Ramblings about my employer.
Check out the John Battelle posting comparing the Yahoo! Search and Google visions and missions.
I particularly liked the Y! Search “FUSE” (for Find, Use, Share, and Expand) – it nicely sums up the attitude at the search team, but also infuses (ha!) a lot of the thinking at Y!.
I’m at the point where a quick scan of my spam folder tells me if I want to read anything in it. I may even go days at a time without reading anything, and then just dump the whole folder. I’ve had a few false positives — email that wasn’t spam, but looked it for some reason.
Spam will always be with us, and we’ll always be looking for ways to limit it – and legitimate direct marketing efforts will be looking for ways for their messages to get through. One method gaining popularity is the authentication of email — making sure the From: line is not faked. This doesn’t reduce spam per se but allows recipients to be sure that the sender is really the sender. Since many spammers fake their sending addresses, authentication could cut down on this kind of spam. It would also be another factor in the spam filtering wars.
I see that the the Direct Marketing Association recently announced that they are co-underwriting the upcoming Email Authentication Summit. Yahoo! is also a co-underwriter. Nice to see the DMA involved, and hopefully that will send a signal to all direct marketers that they should learn more about email authentication.
Remix. Remix. Remix. Web APIs are cool.
This could be the thing that gets people over the hump of subscribing to music.
For a long time I thought it was silly to be “renting” music — if you like a song and want to hear it for years, it would be cheaper to buy it, rather than renting it every month. Kinda like how phones used to be before you could legally own a phone . (OK I’m dating myself.)
But this new service could change that. First, for just listening to stuff, why not subscribe? At $5/mo (for a year) it’s cheaper than XM or Sirius, and you can take it with you. If you really like a song, you can buy it for $0.79.
All in all it looks like a killer offering. Except I won’t be using it, even though Y! employees get a break on the price. You see, it doesn’t work with my Mac or iPod.
How soon until we see lots of Javascript wrappers that make AJAX calls to web APIs via xlmhttprequest? Check out the very cool FlickrJS: A wrapper for Flickr API. Include the .js and you have complete access to the Flickr API.
Amongst the buzz around “we are not a portal” Google’s My Search History comes this mention from Bill Slawski (bragadocchio) at cre8asiteforums.com, who discusses Yahoo!s recent patent application regarding search personalization/optimization.
So a court has ordered Y! to turn over all materials belonging to a marine killed in Iraq after his family sued to get access. Y! News has the AP story.
To its credit (in my opinion), in order to comply wirh the court ruling, Y! turned over a CD of information (and will produce paper copies next week), rather than providing the account’s user name and password.
I’m on the right to privacy side on this one – if the marine wanted the family to have access, he would have provided it. But I’m not a lawyer…
I see that http://www.target.com/yahoophotos is live. It’s just a redirect to Yahoo photos – to a special URL, but (currently) without Target branding.
It turns out that Target is going to use Yahoo Photos as a co-branded site. At first I suspect Target stores will promote Yahoo Photos. In the fall you’ll be able to upload your digital photos to Yahoo and pick up the prints at Target.
Clicks and mortar, anyone?
I don’t see it on their web site yet, but search engine company X1 today announced an investment of $10 million, lead by USVP. X1 is the search engine that Yahoo! uses as the base for its desktop search product.
I wonder about the future of desktop search. Between Google and Yahoo providing free integrated deskptop-web search functionality (on Wintel, anyway), and Microsoft and Apple providing instant metadata indexing at the file system (in Longhorn and Tiger), is there a market for anyone else?
Apparently X1 wonders as well. They say the $10MM will go to their yet-to-launch enterprise search product, which I guess aims it squarely in the face of players like Autonomy and Verity.