service by the Google Answers Researchers". Tomi invited Google Answers researchers to join the Yahoo! Answers community. I´m not sure if this is rather an inofficial invitation to former Google Answers Researchers (exGARs) to join the Yahoo! Answers team and work for Yahoo!!!
Yesterday, Google will soon shut down the service Google Answers. Later this week, they will stop accepting new questions and they will stop accepting new Answers to questions by the end of the year. The existing Qs and As will however be available.
This decision comes one week after Yahoo! announced the merge of Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Answers. I believe that the main reason why Google Answers didn´t succeed as compared to Yahoo! Answers is that it is a charging service. People are not willing to pay to get an answer to a question that they can get for free just by using Google or Yahoo! powerful search engines. This might explain the success of free question-answer services that mainly rely on users who can ask and answer each other questions (the wisdom of the crowd) such as Yahoo! Answers, its German version Yahoo Clever, or Amazon´s Askville.
I even argue against the success of the free question-answer services e.g. Yahoo! Answers. To be honest, if I have an open question, especially if it´s a question related to my work, I would not post it to Yahoo! Answers or Amazon´s Askville and wait for hours or maybe days and weeks to get an answer that might not meet my expectations. I would rather use Google or Yahoo! main search engine which are getting increasingly better to get a quick answer, or directly ask someone that I know s/he might have the answer. Additionally, I would not waste time to browse through the questions posted and answer them even if know the answer. I think Yahoo! is aware of this problem, that´s why they are hardly trying to give a push to Yahoo! Answers by e.g. including search results from the Yahoo! Answers page to the main Yahoo! search page.
Some time ago, I wrote about question-answer services and Yahoo! Answers, the free service that rely on users who can ask and answer each other questions. Today when browsing through the Yahoo! Search blog, I came across this post announcing the merge of Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Answers. With this service, Yahoo! provides us with an innovative Web 2.0 driven search approach, based on the wisdom of the crowd and the important principle of harnessing collective intelligence. Ya-Bing Chu, Product Manager at Yahoo! Search states "we have been integrating knowledge from the Yahoo! Answers community into search to enhance your search experience...if you're looking for personal experiences with tennis camps, finding places off the beaten path, or researching the best hybrid car, you'll now have an extra option on Yahoo! Search (scroll down the results to see them)". Well worth a try!
The Yahoo! User Interface team announced the release of the Ajax Framework Yahoo! UI version 0.12 with new interesting features:
Yahoo! has recently launched a new beta service: Yahoo! Bookmarks. According to the Yahoo! bookmarks team, Yahoo! Bookmarks allow people to store their favorites from across the web and get to them from any computer connected to the Internet. New features of Yahoo! bookmarks include:
Amazon has launched 2 new question-answer services available in beta versions: Nownow and Askville. These 2 services can be viewed as Web 2.0 services since both are user-centric.
NowNow's FAQ states "NowNow is a service that mobile users can use to find answers to any question via mobile email. When you post a question to NowNow via email (ask@nownow.com), our NowNow workers will surf the web to find the answer for you. NowNow workers are users who are being paid to search the web on your behalf. NowNow bypasses the need for mobile users to go to the web to find answers to questions as NowNow will send you an email with up to 3 answers to each question you ask. We have not finalized our pricing for each question, however, we expect each question will cost less than $0.25. During this beta-test period all questions asked will be FREE."
NowNow is similar to Google Answers, both are charging services and people are paid to answer a given question.
I´m trying here to collect Google and Yahoo Web 2.0 oriented services and put them together into one table. Still much more Google and Yahoo! products and services are available. The table below shows that, so far, Google suite includes more Web 2.0 oriented services than Yahoo! suite. But, this situation might change at any time, since Google and Yahoo! are adding every day new Web 2.0 services to their suites.
| Google | Yahoo | Service Category |
| | ||
| Personal Page | ||
| Photos | ||
| Social Networking | ||
| Video | ||
| Groups | ||
| IM | ||
| Social Bookmarking | ||
| | Feed Aggregator | |
| | Blog | |
| | Collaborative Document Editing | |
| | Podcast |
