Yahoo Video Search lets users filter searches by the length of the videos. Search queries can also be restricted to official videos from a band or artist. Just like it does with non-music related searches, Yahoo also features recently shared videos from Twitter at the top of the search results.

Yahoo Video displays videos from services like YouTube, DailyMotion or MetaCafe right on the search results page. For the vast majority of video services like Artist Direct, however, users have to leave the site to see these videos. In our tests, this new feature mostly worked as advertised, though it sometimes showed songs that weren't part of the album we had selected.

Reaction to Google Music Search?

It is worth noting that while Google launched its new Google Music Search service last month, Yahoo also offers a seamless integration with Rhapsody on its site.

Yahoo Search continues its steady decline. Yahoo Search lost another 1% market share last month and has now lost a total of 5% since September 2008 when it still owned 18.8% of the market according to Compete. The total search volume on Yahoo was down 8% and Yahoo served 100 million less queries in September than August.

Google, Ask and AOL Hold Steady

Google's market share grew slightly from 72.3% to 72.6%, while Ask and AOL remained stable. Based on this data, Bing seems to be eating into Yahoo's market share, but isn't growing at Google's expense.

Searches Per Day

Compete's Marko Madjarac points out that Bing's numbers are even more impressive when we take into account that Bing's users tend to perform fewer searches on the service (5 searches per user per day) than Google's users (5.6 searches). Bing apparently lives up to its promise to get users to relevant answers faster than any other search engine. Yahoo users performed an average of 7.8 searches per day.

Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample.

Gmail Skews Young, AOL Older

That being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age:

It's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc.

As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available.

Gmail Has More Females, Hotmail Has More Males

Perhaps more interesting is the gender variations between the services. Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences have meaning.

Why would Gmail attract more females? And conversely, why does Hotmail have more males? (It's 57% male.) Is there something about the aesthetics, workflow or features in those services that appeal more to women than men or vice versa? And if so, what? Unfortunately, raw data can't provide these sorts of answers, but they're definitely intriguing to us. We would imagine they are intriguing to the user interface designers and engineers behind the products, too.

Do women like Gmail's drag-and-drop features or its themes? Do men prefer Hotmail's efficient "quick adds" which allow for one-click additions of Bing content to messages? We doubt those are the reasons for the discrepancy, but it makes us wonder what are. Try as we might, we can't come up with an easy theory to explain this. (If you can, please share in the comments.)

Future details about the study will focus on other data including online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships. Stay tuned to Rapleaf's site for more information.

However, in stark contrast to the 140-character wunder-app, Meme has proven in the months since its release to be a much better platform for multimedia sharing and cross-platform content curation. Now, the Tumblr/Twitter/Posterous hybrid is offering an API built on top of YQL, Yahoo!'s query language that we covered back in May, when we were impressed with its power, versatility, and uniqueness. The Yahoo! team has already used the API to develop a version of Meme for smartphones.

As an example of what YQL allows developers to do, Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brooks told us in May, "YQL... allows you to build tables of data from other sources online, using Javascript as a programming language and run it on Yahoo!'s servers, so the infrastructure needs are very small." Also from our May coverage:

According to Yahoo! Chief Technologist Sam Pullara, the idea behind YQL (launched in October 2008) was to create an agnostic query language similar to SQL, a language familiar to most developers, and let developers use that language to use the Internet as a huge database. "If you make it universally and simply accessible so every application developer doesn't have to learn every API, it's be easier for developers to create apps from the data users have taken so much time to make available on the Internet."

Although YQL looks a lot like SQL, it treats the info on the web as a virtual table that developers can manipulate in a standardized way, regardless of the API that data came from. Developers only had to know how to use YQL to quickly create simple mashups.

Interested developers can check out the Meme documentation. The API, the site says, "is intended for developers who are familiar with RESTful Web services." In addition to offering superior support for multimedia content and simple access through YQL, Meme also has an excellent built-in repost function, an asymmetrical friendship model, and OAuth compliance.

At once rich and simple, the new homepage is accessible by more than 1,900 different mobile devices, which Yahoo! says represents a 500 percent increase since the mobile site launched in April. We checked out the site on a BlackBerry Storm tonight and were impressed by the features Yahoo! is offering for discovery and filtering of content. From tech-related videos to dynamically refreshed news feeds, Yahoo! gives mobile users plenty of room to play.

One of our favorite features was the site's enhanced mobile video integration. Video clips were quick to load. As previously mentioned, we got to browse through the Tech Ticker, which, as it turns out, is stocked with Yahoo!-produced video content all about tech, business, and financial news. Other mobile video feeds include Prime Time in No Time, a recap of the previous night's TV shows, and general news, entertainment and sports videos from the Associated Press.

Users can also use the "My Favorites" tab to integrate content from nine social networks, including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, as part of its Social Pulse feature. From this tab, users can also pull in any RSS feeds or other types of content, such as email, weather, and theatre information.

And speaking of theatres, Yahoo! is also nearing perfection with their newly revamped movie results. Users can get results on what films are showing at nearby theatres; they can watch movie trailers; they can read reviews from multiple sources. Best of all, users can buy tickets from participating theatres all directly from their mobile devices.

In short, the new Yahoo! mobile homepage is a well executed, updated version of the portal that ruled a much younger Internet. It's accessible, fast, full of interesting content and infinitely customizable. In an age of Y!-bashing, dare we admit to liking a Yahoo! product?

We encourage our readers to take the site for a quick test drive and leave opinions in the comments. Can you see yourself using this feature-packed but still lightweight homepage on a regular basis?

In yesterday's attack, the list of comprised Hotmail accounts were limited to those where the usernames started with the letter "A" or "B." However, that seemed to imply that the posted portion might actually be a part of a bigger list containing even more login/password combinations. At the time, a Microsoft spokesperson said that the company determined "this was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and initiated our standard process of working to help customers regain control of their accounts." Instead, claimed the spokesperson, those users whose credentials were revealed were likely to be victims of an online phishing attack where a third-party website was involved.

Phishing attacks are typically carried out via email messages where the attacker tricks the recipient into revealing their username and password by pretending to be some sort of trustworthy entity such as the user's bank, IT administrator, a popular website, or an online service. In the case of the stolen Hotmail passwords, it's possible that the attacker sent emails which claimed to be from the end user's email provider. If the user then followed the link contained within the malicious email, they would have ended up not on the actual email provider's site, but on a third-party site whose sole purpose was to capture their username and password when entered.

Beyond Hotmail: More Webmail Providers Affected

According to a story in today's BBC News, the most recent list of compromised accounts, which includes login credentials for Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, and Comcast users, contains some accounts that appear to be old, unused, or fake. However, many others listed are, in fact, genuine.

There's no way to be sure at this point that the new list is a part of the same phishing attack as yesterday's or if it's a new and separate scam.

The website where the accounts were posted - pastebin.com - is now "down for maintenance." Visitors to the site today will receive a message that reads:

Pastebin.com is getting an unprecedented amount of traffic due to a news story in which some leaked Hotmail passwords have been pasted on this site

Pastebin.com was intended as a tool to aid software developers, not for distributing this sort of material. Filters have been put in place to prevent reoccurrence, but the current traffic level is unsustainable.

Pastebin.com is just a fun side project for me, and today it's not fun. It will remain offline all day while I make some further modifications

Paul Dixon

Regardless of whether or not you think your account was compromised, today would be a good day to change the password on whichever webmail service you currently use. Better safe than sorry!

Apps are to be built using Yahoo!'s proprietary development platform, YAP. The YDN post further noted, "We're working on an array of additional developer monetization opportunities - these will be available soon." The gallery's inaugural class includes YAP-built applications from Mint, Lumosity, Flixter, Target, and WordPress.

For users, the benefit is a slew of widgets to make the Yahoo! portal more intensely personal, whether that experience is one of entertainment, education, practicality, socialization, or information. The apps pop into a lightbox-style layout, called "Small View," on scrollover and go to a full-page "Canvas View" when a user clicks through.

Yahoo! has made conscious and ever-increasing efforts to open themselves to the developer community in what many see as a struggle to remain interesting and viable in the age of the open API. Tools such as YQL, their proprietary query language which we covered in depth, and their YAP application development platform help to foster a sense of relevancy for the aging web giant.

Last month ReadWriteWeb covered a number of Yahoo updates to Mail, Search and Messenger. The most notable items appear to be the ability to monitor friends and status updates from a single dashboard. Being the singular entry-point for multiple services including Flickr, Mail and Messenger is likely to be a major facet of the Yahoo campaign. Nevertheless, while the company remains a leading advertising and email player, critics argue that these recent life streaming features do not offer the same ease of use as sites like Facebook and Friendfeed. It will be interesting to see if the new campaign can convince users to stay within the Yahoo ecosystem for all of their communications and business needs.

Photo Credit: Franco Follini

The Yahoo Finance app gives users access to all the data one would typically expect from a financial app, including stock tickers and financial news stories. In addition, users can also follow their own personalized portfolio on Yahoo Finance. Another neat feature is that the app can display streaming video from Yahoo's Tech Ticker.

Unlike other finance apps, Yahoo also made its own app very customizable. In the 'Quotes' section, for example, you can simply press down on a ticker symbol and a menu will pop up that allows you to reorganize the page, move stocks around on the page, or display them as a full-sized graph.

While the app isn't necessarily revolutionary, it does give users access to the wealth of information available on Yahoo Finance and displays this information in a more customizable format than most other finance apps, including the CNNMoney and Bloomberg apps.

Fantasy Football

Yahoo's Fantasy Football '09 app gives players access to all of the features they would probably expect in a mobile fantasy football app. Users can manage their teams and view matchups, standings, and player stats. The app also gives users access to live scores. Users have obviously been waiting for this app for a while and it climbed into the top 10 of free sports apps in the App Store within hours of its release. The only complaint these users seem to have is that the app doesn't display data from players on other teams but their own.

Flickr Has Lots of Competition

For a long time, it seemed as if Flickr was going to be satisfied with having an iPhone-optimized website and not a "real" app when it came to their iPhone/iPod Touch offering. That left the door open - wide open - for a number of developers to create their own Flickr tools. Do a search today for "flickr" in the App Store and you'll see a page filled with thirty-some results for alternatives to the official app. Although not all the apps are uploaders or photo browsers (some just mention "flickr" in their descriptions), many are. From Flickup to Flickr Sendr to Flickr Search and one of our personal favorites, FlickIt, the choices for interacting with Flickr from your iPhone are plenty.

But Flickr doesn't just compete with other Flickr-based apps, they also have to deal with the multi-site uploaders...which some could argue are even more useful than Flickr's own official app. For example, Pixelpipe supports uploading to social networks, micro-blogging services, photo and video sharing sites, blogs, online storage sites, and much more. It's an incredibly useful tool for anyone who shares photos on multiple sites or just feels more comfortable knowing the data is stored on more than one service in the cloud.

Why the Delay?

There have been rumors that an official app has been in development for some time, as noted by this VentureBeat article back in December 2008. Yes, 2008.

We have to wonder why Flickr decided to wait so long to develop something for the iPhone platform. The app itself isn't all that complicated and it could have flown through the app review process, so it seems to be a case of the company just not feeling it was a top priority. That's an odd business decision for a company who reported that the number one camera used on their site is the iPhone. Not to mention the fact that after releasing the iPhone-optimized site, they saw a 50% increase in mobile users year-over-year. In fact, it's not just an "odd" decision - it was a bad one.

Although we're sure the company will gain plenty of users for their app in no time - the simple app is well-designed and does a good job - it is somewhat funny that a universal search in iTunes for "flickr" today doesn't even return the official app in the top four results displayed in the "Applications" window. And considering the large number of Flickr competitors, it's possible that it never will.

If you haven't been following the story (see our initial coverage here and here), the short summary goes like this: Chicago resident Firas Alkhateeb created an image that showed President Obama wearing the makeup of the Joker. He used an image of the President snagged from TIME magazine's October 23rd, 2006 cover. After uploading his photo to Flickr, an unknown third party doctored the image some more adding the word "socialism" beneath the picture. This doctored image started showing up plastered across cities nationwide as well as on numerous political bloggers' websites.

Flickr, after having received a DMCA take-down notice, removed the photo from Firas' account. They did this despite the fact that the image could easily be argued to fall into the grey area of "political parody" and the copyright infringement claim itself comes from a character with a questionable background himself and not, as it turns out, from TIME magazine, DC Comics, nor the photographer who took the original photo. Instead, the supposedly infringed-upon party, a Mr. Edward Przydzial, is a freelance photographer whose only proof of his claim comes from a LiveJournal post dated Oct. 9th. Blog posts are easy to backdate which makes the claim questionable in the eyes of the law.

To make matters worse, the case highlighted a problem with Flickr's takedown policy which appears to be "delete first, ask questions later."

Flickr User Suggests a Policy Change, Flickr Agrees

While for the most part Flickr is standing behind their actions, saying that the law leaves them no choice but to remove images upon receipt of a takedown notice, they have been open to discussion about better ways to comply with the letter of the law without impacting the Flickr community so much as before.

In a forum posting on the photo-sharing site, a Flickr user by the name of "The Searcher" debating the company's DCMA policy, offered the company a suggestion. Instead of simply deleting the photo page in its entirety, the company should just replace the image itself with a blank that reads "this image has been removed for copyright issues," wrote the user. Flickr's director of community Heather Champ replied saying she liked the idea and would push it up the food chain. And that she did.

According to her follow up post, Flickr decided to make a change to the way they handle takedown notices and, going forward, they will no longer delete the entire photo page, just the image itself. A screenshot of how this will look is posted here and, as suggested, it will feature text that reads: "This image has been removed due to a claim of copyright infringement."

As Champ explains, this notable change will preserve the photo's metadata while still complying with the law. Other policies remain the same. For example, members will still be warned, by way a private message, who is making the claim against them. Flickr will remove the image from the site and will store it so that it can be replaced in the event that the U.S. Copyright Team gives them the go-ahead to do so. Now, however, the existing title, description, comments, tags, notes, etc. on the original photo page will remain available and the photo can still be added to sets and groups. Champ says Flickr will also be reaching out to the copyright teams in other parts of the world to see if they're interested in enacting the same policy. (The current policy is specific to the U.S. where the DMCA law is enforced.)

Overall, the community received the news positively, even though it still allows Flickr to eschew any responsibility of investigating the validity of DMCA copyright claims themselves. The company will continue to delete away no matter who asks, it seems - a move that drew ire from Techcrunch's Michael Arrington who said they should have checked with their lawyers first before yanking the image. Photographer and rival service Zooomr exec Thomas Hawk also questioned whether the removal was simply sheer incompetence on Flickr's part.

Ultimately, the change is a good one. It's better for the online community and the photographer whose image is removed, while still respecting the rights of the supposed copyright victim. However, the real problem here may not be how Flickr deals with copyright claims, but the DMCA law itself.

In June, ReadWriteWeb covered the Google toolbar's translation feature in Internet Explorer. Worldwide Lexicon's browser-based toolbar seems to improve where the Google toolbar leaves off. One of the great features of the Worldwide Lexicon project is that you can correct translations or suggest that a translator improve upon a particular page.

A Russian friend once mentioned that he had a hard time getting entries accepted into Wikipedia because he had a hard time depoliticizing his words. Rather than removing cultural nuances from an article, the Universal Translator gives us a window into an authentic perspective often unlike our own. While no human or machine translation is perfect, this effort is a great step towards bridging truly global dialogue.

Yahoo Mail has been improved with the idea of making it focus more on the social connections that are already implicit in users' email exchanges. The Yahoo Mail homepage will now display status updates from a user's friends on the service. If a contact uploads new images to Flickr, for example, these updates will appear on the Yahoo Mail homepage (and also in Yahoo Messenger).

Yahoo also now allows users to attach up to 25MB of photos to messages and has improved its tools to attach and view these images. To make sharing photos easier, Yahoo has integrated Xoopit's 'MyPhotos' application into Yahoo Mail. Yahoo acquired Xoopit last month. In addition, Yahoo will also integrate Evite into Yahoo Mail, which makes it easier to create invitations based on a user's address book. 

In addition, Yahoo has also updated its mobile, web-based version of Yahoo Mail. The site is now a lot cleaner and allows users to read Word, Excel, and PowerPoint attachments right from within the web application.

Some of these updates are quite reminiscent of what Microsoft is doing with its Live products. On Windows Live, for example, users can also aggregate their updates from other services and see what their friends are doing online. While Yahoo is integrating all these services into Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Live splits all these tools up into separate applications.

Despite Bing Deal, Yahoo Redesigns Search

Interestingly, Yahoo also decided to preview an updated look and feel of Yahoo Search. The new look will feature a three-column layout, similar to the Yahoo homepage. While most of Yahoo's own search engine technology will obviously soon disappear in favor of Microsoft Bing, Yahoo wants to align the layout of its search engine with the rest of its services. The new layout brings services like Search Monkey and data filters into a column on the left side. None of these are new services, though they do bring old services that were often underutilized to the foreground.

People Search

Yahoo will also give its users a better way to search for people. Once these updates go live, whenever somebody uses Yahoo Search to find information about a person, Yahoo will display data from LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook.

Nice, But What About Bing?

All of these updates are quite nice, though once Yahoo switches over to Bing, it will remain to be seen how many of Yahoo's search tools will actually survive the transition. During today's presentation, Larry Cornett, Yahoo's VP of Search Products and Design, stressed that the company will continue to invest in search technologies. During the Q&A session after today's presentation, Yahoo also focused on the fact that it will continue to control how search results are displayed, even if those results come from Bing. Yahoo will also continue to be able to add on to Bing's results, which sounds as if programs like Search Monkey could survive the transition.

Yahoo Messenger

Yahoo also announced updates to Yahoo Messenger. The new beta of Messenger 10 will launch in 25 countries and will feature support for status updates, similar to Yahoo Mail. None of these updates are extremely exciting, though it is important to remember that Yahoo Messenger has a lot of users, both in the US and worldwide. Many of these users will surely appreciate these updates, which, among others, include support for high-quality video calls.

The daily deals section is by far the most interesting feature as users can check for deals in the verticals of their choice and be redirected to daily sale sites like Smart Bargains and Woot via Sellout.Woot. In this case, Yahoo finally gets a chance to really showcase their 2007 Woot partnership in a shopping experience that isn't a maze of click-thrus. For those readers who are already following Woot on Twitter, you may want to also follow Yahoo Deals and increase your chances of scoring cheap computer equipment or stereo gear.

As for the coupons section, if Yahoo Deals gains real momentum, coupon clippers might be found abusing office supplies (namely toner cartridges and paper) across the country. One great way to combat the waste of old school coupon clipping would be for Yahoo to offer a mobile version complete with scannable bar codes. This way a deal finder could simply load up their mobile phone with the correct bar codes and cashiers could scan the jpegs.

The Read/Write Web

While the earlier incarnations of YQL were mainly meant to read data, with the addition of these three new SQL verbs, the focus has now shifted towards writing data back to the net as well. Developers can now use YQL to write and modify data on web services and applications.

To explain how useful this can be, the Yahoo team used a few different examples. A developer can now easily use YQL to update a Twitter account (even authentication with OAuth is possible), for example, or add a new comment to a blog post, or insert any data into a remote database. Basically, developers can now use YQL to write data back to any web site that uses forms for data entry and to any API, including authenticated APIs.

To try this, here is an example from Yahoo (you will have to log in to the YQL console):

Try creating a new tweet from the YQL console, follow this link <a href="https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console?q=use%20%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yqlblog.net%2Fsamples%2Ftwitter.status.xml%27%3B%20insert%20into%20twitter.status%20(status%2Cusername%2Cpassword)%20values%20(%22Playing%20with%20INSERT%20UPDATE%20and%20DELETE%20in%20YQL%22%2C%20%22twitterusername%22%2C%22twitterpassword%22)">to run this</a>:

use 'http://www.yqlblog.net/samples/twitter.status.xml';

insert into twitter.status (status,username,password) values ("Playing with INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE in YQL", "twitterusername","twitterpassword")

Pullara and Trevor also stressed that because Yahoo runs YQL on five datacenters spread over three continents (three in the US, one in Europe, and another one in Asia), executing commands through YQL is generally very fast. Yahoo also set some relatively generous rate limits for the service. Developers who use the service and who identify themselves with an access key can make up to 100,000 calls per day, while anonymous users are restricted to 1000 calls per hour, which is still a pretty good number.