After it became clear that the Department of Justice would try to block the Google-Yahoo advertising deal, Google today announced that it has decided to walk away from the deal. Google was clearly not interested in a protracted legal battle that would potentially alienate its partners. In its own press release, Yahoo points out that the deal was only 'incremental' to its product roadmap, though Yahoo did not discuss the potential financial fallout from this announcement.
When Yahoo! launched its live video streaming service, Y! Live, to the world earlier this year, it was admittedly an "experiment in live video" designed to elicit feedback from the market. Today, Yahoo! has decided that the experiment has received enough feedback - or perhaps too little. They're going to be closing the service down on December 3.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've remained proponents of live streaming video, claiming more than once that it is "going to be huge." If that's the case, why is Yahoo! pulling the plug on Y! Live so quickly?
In spite of - or perhaps due to - its ongoing trials and tribulations, Yahoo! has done an admirable job of remaining on track with plans to open its platform to the developer community - plans that could mean the survival of a company that is among the old guard of the Web as we now know it.
Today marks a significant step forward in bringing those plans to fruition as the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) team officially throws open the gates to a newly rewired and open Yahoo!, providing developers with unprecedented access to Yahoo!'s network and social data.
Given yesterday's cloud computing announcements from Microsoft, it only seems reasonable for Yahoo to make at least some announcements about cloud computing as well. Today, Yahoo announced that it will offer the Zimbra collaboration suite as a hosted solution for educational institutions. According to Yahoo, over 400 schools are already using Zimbra at this time. While this hosted solution is currently only available to educational institutions, chances are that Yahoo is testing the waters with this release and will soon offer a similar solution to small businesses.
While separate search boxes have long been a standard feature of every major browser (except for Chrome), their functionality and intelligence has not gone much beyond autocompleting searches. Yahoo is trying to change this with its Inqisitor plugin for Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. This plugin not only autocompletes your searches, but can also directly display the results of your search as you type, which can potentially safe you quite a few clicks.
Our review of the new iGoogle homepage was generally positive. For a large number of users, however, the latest updates, including the stronger emphasis on the full-screen canvas view, were simply unacceptable. Just this weekend, the New York Times reported about the difficulties of making drastic changes to popular web sites without alienating users. Judging from the reaction of some of iGoogle's users, Google's switch to the new iGoogle layout is a textbook example for how not to update a popular product. If Google had made these changes incrementally instead of foisting a completely new version of iGoogle onto its users without warning, it could have surely prevented the current outrage.
At the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo in Santa Clara today, Dave Beckett (principal software architect at Yahoo!) and Tom Hughes-Croucher (technical evangelist, Yahoo! Developer Network), answered questions about the recent consumer release of Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) and discussed the company's future plans to open up almost everything.
"The open source, hacker attitude has been part of our culture for so long; now we're opening up the different pieces," Hughes-Croucher told the packed room yesterday. "We're taking data from across our sites and sharing it."
Yahoo's SearchMonkey platform allows publishers to easily write applications that integrate structured data from their own sites into Yahoo's search results. Most of these applications still have to be turned on explicitly by the user, but Yahoo has also started to integrate some of them into its regular search results. Today, Yahoo turned on results from the Citysearch and Zagat SearchMonkey applications for all users.
Yahoo today launched a new ad campaign for its search engine that stresses the security and convenience of using Yahoo Search. After relying on outside search providers (including Google) for a long time, Yahoo launched its own search engine in 2003, but even though it has constantly innovated and opened up its search index to developers, it has continuously lost market share to Google. By now, YouTube handles more search queries every day than Yahoo.
Yahoo today announced a closed beta of a major update to its online calendaring application that will feature a tighter integration with Yahoo Mail and other Yahoo properties. The new calendar is based on the Zimbra platform, which Yahoo acquired in 2007, and will support both the iCalendar and CalDAV standards for exchanging information with other calendaring services.
Among the new features are the ability to enhance your calendar with photos from Flickr, a built-in to-do list, and support for drag and drop. Yahoo Calendar can now also send out reminders for important events by email, IM, or SMS.
