Getting information out to victims and their families during a disaster is a major issue for any relief organization. So while the Central United States recovers from a spate of storms that has ravaged towns with tornadoes and flooding, the American Red Cross is relying on a number of web 2.0 technologies to spread information to the press and people affected by the severe weather. The online newsroom that the organization has set up relies on a number of web 2.0 widgets.
Yesterday we questioned whether Yahoo is focusing enough on its core products. We wrote that "Yahoo's key properties remain yahoo.com, email, myyahoo, and even Answers can be considered special. In short, content is what continues to drive Yahoo and those core properties are still enormously popular."
A leaked Yahoo memo has come to light today that further clarifies Yahoo's product focus.
My first post for ReadWriteWeb (nearly a year ago) started with the premise that search was "game over", that Google had won and the only opportunity left was (re)search - i.e. what one does after the basic search. Unfortunately, none of the search start-ups since then has made a dent in Google's relentless march towards search market dominance. In this article, we outline 11 search trends that may change that.
Due to demand in the comments, 3 new IM clients have been added to the poll. You can now vote for Pidgin, Miranda, and Apple's iChat. Apologies for omissions! Our poll this week focuses on IM clients. This weekend Corvida wrote that interoperability between popular IM clients is happening, albeit slowly.
For better or for worse the concept of the cell phone novel is making a splash in Western countries via a Twitter-like app called Quillpill. Quillpill handles all the heavy lifting -- i.e., aggregating each post and displaying them in the correct order. Essentially, Quillpill is a mobile writing application that imposes a Twitter-style 140 character limit on each entry.
A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project reveals that 46% of Americans have used the Internet, email, or text messaging to get or share election information this year. 35% have watched online political videos -- triple the number that watched video online in 2004, while 39%, according to the study, have turned to the web for "unfiltered" campaign information, such as raw video or transcripts of speeches and debates. But Americans aren't convinced that all this social media business is a good thing for politics.
Online ecommerce giant eBay today announced "Project Echo" at the eBay developers conference, which will allow developers to create applications for sellers that will run inside the eBay Selling Manager. Previously, third party applications built for eBay via the site's API could only run off site. Project Echo, which will probably launch sometime in 2009, can be thought of in terms of Salesforce's AppExchange platform. But is better integration with third party seller tools really what eBay needs to do to keep sellers satisfied?
Need to get access to real scientific data but having trouble finding any relevant search results in Google? That could be because a lot of the science and technology documents on the web aren't typically indexed by major search engines. They're a part of the "deep web," the repository of web pages usually generated by database-driven sites that search engines' spiders can't access. One resource to help open up the deep web for scientific research is WorldWideScience. This portal allows you to query more than 200 million documents not typically indexed by today's search engines.
If there's anything Twitter can be counted on for, lately it's been the service's instability. The situation got so bad that avid twitterers have now gotten used to loading up istwitterdown.com in one of their browser tabs while debating whether FriendFeed was going to replace Twitter. As Twitter started the long, hard process of a rebuild, the team learned how to quickly adjust the load by disabling services when needed. Staying up through the WWDC keynote was a triumph that they thought was reason enough for celebration. Don't be fooled though - they may have mastered how to shed load fast in order to stay afloat, but Twitter still has a long road ahead of them. Only now, they might have some help.
There's been a lot of hand wringing in the media over the weekend about Yahoo's rejection of Microsoft's takeover bid. Most of the coverage has focused on the (very serious) financial and people issues that Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang is now facing. But let's turn some attention to Yahoo's product line for a moment. How will that be affected? Remember the Peanut Butter Manifesto? Or Jerry Yang's 100 days of strategic planning? Both aimed to create a more streamlined and focused product range. Yet nearly a year later, it's still 'everything but the kitchen sink'. And the shareholders are pissed.
