Gadgetopia

Yahoo 360 takes spin through blogosphere: Yahoo is gonna blog. "Yahoo 360 allows consumers to conveniently connect with the people they care about by creating and sharing blogs, photos and other content across Yahoo."

Do you Yahoo? Were you aware of this: Yahoo is using something called "Web beacons" or a "super cookie" that tracks not only where its users go on the Yahoo network but also tracks where they go outside of the Yahoo network using a persistent file on the hard drive. ...

The Blog Herald: Yahoo! to buy Blog hosting company "....Yahoo! is set to launch into blogging based on the blog service it appears to be running in Korea (but no one is sure as its in Korean except the logo: Yahoo Korea Blog) ignores the recent history of Yahoo! and ...

Yahoo! UI Library: Yahoo somewhat rules for this. A Free BSD license makes it even yummier. The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, HTML and AJAX. The UI Library Utilities ...

Yahoo! Maps, Driving Directions, and Traffic: They have satellite imagery this morning.

Yahoo launches Web site publisher: How long until they offer a blogging tool? "The tool, called SiteBuilder, lets customers create a Web site using an array of templates and interface options. The product also lets people develop pages while offline through an application download and then upload publishing changes onto ...

WordPress on Yahoo: As if Movable Type on Yahoo! wasn't enough, now you can have WordPress pre-installed. When we started, Yahoo asked "What would the perfect blog host do?" and their team has been really amazing in executing on a really kick-ass platform for serious bloggers. It took a little ...

Yahoo offers Movable Type for bloggers: Good for Yahoo -- instead of building their own blogging software, they just partnered with Six Apart to offer Movable Type to all their hosting clients who want to blog. Pre-installed, even. Yahoo will effectively act as the preferred provider of Movable Type for ...

Yahoo allows outsiders to innovate on Yahoo e-mail: This sounds big. Officials of the world's largest Internet media company said on Friday it planned to give away the underlying code to Yahoo Mail, one of the crown jewels of its business, in a bid to encourage software developers to build ...

5 cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes: If you still haven't figured out what you'll use Yahoo Pipes for, here are some great examples: This pipe takes a user input - a Last.FM username - then grabs the last 10 played tracks for that user, and replaces this input with ...

Yahoo! News Search via RSS: Jeremy has reverse-engineered how to get a Yahoo! RSS feed based on a keyword. You have to come up with a funky URL to do it, and he's graciously put just such a funky URL creator on his Web site.

Yahoo fortifies free e-mail to counter Google's Gmail: It's a huge battle to see who can give away the most free stuff. Reminds me of 1999. Beginning Tuesday, all of Yahoo's free e-mail accounts will be upgraded to 100 megabytes, a move spurred by Google's plans to offer 1,000 megabytes ...

ArsTechnica tells us that Microsoft and Yahoo will integrate their IM Networks. Sources tell me that Microsoft and Yahoo will announce a new partnership tomorrow that includes Instant Messaging network sharing that will effectively allow MSN Messenger users to talk to Yahoo's IM users, and vice versa. While details are ...

Dead Marine's kin plead for e-mail: The family of a soldier killed in Iraq wants access to his email account. Yahoo! has said no. "I want to be able to remember him in his words. I know he thought he was doing what he needed to do. I want to ...

Why Yahoo! Answers is a librarian s worst nightmare: Great article from Slate that mirrors how I feel about Yahoo! Answers: it s total crap. The answers are complete garbage. The blockbuster success of Yahoo! Answers is all the more surprising once you spend a few days using the site. While Answers ...

Yahoo! Search Web Services Launch!: Yahoo! has released their Web services API, and Zawodny has a great collection of links. I was reading somewhere else too that pointed out the fact that Google's Web service API has stagnated horribly since it was released, which is true what have they ...

Yahoo proposes new Internet anti-spam structure: Good thing this is Yahoo!, because it's going to take a big company to pull this off. They're apparently going to open-source it. Under Yahoo's new architecture, a system sending an e-mail message would embed a secure, private key in a message header. The ...

About the new Yahoo! Mail: Jeremy writes about the new Yahoo! Mail interface and has a great screenshot. Oh, and if you look at that screenshot, you'll see that there are over 42,000 messages in my inbox. The product still works well with a big volume of mail. He includes ...

Microsoft says proxy battle not worth it: And that s the end of that. In a letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer confirmed that Microsoft was willing to offer $33 a share, but that Yahoo was holding out for at least $37 a share, or $5 billion ...

Yahoo! Sets Up Christmas Tree With Internet Receiver: This is what happens when you let a dot com sponsor your Christmas tree. Yahoo.com has set up a Christmas tree in Herald Square with a wireless Internet receiver on top. New Yorkers walking by with a laptop can set it down ...

Yahoo! Go - What Is It?: I don't get how this works. It's an OS for a DVR, essentially. But can you load a new OS on your DVR, or is this for a TV you make work like a DVR? Now you can take Yahoo! off your computer and ...

Yahoo crawls deep into the Web: I'm nervous that this will lead to people found out about that murder conviction in '78. Yahoo on Tuesday began a systematic effort to draw more content into its searchable database of Web documents, its latest bid to win Web surfers from search rival ...

Yahoo! Maps, Driving Directions, and Traffic: Yahoo! has released a new version of their mapping service. It's done in Flash, which is nice. A bit smoother than the DHTML version over at Google, but no satellite images. If you want directions and you enter a destination address, it pops up ...

Get this for a new spam angle -- I had shared my Yahoo Calendar with my wife, so she could add events. Somehow I must have hosed it up, because some idiot has managed to add events to my calendar so that I'm amply remind that I need to join ...

Has anyone else had good luck with Yahoo! video searches? I was reading Wikipedia tonight about Alexander Karelin, the dominating Russian wrestler. The article mentioned the "Karelin Lift" where the guy just picks up other world-class, heavyweight wrestlers and tosses them backwards. Not believing this was possible, I searched Yahoo ...

Pipes: Rewire the web: This looks insanely cool. It seems to be a system to capture feeds, manipulate them every which way to Sunday, then spit them back out. It's all done through an insanely-good DHTML interface. Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create ...

Yahoo's First Hack Day: What a Blast!: This is a nice concept, but I hear the guy's over at Google get to do this one day a week, all the time. Organized by Chad and supported by the rest of us on the Technology Development team, the plan was simple: ...

I spent some time over at Yahoo! Answers today. I had a question (it's here, if anyone else wants to chime in). I believe in giving back, so I spent 20 minutes or so trying to answer some other peoples' questions as well. After this experience, I'm prepared to say ...

Google wows investors with first results since IPO: Part of being a publicly-traded company is that you have to release earning reports. In their first report ever, it looks like Google is going to trounce Yahoo! over the next few years. Google reported revenue of $805.9 million, more than double ...

Michael Robertson (the guy from MP3.com, Linspire, and now SIPPhone) writes up "Michael's Minute" a few times a month, which is sort of a letter to customers that's often informative, but usually relates to MS-vs-Linux type issues. This week, though, he wrote a thinker of a piece on how far ...

Amazon Askville takes on Yahoo! Answers: first look: Amazon is heading into the Answers space with Askville. Google ended Google Answers last year. Yahoo Answers kind of sucks, for reasons I explained here. The only one I ve had a good experience with is LinkedIn Answers, a site on which Aaron ...

Rumor: Google to buy Opera, according to Yahoo Europe president: Um, whoa, assuming it's true. Pierre Chappaz, the former president of Yahoo Europe, claims to have a source, whom he says is generally very well informed, who told him that Google is planning on buying the Opera web browser. Via ...

MSN to offer search ads through AdCenter: Microsoft is going to add contextual pay-per-click ads to MSN Search. Who didn't see that coming? Internet search giants Google and Yahoo no longer have the red-hot search advertising market all to themselves. Microsoft's MSN on Wednesday will unveil its answer to Google ...

Google to abandon answer service: Google Answers is shutting down. Yahoo Answers was clobbering it. Google Inc. doesn't have all the answers -- a fact underscored by the Internet search leader's decision to abandon a 4-year-old service that hired researchers to field questions on everything from school homework to sports ...

Google Blatantly Copies Yahoo!?: While I know that Jeremy is not a huge Google fan to start with, I have to agree with him that this is insanely blatant. So blatant, in fact, that I'm left thinking there's more to the story. Back when IE7 launched, Yahoo! created a customized ...

Yahoo Submits DomainKeys to IETF: Six months after first announcing their plans, Yahoo! has submitted a spec for "DomainKeys" to the Internet Engineering Task Force for approval as a standard. Good for them. DomainKeys is a way of authenticating email senders, using public and private key pairs and the domain ...

Found on Yahoo! today. This guy is paying $0.51 a click for this. Thanks Greg.

Google to take down front-page boast about index size: Apparently Google and Yahoo! are counting "pages" differently, and Google takes exception that Yahoo! claims more than they have. Google Inc. will stop boasting on its home page about the number of Web pages it has stored in its index, even ...

Use Targeted Keywords in URL: A month ago, I questioned the use of keywords in URLs. These folks did a test. They put a garbage word in the URL of a page. They used the word nowhere else on the page or in the linktext to that page. Before we ...

Iceberg Beta Launch: Watch this video. It reminds me of a mashup between Dabble DB and Yahoo! Pipes. It s impressive, and apparently launching soon.

My content, my readers, my numbers, damnit: Here's a funny rant that points out a very real problem: it's virtually impossible to figure out how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed because of feed aggregators and cachers. If you took a song and cached it and fed it ...

Proof that Gmail has raised the ante in the Webmail game: new betas from the two other big players -- New Hotmail screenshots (Microsoft Mail, it's called) New Yahoo Mail screenshots It goes without saying that they're all Ajaxed up.

Merrill Lynch boots outside ISPs: "Merrill Lynch on Friday will ban access to outside e-mail services from popular sites such as America Online, Yahoo and MSN, in response to regulatory requirements and to protect its network from viruses, according to a company memo."

OSCMS Summit 2007: This is a very cool thing for Yahoo! to do. A gathering of Open Source content management systems and the geeks who love them: the conference open to all open source CMSes and will host several "sub-conferences" including Drupal's DrupalCon.

Why I don't recommend Firefox: Adam doesn't think that Firefox is ready to be unleashed on all users just yet. He makes some good points. Firefox right now is very good for an experienced net user, but is not at all ready for the average person. If you plan on ...

Flashmobsters Discover Even Lamer Past-time: And you thought Flashmobs were silly. "...some enterprising Internet souls with even larger tracts of time on their hands have created an innovation that precludes the annoying physical presence of the flashmob: flashblogging. Apparently starting from a Yahoo Group, the flashbloggers are flitting ...

Steve Souders is Yahoo s front end engineer. He s the guy who wrote the article we discussed a few months back which brought us back to all those old tricks that make your Web site load faster. Consider this: say your page takes 700 milliseconds to load from request to final ...

TrackMeNot: Would this really make a difference? Probably not, but it's an interesting idea. TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. It hides users' actual search trails in a cloud of 'ghost' queries, ...

Basecamp API: The Basecamp API has landed. The API allows programmers to access/read/write Basecamp data from third-party systems like OS X dashboard widgets, Yahoo/Confabulator widgets, web sites, back-office systems, billing systems, and more. The API allows Basecamp to integrate with a variety of other products and systems. Prepare for some ...

Moving On and Trading Places: And the April Fool's posts are upon us. I've struggled for a while, trying to figure out how to write this. So long, in fact, that I intended to publish this yesterday but kept stalling. So I'll keep it short and sweet. I recently left ...

Interesting things are happening at UserLand. John Robb has left, and Dave Winer is hinting that big changes are coming. Two theories abound: (1) they will open source some or all (Frontier, Manila, Radio) of their products, or (2) they will be acquired. With Google's purchase of Blogger some months ...

I've recently made the switch from Microsoft Outlook to a Web mail account. I was nervous about virus propagation, and I wanted to be able to access my email anywhere, so I decided to make the leap. But which Web mail service to use? I tried several free ones (Hotmail, ...

The New State of Search: Here's a little table of all the search engine acquisitions and deals that have happened this year. I didn't realize that Overture bought AltaVista, then AllTheWeb, and then was acquired by Yahoo! along with Inktomi. Then Google picks up Prya Labs, and MSN lanuches the ...

Google to offer 1 gig of free e-mail: This will alter the playing field a bit. Comes with a GB of storage. Search engine Google Inc. announced Wednesday it will launch a free, Web-based e-mail service to compete against popular services from rivals Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Google's service, ...

Wikipedia Needs $20,000: Here's some interesting perspective on the evolution of Wikipedia. Three years ago today, they were in a panic because they needed $20,000 to buy some new hardware. Today, they just happen to be in a middle of another fund raising drive. As of this writing, they have ...

Dogpile Search Comparison Tool: This is a well-done little promo app for Dogpile. It lets you put in a search, then it runs your term through Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, and tells you what results, if any, were common. Searching for "gadgetopia" apparently has only one common result between the ...

TV show 'Alias' features Trillian: I saw the episode in question, and I knew they IM'ed each other, but I never realized it was Trillian "I was surprised to see Jennifer Garner's TV mom and dad instant messaging each other with none other than Trillian. Not AIM, not MSN or ...

CNN.com - MySQL: A threat to bigwigs?: A good article on MySQL: "Yahoo's Zawodny makes a different analogy: 'MySQL is to Oracle as Linux is to Windows. It will slowly but steadily creep up the food chain, just like Linux has.' ... Mickos is already seeing real headway. 'I estimate ...

AskTog: It's Time We Got Respect: Bruce Tognazzini is pushing a new name and new segment of the usability profession. "I have spent the last several months thinking about and talking with others about this issue, all the while casting about for a new title for our profession. I have ...

The Gibbs Aquada is a new British 3-seater sports car that converts into a speedboat. "The Aquada can hit speeds of 100 miles an hour on land — and once it hits water, the wheels retract into the wheel arch, jets kick in, and the car is suddenly a boat. ...

Google mail's features outweigh privacy concerns: Here's a review of Gmail, which is generally positive. The privacy debate tends to obscure assessment of other Gmail attributes namely usability, storage and search. In most of these areas, Google trounces other free e-mail services, including those offered by Microsoft Corp. ...

GMail code hints at coming domain feature: These guys did some snooping around in the huge JavaScript code libraries for GMail and found some code that leads them to some cool conclusions. Their next big move will likely be GMail for domains -- a powerful way for anybody who owns ...

Google treading on Microsoft turf in Dell tests: In the article, both Dell and Google confirm this report. The report, citing unnamed sources, said Dell and Google are in talks to put Google software on as many as 100 million new Dell PCs following a bidding process in which Google ...

And that effectively took Microsoft, Symantec, Google, Apple, Lycos, and other big hitters offline yesterday. Read about it here. ...the problem stemmed from what a spokesman called a "large scale international attack on the Internet's infrastructure". Akamai said the attack was primarily aimed at the large search engines - of ...

Imitation and the Slippery Slope of Portaldom: My Google: Google released Personalized Home Pages today. What I found interesting was Jeremy Zawodny's response to it (he works at Yahoo!, remember). There's a radical idea! A customized home page with a search box at the top. Innovative! Whoever thought of the ...

Fifty Ways to Take Notes: Here's a fairly insane list of ways to take quick notes online. I still use Yahoo Notepad, but I need to start using my company wiki. [...] when it comes to note taking, I personally look for quick and simple. If I have something on ...

Buying Clicks To A Tragedy: Interesting. I don't think there's an ethical problem here, it's just a reflection on the new world we live in. As news outlets deployed their teams to Blacksburg, Va., following the Apr. 16 shooting at Virginia Tech, the business operations of The New York Times, ...

Amazon Plans Search Service To Drive Sales: Everybody is rushing to search these days. "Amazon.com Inc. has quietly established a beachhead in Silicon Valley to develop its own Web-search technology, a plan that could pit it more directly against Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in an emerging battle over who ...

New hope for computer users suffering from "Essential Tremor": The device, which looks a bit like a guitar effects box, is a small device with two on-and-off switches. It plugs in between the PC and the mouse, and it can easily be switched off when someone else wants to use ...

Mozilla, Microsoft reps argue over the future of web scripting: Interesting article on the future of JavaScript. Do you release a new version with incremental improvements, or do you scrap it in favor of something more robust like Python or Ruby. Critics like Microsoft and Yahoo argue that certain characteristics ...

Buzz Game: Home: This is fascinating. The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends As a player, your goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search frequency over time. Predictions ...

Anyone can slap some rims, a spoiler, and a nice paint job on their Honda Civic, but it takes a real pro to trick out a stapler Trick Anything specializes in the customization of your most cherished possessions. By expanding our medium to include anything that can be sanded, painted ...

I want a piece of software, and I'm hoping one of you out there knows where I can get it. I want software where I can specify: A search engine A search phrase A domain name Then this piece of software will tell me the position of the first appearance ...

Microsoft to roll out online versions of Windows, Office: This is apparently a very big deal, but I can't figure out why. I went to the site -- there's nothing really available yet. Windows Live will be offered for free and try to make money from the rapidly expanding online ...

Solving and creating captchas with free porn: You know those distorted alphanumeric codes you have to decipher and type in on some sites to get access? They're apparently called "captchas" and they're meant to make sure you're a real person, not a script. Well, here's a flat-out brilliant way that ...

Yahoo! News - Novell to Buy SuSE Linux for $210M: Wouldn't it be rich if Linux came back to take the desktop, thus letting Novell beat Microsoft in the end? There's such poetry there that fate just has to make it happen. "Novell Inc., a software pioneer that was badly ...

VisitorVille: Web Site Intelligence for Creative Thinkers.: You gotta see the screenshots of this it's Webalizer meets SimCity. Traffic stats are displayed in little Sim-like animations with visitors getting off buses with "Yahoo!" and "Netscape" painted on the top. No...seriously. Look at these screenshots. Buildings grow and shrink in ...

USATODAY.com - Tiny signs of life bloom in Silicon Valley: This is the latest in several articles I've read lately about Silicon Valley coming back to life. "Year-over-year job losses in Santa Clara County — the heart of the Valley — are easing. Median home prices, among the highest in ...

This is an excellent article at InformationWeek about the blogging trend and how blogs can be useful inside a company for things like project and knowledge management. Interestingly, UserLand popped up again: "John Robb, president and chief operating officer of UserLand Software Inc., which develops blogging technology, envisions individual workers ...

A preview version of Longhorn — the next Windows release — has been leaked. The biggest change is the use of the new file system, WinFS. It has a database architecture where each file has a key which doesn't change regardless of where the file is on the file system. ...

Gates reveals his 'magic solution' to spam: Just imagine if he actually did it and become "The Man Who Solved the Spam Problem." The world would herald the savior. That's enough to give Apple die-hards a shiver. The battle to rid the world's in-boxes of spam has got itself a ...

Internet Business For Sale: Some big money is being asked on this page. This site is on the block for $20 million. One of the few remaining leading photo sharing portals is exploring acquisition opportunities. Currently in its seventh year of operations, this online photo service enables its members to ...

Social Network and Relationship Finder, or SNARF, was released by Microsoft Research at the end of November. SNARF is designed to assign priorities to email in your Outlook inbox according to established relationships you have with the senders of that mail. As one MS Research guru puts it... We often ...

From the "It Was Only A Matter Of Time" department, some guy John Kiel Patterson of Louisiana is suing Apple because he says the iPod he bought is a hazard to his hearing. Patterson does not know if the device has damaged his hearing, said his attorney, Steve ...

I've decided to make the switch to pure Web mail. It's been a long time coming. About three years ago, I got sick of having to sync a POP account in two locations, so I switched to IMAP. I've loved that set-up ever since. I have an account at Fusemail, ...

I stumbled across Escapade while looking through the EditPlus Yahoo! group. It's a very (very) lightweight server-side scripting language. It provides for include files, database access, variable assignment and retrieval, and not much else. But I had it installed in about two minutes and I was pulling data from a ...

Someone at Forbes had a great idea, and made it reality: Most time capsules involve cramming stuff into a metal box and burying it in a hole in the ground. It's a method that works but it's so primitive. What if you could write an email to yourself, and ...

MSN Search MSNBOT: This is new. MSNBOT is a prototype Web crawler robot developed by MSN Search... More good information over at Scripting News: They [MSN] currently outsource all their searches to Inktomi and LookSmart, with ads embedded through a partnership with Overture. Now that Inktomi is owned by ...

The Zombine Hunters: This article is scary. Crackers tried to get this company to pay $10,000 in protection money. The company refused, and it now costs them a half-million a year just to stay online. A brutal story. Michael Alculumbre's first communication from the extortionists arrived on a Thursday evening ...

Casey Serin: The world s most hated blogger?: I ve read this guy s blog before and I agree that he s more or less an idiot. He bought millions of dollars in houses with little planning, and then the bubble burst. So he started a blog about his troubles and has really found ...

Australia's Internet Industry Association is launching a new campaign to educate consumers on the best way to eliminate spam: "Don't try - Don't buy - Don't reply". "'Spam is the unwelcome by-product of a largely free and open email system', says IIA chief executive, Peter Coroneos. 'Spammers are freeriding on ...

I'm a nomad these days -- I split my time between two offices, one with a Windows domain, and one without. Because of this, I've decided to remove my computer from the domain to which it was attached. I still have my domain user account to access resources, but my ...

Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site: This is a phenomenal page at the Yahoo! Developers Network about how to speed up pages on the front end. The front end means everything after code execution is complete on the server. As developers, we tend to concentrate on server-side rendering, ...

I'm not working from a Windows box as much as I used to these days, so maybe I'm a little too blissfully isolated from the sheer volume of crap that most of you put up with from your computer each day. Tonight, though, I was working from my wife's PC ...

The taxonomy was always supposed to be the be-all and end-all of information architecture. A good, solid category structure was how all the information in an enterprise was supposed to fit together. But they're harder to build than you think. There are shades of gray and complications. You need related ...

Bridging Desktop And Web Applications - A Look At Mozilla Prism: Here s an article about what are being called Single Site Browsers (SSBs), or little standalone browsers that let you browse and interact with a single Web app in a desktop app-ish environment. Surf to Gmail, for instance, choose “Convert ...

Since arriving in Iraq, people have been amazed at the ease of which I am able to communicate with my friends and family. I have to admit, I have been amazed, too. I never thought I would have this much access to home. Internet and phone technology is in the ...

This weekend, I was struggling with a .Net / XML / XSLT problem. I'm not a big .Net guy, but I've been working with it for the last few months on a big project for Blend. Brian, from MyHomepoint has been a huge help as I've gotten my feet wet ...