"Wreck - Conception bay, Newfoundland"
Archive for September, 2008
The Future is Yahoo the Platform
18
Sep
Rob Diana via Mashable!
shared by 4 people
During the Microhoo debacle, everyone was wondering who was going to buy Yahoo. While all eyes were on that, Yahoo has been quietly going about its business. Their business now seems to be wanting to become the platform that everyone develops for, and that initiative is called Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS).
In the past few months, we have seen the release of SearchMonkey, FireEagle and the BOSS API. On Monday we saw the addition of two preview technologies, Yahoo! Social APIs and Yahoo! Query Language (YQL). Obviously, Yahoo has not been giving us empty promises.
So, what have they given us so far?
- SearchMonkey - the structured search result data API
- FireEagle - the location aware API
- BOSS - the build your own search service API
- Social APIs - a suite of preview APIs for basic social networking, contact communications, user status and user activity.
- Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) - a preview release of a single endpoint service to query, filter and combine data across Yahoo and beyond.
Why is this interesting? Well, the first APIs that we saw were interesting by themselves. There was a good amount of hype regarding the SearchMonkey API because it gives developers a way to use search results in their own applications. FireEagle’s location awareness was a cool addition, but nothing earth-shattering by itself. BOSS allows us to create niche search services, or any application that is based on search services. So the combination of these first three services starts to get interesting. You can build a location aware niche search engine as part of your application, and your users would only know that your application is really cool and useful.
The addition of the Social API suite takes the Yahoo platform in a different direction entirely. They have not had a good history with social networking up to this point. Mash was recently shut down, and Yahoo 360 has not had the significant adoption that they hoped.
Given the number of users with email accounts and personalized homepages at My Yahoo, there is a very large market that they can tap into. By providing the Social API suite, they are giving third parties the chance to create a social application based on the Yahoo user base.
This could be a very interesting move for Yahoo. Because they have millions of users, many developers will try to create applications to woo them. Because the social applications would be using the Yahoo Mail address book and other information that users have already entered, these applications would need to be value added services instead of a “traditional†social network application. The Social APIs could be a major boon to Yahoo’s social presence, but it is not the most important technology release.
Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) uses a SQL-like SELECT syntax to retrieve data, and SHOW and DESC commands to discover the available data sources and structures that are available. For developers that are familiar with Unix systems and databases, YQL will not have a big learning curve.
This means that YQL enabled applications could be developed fairly quickly as well. Creating a generic query service gives tremendous power and flexibility to the developers. If you combine YQL with any of the other services available, like the Social APIs and FireEagle, very innovative uses of the now available Yahoo information are possible.
Even though the “business side†of Yahoo seems to be struggling, they are still a major player. They have a very large user base in their Yahoo Mail and My Yahoo properties, and Buzz is also attracting plenty of attention. With those sites, Yahoo is still valuable. The new Open Strategy is putting Yahoo in a platform position with the hope that developers can pick up the innovation slack and make Yahoo cool again. With these new releases, Yahoo is telling everyone, they are not going down without a fight.
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Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
Yahoo Search Monkey Reveals More Details on Developer Platform
Pushed By Icahn, Yahoo Jumps Back Into Ad Deal With Google?
Yahoo OMG. Get Your Celeb Gossip Here.
More Problems For Yahoo: They Might Lose Bebo Ad Deal
Yahoo China Launches a MySpace Clone
Yahoo Didn’t Give Up On Its Widget Engine (Yet)
Yahoo Acquires Analytics Company IndexTools
Whole Earth Catalog as early blog
18
Sep
Geodesic Domes, in the Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1975
Kevin Kelly, who was editor-in-chief at Whole Earth was looking at an old Whole Earth Catalog came to the realization that it was a 1970s version of a blog.
As I read the dense, long reviews and letters explaining the merits of this or that tool, it all seemed comfortably familiar. Then I realized why. These missives in the Catalog were blog postings. Except rather than being published individually on home pages, they were handwritten and mailed into the merry band of Whole Earth editors who would typeset them with almost no editing (just the binary editing of print or not-print) and quickly "post" them on cheap newsprint to the millions of readers who tuned in to the Catalog's publishing stream. No topic was too esoteric, no degree of enthusiasm too ardent, no amateur expertise too uncertified to be included. The opportunity of the catalog's 400 pages of how-to-do it information attracted not only millions of readers but thousands of Makers of the world, the proto-alpha geeks, the true fans, the nerds, the DIYers, the avid know-it-alls, and the tens of thousands wannabe bloggers who had no where else to inform the world of their passions and knowledge. So they wrote Whole Earth in that intense conversational style, looking the reader right in the eye and holding nothing back: "Here's the straight dope, kid." New York was not publishing this stuff. The Catalog editors (like myself) would sort through this surplus of enthusiasm, try to index it, and make it useful without the benefit of hyperlinks or tags. Using analog personal publishing technology as close to the instant power of InDesign and html as one could get in the 1970s and 80s (IBM Selectric, Polaroids, Lettraset) we slapped the postings down on the wide screens of newsprint, and hit the publish button.The Whole Earth BlogalogThis I am sure about: it is no coincidence that the Whole Earth Catalogs disappeared as soon as the web and blogs arrived. Everything the Whole Earth Catalogs did, the web does better.
First Historic Image of Planet 3106 Trillion Miles From Earth [Telescopes]
18
Sep
Thanks to the distortion-reducing power of the ALTAIR adaptive optics system on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, three University of Toronto scientists were able to capture images of the star 1RXS J160929.1-210524 from a distance of about 500 light years away. The image is believed to be the first ever of a planet in an alien solar system around a sun-like star. The discovery is made even more significant because the "planet" lies a tremendous distance away from its parent star—challenging currently accepted theories about star and planet formation. It will take up to 2 years of research to determine whether or not this object is, in fact, tied to the star by gravity. [Gemini via ScienceNews via DVICE]
Mauritian Sunset
18
Sep
SlideRocket’s Online Presentations Open to the Public
18
Sep
Leslie Poston via Mashable!
shared by 4 people
When Mashable first covered SlideRocket, it was in private testing. Finally in open beta, SlideRocket is proving to be a beautiful and easy to use tool for creating full featured presentations.
SlideRocket offers you the ability to create presentations online using its full featured Web application. You can add charts, graphs, images, animations, special effects, lighting effects and more to the slides. You can also play around with the text, and it offers a downloadable desktop application for viewing the slides offline. SlideRocket also works with a variety of platforms.
When the private testing phase started I’d gotten an invite, but declined. At the time I was too busy to really play around with it and give good testing feedback. Boy do I wish I’d started playing with it way back then! They have had a few glitches today since opening their doors to the public, but overall it has gone off without a hitch. I’d say this application beats the pants off PowerPoint and is really going to give KeyNote a run for its money as well.
The main issue I’ve had today is a number of freezes while trying to use the service. I’m going to assume this is being caused by the number of people trying out this new shiny object. I have a number of presentations to create in the coming weeks, and I plan to try using SlideRocket for them, so I’ll know soon enough if the freezes are a strictly opening day issue.
If you haven’t checked out SlideRocket yet, you should. It gives you a fully featured place to create presentations online, right down to importing of Google Docs spreadsheets and including special effects in your slides. I’m quite impressed with how easy it is to use and how elegant the presentation is. You have to love a beta that launches that is both useful and has a great user interface. SlideRocket seems to have accomplished both goals, giving us an application that matters in a pretty package.
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Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
SlideRocket is a Slick Slideshow Creator for Presentations
Alpha: When Beta Is Not Good Enough
Forget PowerPoint: 13 Online Presentation Apps
Stitcher Prepares To Go Public With Its Beta
Web 2.0 Invites for August 22nd, 2007
Google’s Urchin Software Released As Public Beta
Flock Public Beta Now Live
Popular Names for iGoogle Tabs
18
Sep
Ionut Alex Chitu via Google Operating System
shared by 5 people
iGoogle has a very cool feature that populates tabs with gadgets and feeds just by entering a title. When you create a tab, there's an option called "I'm feeling lucky. Automatically add stuff based on the tab name".
To make things even easier, iGoogle started to suggest popular names sorted by the number of users. There are 227,300 users that have tab named "Lifestyle", 3,725,200 users that named a tab "Music" and 21,070,090 users that couldn't find a better name than "Home".
Here's the top 10 for English:
1. Home - 21,070,090 users
2. News - 6,755,900
3. Games - 4,103,500
4. Entertainment - 4,002,300
5. Music - 3,725,200
6. Humor - 3,712,500
7. Sports - 3,667,300
8. Technology - 3,016,700
9. Cooking - 2,203,700
10. Politics - 2,170,700
.....
?. Name this tab - 490,000
and the top 10 for French:
1. Accueil - 1,757,000 (Home)
2. Actualités - 590,100 (News)
3. Dictionnaire - 375,100 (Dictionary)
4. Google - 371,300
5. Musique - 346,100 (Music)
6. Jeux - 297,800 (Games)
7. Informatique - 291,600 (IT)
8. Photos - 282,700
9. Culture - 242,600
10. Radio - 237,700
For other languages, use this URL:
http://www.google.com/ig/mtjson?hl=LANG_CODE&q=
and replace LANG_CODE with a language code supported by iGoogle.
iGoogle has a very cool feature that populates tabs with gadgets and feeds just by entering a title. When you create a tab, there's an option called "I'm feeling lucky. Automatically add stuff based on the tab name".
To make things even easier, iGoogle started to suggest popular names sorted by the number of users. There are 227,300 users that have tab named "Lifestyle", 3,725,200 users that named a tab "Music" and 21,070,090 users that couldn't find a better name than "Home".
Here's the top 10 for English:
1. Home - 21,070,090 users
2. News - 6,755,900
3. Games - 4,103,500
4. Entertainment - 4,002,300
5. Music - 3,725,200
6. Humor - 3,712,500
7. Sports - 3,667,300
8. Technology - 3,016,700
9. Cooking - 2,203,700
10. Politics - 2,170,700
.....
?. Name this tab - 490,000
and the top 10 for French:
1. Accueil - 1,757,000 (Home)
2. Actualités - 590,100 (News)
3. Dictionnaire - 375,100 (Dictionary)
4. Google - 371,300
5. Musique - 346,100 (Music)
6. Jeux - 297,800 (Games)
7. Informatique - 291,600 (IT)
8. Photos - 282,700
9. Culture - 242,600
10. Radio - 237,700
For other languages, use this URL:
http://www.google.com/ig/mtjson?hl=LANG_CODE&q=
and replace LANG_CODE with a language code supported by iGoogle.