Is Yahoo Really an Illusion?
Bing is full of surprises these days in its unending competition with Google. Bing adds new features regularly like the Wolfram Alpha function and mapping tools that are visually stunning. Integration with the Wolfram Alpha computational engine means that they will now be able to interpret what you ask in human terms. If you search for “fast food”, it will give you the usual restaurant information, but also exercise tips and indigestion information. Yahoo has introduced a major search feature too – as of last year. The feature is called Bing. Yahoo is finally throwing in the towel in search; they may have snubbed Microsoft’s $44 billion takeover offer two years ago, but they have other Microsoft-friendly attitudes in place.Yahoo has closed its search business, and is allowing Bing to do the backroom work. They closed down their shopping API as well, and chose to power their shopping site with Price Grabber.There have been other reports out there wondering if Yahoo is preparing to shut shop entirely; if they don’t do their own search, what is it they do? Yahoo’s management has put out a vehement statement about how it isn’t fair for anyone to consider Yahoo a spent force. The statement claims that Yahoo has a great relationship with its developers and a commitment to open platforms; well, my Log Blog was an innovative service that developers and geeks loved too. And that’s been closed by Yahoo as well. GeoCities recently got the ax, and it looks like Yahoo these days is all about closing down and outsourcing. It would appear that pretty soon, the US search market will be left with just a big two – just like the US auto market when it lost Chrysler.
But Yahoo is still in the search business to all appearances. They take care of all the advertising business on their own site as well as on Bing’s. Yahoo’s plan is to cut costs, of course. But to do that, it still needs to be around, doesn’t it? Yahoo is no longer a website that provides original services; it is just an aggregator. And this makes for the passing of an era.
How many Viewers do Video Streaming YouTube Clone Sites actually Get?
YouTube is the number one video streaming site out there; and Nielsen estimates that they served 6 billion videos in December. And Hulu at number two, served about a tenth that number. But what if you tried a different polling firm, one like comScore? This company believes that Hulu is at the number two position too; but according to them, Hulu served almost a billion videos last month. Anyone with a little YouTube clone site will be humbled by every number mentioned here; but it makes you wonder still; do these numbers make any sense if they can be so far apart when measured by two different polltakers?Hulu has always been protesting against the way these polls are taken. It isn’t clear whether one Hulu video that runs for an hour, should count just the same as a YouTube video that runs for just three minutes. After all, YouTube mainly streams short files that are user-uploaded, while Hulu only does regular broadcast content and movies – things that last much, much longer. Should only the main program material be counted, or should streaming advertisements count too? What about videos that are watched off-site, on an embedded player elsewhere? Poorly defined standards of measurements like this, can often cause these discrepancies.
Essentially, these numbers are so impressive when reported by comScore, because they include every streamed advertisement run with a program. Nielsen does not include the advertisements. But there is one thing you can trust; both these survey companies do place YouTube and Hulu at the correct relative places: at number one, and number two. Perhaps comScore does this intentionally; if Hulu’s numbers look much more impressive when reported by comScore, they will love how they can get better advertising rates from their partners. It is somewhat possible, that all YouTube clone sites would choose to be rated by comScore and not Nielsen. It makes them look much bigger to the advertiser.
Facebook Addiction Tumult – Accessing Facebook through Email
Everyone is abundantly aware of the kind of stupendous distraction social networking is. Facebook estimates the number at 10 billion man minutes – the amount of time that Facebook’s 350 million registered users spend on the site every single day, taking time away from their homework, their official duties, and their families. Doctors seem to say that these are people who deal with a real and active addiction; and informing support networks to keep themselves in check is often as good of an idea for Facebook, as it is for substance abuse. Many people just close or deactivate their Facebook accounts. Others, form pacts with their friends to help keep them off their habit most of the time. Some people even give over control of their account to a trusted friend (presumably one who is less ravaged by the addiction)who will change their password, and not give it back to them until they feel truly able to control themselves. Parents of Facebook-hooked teenage children certainly seem surprised at the determination they see in their otherwise irresponsible young charges, trying to keep Facebook from running away with their whole lives.But children on the whole seem to be in better and control of their dependencies than working adults. Businesses in America and the UK are increasingly finding that they need to block access to social networking sites at the company’s server, to keep this habit from lowering workplace productivity. And of course, employees are certainly not taking a hint at this; they and are finding workarounds, such as accessing Facebook through their e-mail. For the less-than-responsible, a service called MoDazzle lets you do this.. You just send an e-mail to MoDazzle, and it fetches you all your latest updates through your e-mail. You can do most of the stuff on MoDazzle that you would get to do on Facebook.
It isn’t just the matter of self-control that Facebook brings up at work and at home. In America, the state of Florida has ruled that lawyers and judges cannot be Facebook friends. There is the matter of being responsible, and then there is something like this that is clearly silly. Lawyers who are friends, are not suddenly going to turn strangers just because one of them got promoted to being a judge.
Personal Finance on the Cloud
It wasn’t long ago that whenever you bought a computer, it always came Pre-installed with a trial version of Microsoft Money, the company’s software for personal finance and home budgeting; and Intuit’s Quicken was the underdog. Today, Microsoft money nor longer exists;and Quicken has basically shut down. How did this happen? Blame it on their free online competitor iMint, a superstar of Web 2.0.iMint effortlessly gets into all of your online credit card, debit card and bank accounts, retrieves everything you ever charged to your cards, to bring them to one place, one list, and just makes home accounting a pleasure.And since it is all online, in the Cloud, you can access your finances anywhere – there is no need to remain tethered to one computer anymore. Microsoft Money and Quicken saw no reason to stay in business anymore, when iMint could run rings around them for free; the parent company of Quicken has discontinued their product, bought iMint, and are in the business today managing it. Microsoft Money, in association with Citibank, is bringing out a new product, for free, pretty soon.
The Web 2.0 Revolution certainly has not past the personal finance world over. The desktop is no longer where you do your accounts: your cell phone, or other Internet device is. There are a host of other services around the finance concept too. Bill Minder,for example, helps you remember when your bills come due.Small business accounting software, is the next category of previously-immobile application to make the leap to the web. Xero, a New Zealand online accounting site, strikes most users as particularly smooth, eye-catching, and easy to use. It is early days yet for Cloud ERP. For instance, you can’t account for stock trades on these. But there is something about these services that makes accounting no longer dry, no longer just for the suits. It almost feels like a game to try your hand at.
So how do these services turn a profit?So far, it seems to be hard; you could always buy into their premium service. And then there are other creative ways, like iMint’s plan to sell its user-data, to third parties, with all identifying personal details removed. There are lots of companies that would really appreciate having detailed information on the shopping habits of people in general. So far, iMint’s track record of protecting its members financial information, is spotless. Perhaps, it can be trusted even when it tries to sell, information about all those members who made it this successful.
And as an aside, would you ever be interested when you were running through your figures, in knowing how closely you followed the spending patterns of your general income group, your friends in the neighborhood? Try the new online service, Bundle. Bundle gets its information from Citibank and other sources, and sifts through the data, to find out how Americans manage their budgets. Of course, financial institutions have always done this kind of number interpretation for years. But this should be the first time the details are available to lay people. You never get any personal information, but you certainly do get to know what everyone on your street spends, without identifying information, of course.
Google Reader Learns an Intriguing New Trick
Google Reader just saw an intriguing update added to its bag of tricks recently. Let’s say, that you visit parts of a website that don’t advertise an RSS feed ability. What would happen if you still insisted on signing up for one? Up until now, you would just have found an error message from Google Reader about how you were mistaken in your impression that the page featured an RSS feed. The updated Google Reader though, will summarily create a custom feed for the page that you are interested in, and send you updates on it, whenever it crawls through. You’ll get a little notification of changes made to the pages you chose. If you happen to have a gossip page you have an eye on, or the latest prices on a product, Google Reader should track it for you. You can actually use any competing feed reader that you like, to access the service too. All you need to do is click on the Show Details link on the new feed. There are other services that allow something of this nature too, Change Detection , being one such example. And It won’t just give you a little snippet of the page in question either, like Google Reader does;there are plenty of details on offer, and an RSS feed of them too.
Agriya Launches New Web Properties!
For those of you who are not Uber-nerds like us, you might be confused by the term “web property” but it basically means a website built to earn income. This has been part of the business plan of Agriya for a long time now to create various web properties in different domains, and just like London buses, we wait for one and suddenly two come along at once.
So let me tell you a little bit more about these great new sites…
Eve’s Cafe – www.evescafe.com
Eve’s Cafe aims to become the number one stop for women around the world who are looking for help, advice, tips and information on a whole range of lifestyle choices. From Food to Fashion, Health to Wealth, no stone is left unturned in this online web magazine. Eve’s Cafe has been built on the Cake PHP platform and incorporates a custom design with integration. Articles and video tutorials will be added to the site daily and we’re open to advertising enquiries on the site for suitably related products and services.iSongs – www.iSongs.fm
iSongs has been created using our Volume software with a fantastic custom design (one of the first to make me go “wow!”) and a few script modifications. The portal is aimed at the Tamil speaking community because apparently I’ve been told that there are 90 million Tamils in Tamil Nadu alone, and that figure doesn’t include the diaspora spread across the globe! Tamil music is upbeat, loud and proud which makes it the perfect companion for Volume 
To celebrate the launch of these two web properties we held a small launch party on the roof top terrace of our office and I’ve included some of the pictures from the event below!
Might Twitter have Peaked Already?
Most of what made the news about social media last year, certainly makes it in general, to appear unstoppable; specific reporting about Twitter in particular couldn’t find enough good things to say about the social networking major. Twitter seemed to have its game plan completely figured out – about 60 million registered users, real-time search deals with Google and Bing, and an overzealous crowd of app developers. You would think that a company that was at the very the the zenith of social media success, would find it hard to be written off, but a CNN report does just that.According to the report, Twitter hasn’t seen a major rise in its membership in six months; in fact, towards the end of the year, monthly visitors actually fell on the Twitter site. Of course, Twitter is countering this, saying that all the company lost were the casual users. The true loyalists, have been visiting Twitter in an alarmingly dedicated fashion, they contend. And of course, there is the old stand by – to use Twitter, you don’t have to visit the site; you can use any number of other embedded services. In fact, it has been estimated 70% of the Twitter membership, access its feeds through embedded specialized services. Twitter has declared that it wishes to regain the custom of users back on the home site, away from alternative ways.
But it cannot be denied, that Twitter has become so large now, that the fun, and intimate feel that it was well-loved for to begin with, is now, just not there. This might suffer further still,, when Twitter begins to try to serve advertising on posts in tweets. Twitter is barely 2 years old now; this young, and certainly inexperienced company will have teething problems, and it would be silly to write it off just yet. But expert users still insist today on saying, that there is something missing in Twitter these days – something that simply wasn’t felt, in its glory days. This coming year should have important lessons for all in how the social media, really works.
Location Sharing à la Foursquare – the Latest in Social Media
Facebook makes a business out of helping you tell people who you are; Twitter makes it out of telling people what you have on your mind at any given moment; there probably are other things about people that could be exploited for a business model, but Foursquare appears to have a particularly compelling status you can let people know of: where you are. They call this Geolocation; and Foursquare isn’t the only player in this field, that is expected to enable lots of new services. Twitter,for instance, has a new API that allows it too.When Google planned to map out in real time the spots in the world where diseases spread, they said that this proved stupendous new possibilities. Location-enabled Twitter, could actually alert you to how many location-tagged messages are coming in from doctor’s clinics in any given area. If you have a political cause in mind, say, veganism, you don’t ever have to wait for a poll of any kind to find out what part of the country would be the friendliest your views – you can merely check out the number of vegan-related political tweets coming in from any given location. And then you could move out there, either to live in, or to participate.
What if you are waiting in line at your local superstore for a hit Christmas toy that would be just the gift you need, and it is reported to be running low on stocks? If people at different locations around a geographic region could put out a location-tagged tweet about what kind of stocks there were to be found in their local store, that would give a whole new meaning to guerilla shopping.
Any time you are in a given location, newspapers online could send you stories that were reported from that area in the last day. Or, you could be given a running subtext on your mobile phone, by Wikipedia, of all the interesting stuff that it has on its records, that have to do with your location. And of course,if there is a new story being covered in your immediate neighborhood at the very moment you are passing through, news sites could alert you to those too.
Google’s Near Me Now, a service that’s a month old now, runs off your mobile, and automatically finds all the top-rated entertainment, eating places, or anything else you are interested in right on your screen. You don’t need to manually search for anything anymore. It’s almost enough now, to put Yelp to rest with.
Why does Chrome give you an AdSense Blocking Add-on?
Google certainly believes that a rising tide lifts all boats up -Google follows an explicit policy of transparency and open industry standards to this end. However, Google’s upstanding principles may be getting it in trouble. Users who browse through Google’s own browser, Chrome, will soon be able to turn off ads: the very source that keeps the entire company afloat. This might seem like professional suicide – or it might seem like Google is showing remarkable restraint, and is sharing its good fortune around. Take for example, the new Extensions scheme in Chrome – their version of Firefox’s Add-ons. Firefox has ad-blocking add-ons, that are widely popular – like Add block Plus. This plug-in,blocks Google-supplied AdSense ads. Independent programmers have been working together on a rudimentary ad-blocker for Chrome too. And Chrome doesn’t seem to be trying remove it from its add-ons page.The Google browser has nearly fifty million users; and that is only a fraction of all Google users on the Internet the world over. Google loses only a small portion of its potential Chrome advertising income, if people download an ad-blocking application. Firefox today has 7 million installations of its ad blocking software. It is not really that likely that ad-blocking will get so popular, that the Internet ad-serving industry should just go bankrupt. Google’s sentiment is that to live in fear of being shut out of its market, is kind of a primitive; to embrace the whole dynamic of the market, is more appropriate of a responsible Internet citizen. Perhaps this will foster creativity, and make people put up more creative, and watchable advertising.
Google is too Big for the Internet
An important part of the success formula at Google involves finding ever larger areas to record, and finding ever deeper access to websites, to index. But the itinerant Google indexer, whichever direction it heads, often these days, finds itself is timed by foreign government regulation. The biggest news in this area that we’ve seen recently, comes from the China-Google conflict. China wants all search engines operating within the country, to not display any results about the 1989 Tiananmen Square conflict or Tibet. Google did used to go along; but this kind of cooperation can’t be taken for granted anymore, now that China has been found out hacking into Google and causing actual damage.Another kind of wall that keeps Google out is one of the copyright variety. Google’s venture, to try to digitize every university library in the world, has been vigorously opposed by authors and publishers. Google has had to work out an understanding with the publishers. It’s only the orphaned old works that Google has been left alone on. But if the barriers keep Google out of some places, and deprived it of ever more material to index, Google does wonder, if it can foster the creation of new content, just to be able to index it.
Large parts of the world remain alienated from the Internet because of poverty and a lack of education; Google is holding a Wikipedia contest in Tanzania to get locals to translate the free online encyclopedia into their native Swahili. They are giving out laptops and networking equipment to the winners; so far, there have been about 900 articles translated. Google even believes that its search algorithms have reached an important stage in their evolution, and that the company needs to find a new direction – somewhere other than search algorithm tweaking, in which to grow. But even translating the Wikipedia is not problem-free. The original authors of the articles they translate, are now coming out to sue for copyright infringement.
Related Posts from the Past:
Recent Post
Categories
- 360Contest (6)
- Use Cases (4)
- Agriya Events (6)
- Agriya Ideas (11)
- Agriya News (111)
- Anova (12)
- Burrow (5)
- BuySell (3)
- Channel (7)
- Client Interviews (1)
- Computer Security (7)
- Crowdsourcing (7)
- Developers (2)
- Extensions (1)
- Feedy (2)
- FP Platform (9)
- Getlancer (1)
- GroupDeal (11)
- GroupWithUs (1)
- Holidays (1)
- internet (16)
- Internet News (57)
- iSocial (8)
- latest technology (21)
- Life @ Agriya (1)
- Marketplace-Quote (2)
- online marketing (15)
- PartyPlanet (1)
- Private Shop (1)
- search engines (9)
- SEO (1)
- SEO Game (19)
- SF Platform (2)
- Social Media News (17)
- social networking (44)
- Startups (2)
- Uncategorized (1)
- Volume (3)
- Web 2.0 (8)
- web design (6)
- Webmaster Articles (114)
Archives
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
Page optimized by WP Minify WordPress Plugin