Last October, Yahoo announced the Yahoo Query Language, a language similar to the popular database language SQL. Then, this February, Yahoo also announced its first major product that made use of YQL, the Open Data Tables, which allowed developers to create their own table definitions besides the ones already provided by Yahoo. As we reported in March, Yahoo then went ahead and extended YQL with YQL Execute, which gives developers even more flexibility and basically turns the web into a giant database that can be processed and mashed up with YQL. Today, Yahoo announced that it has completed its set of YQL verbs with three more functions (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) that now also allow developers to not just read and manipulate data, but also write data back to other services.
A few days ago, Yahoo! released a new version of their browser toolbar and this time, they've made it available for Firefox users, too, albeit in a beta format. Previously, the new Yahoo! Toolbar was an IE-only download which delivered an integrated search box and links to Yahoo-owned sites and applications. Now the toolbar introduces some new features like "Site Previews" and faster search courtesy of Inquisitor. There's only one problem with the software (besides the fact that toolbars in and of themselves are incredibly passé): it doesn't work on Windows 7.
When the Google-led OpenSocial campaign launched in October 2007 it aimed to give developers a common environment that application publishers could publish widgets to with one set of code, deployable across Google sites, MySpace, Hi5 and numerous other social networks.
A directory of OpenSocial Apps launched today and the reality is even further from that goal than we expected. Out of 12,456 apps listed, only 83 are running on two or more "containers." That's 0.7% or one out of every 1500. Update: See this reply below from Google's Kevin Marks. Marks says that cross-network presence was counted manually and is actually larger than it appears in the directory.
Yahoo Image Search got a nice update today that allows users to filter search results by Creative Commons (CC) license.
For now, this search only includes CC-licensed images from Flickr, Yahoo's own photo sharing service. The Yahoo Image Search interface actually turns out to be a very nice gateway to the CC-licensed image collection on Flickr, especially because the previews update immediately after you change a filter setting.
At the end of last week, Yahoo! introduced an update to their iPhone application (iTunes URL) which now includes the ability to perform web searches using only your voice. This is the first real competitor to Google's Mobile App, whose voice recognition technology came to the iPhone back in November of 2008. Now the only question is how do these two apps compare?
A few weeks ago, we heard that Yahoo was readying a Portuguese-only Twitter clone under the name Yahoo Meme. Today, we finally got our invitation to try this new service, and while it is indeed an interesting micro-blogging service, we wouldn't go as far as calling it a "Twitter killer." Instead of cloning Twitter's communications features like @ replies and direct messages, Meme goes back to the basics of micro-blogging. Users can upload photos and post text (without a 140 character limit), YouTube videos (just copy and paste the URL), and links to MP3 files.
"I Tried YQL Execute and All I Got Was an Authenticated Javascript API Processing Layer in the Cloud"
There's a great amount of data available on the Web in APIs or even straight HTML. It's all there for the parsing - and parsed data from social media in particular is held to be a goldmine. But traditionally, it's the heavy lifting (the broad variety of programming languages used in APIs, the challenges presented by complicated authentications, the occasional need for massive pipes) that has made accessing and sorting data into useful applications a laborious process.
Yahoo!, chiefly to serve the needs of its own engineers, has been developing a sophisticated solution that is agnostic across all Internet platforms and that lowers both the burden of labor and the barriers to entry for social and other web application developers, many of whom are already singing the praises of the newly released YQL Execute.
As of this moment, Yahoo! has no less than 4 iPhone-native applications in the iTunes app store. The latest is Yahoo! Messenger, which already was spotted on the original Yahoo iPhone application (our review here) as well as their mobile-optimized web site. This latest offering, though, is much more of a fully featured IM client for the Yahoo service.
Yahoo unveiled major changes to its image search service this morning and the user experience is now better than Google Image Search. Google may have all kinds of special collections (like the new Life Magazine archives) but Yahoo's image search is just more pleasing to use.
The new Yahoo! interface includes more recommended search queries for related images than Google, a next-image picking slideshow on each image's page, and an easy direct link to the image itself. Unfortunately, there is not a filter by copyright conditions, which is a major shortcoming.
Yahoo released today a new application that brings Twitter's real-time search engine to the desktop. The Adobe AIR application allows users to create persistent real-time Twitter searches that can be grouped together in Sideline's tabbed interface. The application is meant to be a showcase for using Yahoo's UI Library on top of Adobe AIR, but it is also a good real-time search client for Twitter in its own right, with a number of interesting advanced search features.
