Ben Shoemate's Notebook

"Wreck - Conception bay, Newfoundland"

"Earth shadow"

"no description"

"Banner of a victory above reighstag"

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

swissmiss via swissmiss shared by 4 people

‘Mauritian Sunset’ by Sandy Smith.

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

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.

Scientific American

Private Ownership of Fisheries May Shore Up Stocks New York Times - 5 hours ago By CORNELIA DEAN Giving people ownership rights in marine fisheries - in a way, privatizing the fish - can halt or even reverse catastrophic declines in commercial stocks, researchers in California and Hawaii are reporting. New system could help avert collapse of fisheries Reuters Study: Catch share system may prevent overfishing The Associated Press Scientific American - Los Angeles Times - New York Times Blogs - Independent all 137 news articles

via http://www.qbn.com/topics/566198/