Yahoo has just released a new application which brings their location-aware platform Fire Eagle to Facebook's social network. The new app called "Friends on Fire" lets you easily share your current location with a set of trusted friends. Fire Eagle users can also share short, Twitter-like posts with each other. These are quick updates and tips tied to your location and displayed on a map within Facebook. In addition, the Fire Eagle team has also introduced a Firefox extension that lets you update your location with just one click.
Yahoo today announced a new feature for SearchMonkey that makes it very easy for site owners to embed flash videos, games, and documents directly on the Yahoo Search results page. The first sites to make use of this new feature are Hulu, Metacafe, and YouTube. Whenever a video from these sites appears in your search results, you can now watch it immediately in an embedded player right on the search results page.
Google may be outperforming Yahoo Search in terms of market share, but with programs like Search Monkey and BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), Yahoo is still trying to innovate in the search space. Today, Yahoo announced a new feature that integrates Yahoo Search with some of Facebook's core functions. Whenever you see a Facebook profile in your search results, you can now directly add somebody as a friend, send messages, see their friends, or poke them.
One of the most apparent trends from this month's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), was the proliferation of flat panel, internet-connected TVs. Nearly every major television manufacturer was demonstrating some sort of web-to-TV integration, including sets that offered Yahoo widgets, MySpace social networking, and Netflix built directly into the TV sets themselves. This isn't the "Web TV" of days past, but a whole new way to internet-enable the living room. This is the year of the "connected TV."
Yahoo just announced the top 10 search terms on its mobile search engine. The top mobile searches are either for social networks (MySpace, Facebook), or searches for local information (Craigslist, movies, weather). A lot of of mobile searchers were also looking for auctions on eBay. The top 10 is rounded out by searches for more time sensitive topics like the Olympics, AIG, and The Dark Knight. The only celebrity to appear in Yahoo's top 10 mobile searches is Kim Kardashian.
Interestingly, not a single one of the top mobile search terms appears on Yahoo's top 10 list of searches on its regular search engine.
The transfer of human intelligence to the machine is something the internet makes easy to do. With reCAPTCHA, we keep spammers at bay while helping digitize old books, Amazon's Mechanical Turk lets us crowdsource small tasks to a dynamic human workforce available on demand, and Google Image Labeler makes the tedious task of tagging fun. Now Yahoo is trying to tap into that human machine through their new VideoTagGame, a game that encourages participants to tag sections within a video for better retrieval.
It seems like only yesterday - or almost a year and a half ago - that Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang was named interim CEO of the embattled and fragmented company he co-founded. Taking the helm of Yahoo! following entertainment-industry veteran Terry Semel left Yang awash in the throes of a mishmash of "Web company meets traditional media company" - plus a bunch of Web 2.0 acquisitions sprinkled here and there.
By any estimation, the position he inherited would have been a challenge for even the most seasoned executive. So it comes as little surprise that Yang has announced he is stepping down from the position of chief executive, returning to his role as Chief Yahoo!
Yahoo today announced that it is bucket testing a new design of its front page. The new design was built on top of the latest version of Yahoo's UI Library, which, according to Yahoo, will accelerate performance and give third-party developers the ability to easily create applications for the new front page. It is not clear when this new design will become widely available, but for now, it is only available to a random subset of Yahoo's users.
Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer is always good for a controversial statement. His latest came during a Q&A session after a speech to developers in Sydney, Australia. After a question about the relevance of Internet Explorer, Ballmer commented that Microsoft "may take a look" at using the open source browser engine WebKit for Internet Explorer. While this was surely just a throw-away comment, the tech blogosphere immediately jumped on it.
At another meeting in Sydney, Ballmer also announced that Microsoft was definitely not interested in reconsidering an acquisition of Yahoo.
Yahoo is obviously going through a rather tough period in its history right now. Last night, at TechWeb/O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Summit, John Battelle interviewed Yahoo's CEO Jerry Yang and asked him about Microsoft's takeover bid, Google's decision to pull out of its advertising deal with Yahoo, and the persistent rumors of a possible acquisition of AOL by Yahoo. While Yang acknowledged Yahoo's current problems and stated that he would still consider selling the company to Microsoft, his overall outlook for the company was quite upbeat.
