What the hell is Yahoo! doing? They have a couple of the first and best social networking sites, like del.icio.us and flickr. They have an IM. They have Yahoo!Mail with people’s contacts. They have a lot of eyeballs on them.

Why can’t the just come up with a simple site to integrate all of my and my friends activity, in one page? Not some fancy, complicated, Yahoo360 thing. A simple page, where I can see all my friends activity -just copy facebook News Feed.

And a “friends” page where all my friends, will be listed -as flickr friend, del.icio.us follower, addressbook contact, messenger contact etc.

Then, join on the Open Social thing.

Com’on Yahoo!, pull yourself together!

According to this, Yahoo! Small Business, Yahoo! now offers WP hosting. Their prices look nice.

I was just wondering, could someone who is already using the service tell me how much freedom you get? I mean, can I add my plugins, what version of PHP they are using, etc.

Please, if you have more info, leave a comment!

I feel that during the last couple of months the Web is changing fast. It looks like users, developers and enterpreneurs are much more mature on what the Web means and what it is good for.

First, we tried to move all our off-line habits, business and applications to the new, exciting on-line world of the Internet. We gave our shops, our directories, our magazines, our banks a new “web-based” front end. All these services and activities could very well exist off-line and, well, they did.

But now, we are moving on. We create services and business around things that could not even exist without the Web.

We have folksonomies and it’s not a geeky thing anymore (Yahoo! investment in Flickr and del.icio.us is a good proof of this [1])

Google maps are not just on-line maps, we stick our photos, our blogs, our ads on them, and create new and exciting applications like Frappr.

Our RSS/ATOM feeds transfer audio and video (ex. podcasts) and not just the “latest headlines” -they are getting “smarter” too (see Feedburner’s Feedflare [2] and Feed for Thought).

Our blogs are becoming more than just an electronic equivelent of a diary or newspaper, they are an electronic camvas that displays information from our del.icio.us bookmarks, pingbacks and trackbaks, and they interact with the rest of the Web, creating their own “Cosmos”.

Web APIs used to be an experimental feature to “have the developers on our
side”. Not any more. We are using them to build new business models (see Alexa Web Search).

We are also getting away from the PC client. I’m not referring to the usual “mobile phone as a web client”. iPods are connected to the internet nowdays -what’s an iPod without a fast internet connection to download music or audio/video podcasts? TiVo is turning into a web-connected device. And Cisco’s aquisition of KiSS Technologies through Linksys is a good promise we should be expecting more on internet based/enhanced home entertainment…

Oh, I’m so excited!

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[1] One step closer to sexyness
[2] What I called content enrichment a year ago…

del.icio.us: y.ah.oo!

Great news! Yahoo! is doing some really good moves lately and is moving fast to Web 2.0. (del.icio.us and Flickr, wow, the posibilities are endless!)

Upcoming.org Team Joins Yahoo. Considering the rummors about Google Calendar (Google Calendar URL Is Live) this could be indicating that “web based calendar” could be the next major web app….

From Yahoo! Search blog:

So here’s the scoop… Much like My Yahoo! started knocking down walls a couple years ago by inviting anyone with an RSS feed to the aggregation party, HotJobs is using Yahoo! Search to do something quite similar for on-line job listings. They’re pulling in jobs from around the Internet: company web sites, local job listings, specialized job boards, and so on.

I’d like to see the oposite: a CV microformat? This would allow companies to look for people matching their criteria. Just give people a standard micro format to publish their CV!

Sounds like folksonomy at its best. Looking for something? Your social network is here to help you -and they do not have to do a thing! Jeremy Zawodny explains how My Web 2.0 can be used.

You may also read an interesting review of My Web 2.0 at Planet Ozh.

I just noticed that My Yahoo! works fine with unicode feeds (it did not some time ago). That’s good news for all of us blogging in languages other than english!

Yahoo! introduced Y!Q, what they call “context search”. It is actually a “search in the context of the current page viewed”, and an interesting idea I have to admit!

You may also be interested to read the story behind Y!Q.

There has been a lot of talking about whether rel=”nofollow” is good or bad, useful or usless (check
Bitflux Blog :: Why nofollow is useless )

However I think that nofollow is quite useful for a different reason than preventing spam: preventing search engine results shown on “third party” websites mislead the search engines themselves.

Here is what I mean: Take for example g-metrics.com. Most of the pages of this site display results (actually the top-10 results) returned by google for specific queries. To do this, g-metrics.com makes use of Google Web APIs. So when google indexes one of these pages, it would increase the pagerank (or whatever ranking system a search engine is using) of a URL just because it had high enough pagerank to show up in the top 10 results…

However, using rel=”nofollow” can prevent this. (I have started using nofollow in g-metrics as soon as I read about it).

Similar cases could become a big problem for search engines, as similar APIs become more popular (Google, Technorati, del.icio.us, Amazon/Alexa, etc…) The way I see it, similar services may oblige or encourage developers to use nofollow when presenting “their” results.