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Jun 1, 2010

Yahoo to turn subscribers' e-mail contact lists into social networking base

By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 1, 2010; A08

Yahoo plans to announce Tuesday that it is jumping into social networking by using its massive population of e-mail subscribers as a base for sharing information on the Web.

Over the next few weeks, its 280 million e-mail users will be able to exchange comments, pictures and news articles with others in their address books. The program won't expose a user's contact list to the public, as was done by Google through its social networking application, Buzz. But unless a user proactively opts out of the program, those Yahoo e-mail subscribers will automatically be part of a sweeping rollout of features that will incorporate the kinds of sharing done on sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The plan could spark criticism from Yahoo e-mail users, who signed up for the free service perhaps never imagining the people they e-mailed would become friends for sharing vacation videos, political causes and random thoughts throughout the day. And the move comes amid growing concern by federal lawmakers and regulators over how firms such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft have handled the privacy of Internet users.

After backlash, Facebook last week announced new privacy tools to make it easier for users to block Web sites from tapping into their information, as well as a simpler way to configure who on the site can see personal data. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asked Facebook on Friday to explain what kind of user data it had shared with third-party sites. Conyers also asked Google to retain, for federal and state regulators, the data the company scooped off WiFi networks as it collected Street View mapping photos around the country.

To allay privacy concerns, Yahoo said it would give users a week's notice before launching the new features and provide a single button on the site for opting out entirely.

Image via Wikipedia

"We've been watching and trying to be thoughtful about our approach," said Anne Toth, head of privacy for Yahoo.

Specifically, the company will launch a product called Yahoo Updates that allows e-mail users to see what other contacts on their lists are commenting about or sharing on sites like Yahoo Finance, Facebook and the photo sharing site Flickr. Updates will initially include 15 sites and partnerships and will eventually expand to include partners such as Twitter this summer.

Yahoo has tiptoed into social media, launching a similar tool last year called Connections, which allowed each user to customize a list of contacts with whom to share information. The company also tried two years ago to build a competitive product to Facebook, where users sought "friends," or contacts, to join micro-networks within Yahoo in the same way Facebook users amass friends through requests. Yahoo abandoned that project and instead decided to tap into its captive audience of e-mail users.

The move is part of a revamping of the once-rudderless Internet pioneer. Chief executive Carol Bartz, brought in last year to lead the firm, has stripped the company of unprofitable business units to focus on its greatest strengths -- its popular free e-mail and messaging programs, and its library of sports, news and finance sites -- to keep users in the Yahoo universe longer.

The longer a user stays on the site, the more advertising dollars and e-commerce it generates. But it remains to be seen if users will view their contact lists as the kinds of people they choose to socialize with on the Web. When Google launched Buzz, some users complained that they used Gmail for business and to correspond with strangers and that they didn't want to share birthday videos with their plumbers or bosses.

Yahoo will begin notifying users of the change on June 7, one week before the launch. Users who don't want to participate can click one button on the settings page to opt out. Or they can customize each piece of information -- a Facebook update or a comment on a Yahoo news story -- to either be shared with Yahoo e-mail contacts or Facebook. Eventually, Twitter and other partners with social-networking platforms will also be included.

"What Yahoo has done is recognized that your e-mail or messenger network is a useful resource and that you may be interested in knowing what your contacts are interested in knowing about, and they stop there," said Jules Polonetsky, the director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a privacy think tank. "That's opposed to the idea that then, therefore, your relationship with them risks being exposed."

May 28, 2010

Google Names Facebook Most Visited Site

Image via CrunchBase

Daniel Ionescu, PC World

May 28, 2010 9:29 am

Google has publicly released a list of the top 1000 websites in the world, raking the Facebook social networking site as the leading Web property by unique users.

According to Google's AdPlanner stats, Facebook scores more than 540 million unique visitors per month, reaching a sizeable chunk of 35.2 percent of the Internet population.

Facebook not only has the most unique visitors in Google's stats, but also the most page views per month, a whopping 570 billion views, ahead of other properties like Craigslist (#49) with 14 billion views.

The AdPlanner list does not contain any figures for most of Google's own properties, like YouTube, Gmail, News, or Search, but gives an interesting insight into which top Websites do not serve advertising.

Wikipedia (#4) and Mozilla (#10) are the only two Websites in Google's top 10 not to display advertising. A noteworthy entry on the 18th spot in the AdPlanner rankings is Twitter (#18), with 98 million unique visitors per month, which doesn't serve ads.

Destinations portals such as Yahoo.com (#2), MSN.com (#5), Baidu (#8), Sina.com.cn (#11) and 163.com (#15) are also high on the list, probably due to the fact that many people use these sites as their home page.

Search engines also occupy several top places in the AdPlanner list (excluding Google's own Search). Live.com (#2) has over 370 million uniques per month, Bing.com (#13) with 110 million, and Ask.com (#20) with 88 million.

Blogging is also high on Google's list, with Blogspot (Blogger) situated in the 7th place with 230 million uniques, and WordPress.com in the 12th spot with 120 million uniques.

Several news sources made it into the top 100 as well: Cnet.com ranks as #35, BBC.co.uk on #43, CNN.com at #64, and NYTimes.com on #83.

Other entries worth noting among Google's top 1000 websites are Microsoft.com (#6), Adobe.com (#14), Amazon.com (#22), eBay.com (#24), Apple.com (#27) and Hotmail.com (#30).

Apr 5, 2010

Aggregators help media professionals keep on top of digital content trends | Media | The Guardian

Image via CrunchBase

by Kevin Anderson

The internet is not like trying to drink from a firehose but rather like trying to drink from Niagara Falls. For any media professional trying to remain up to speed on digital content trends, it is often overwhelming. I've had to develop a lot of methods and constantly change the tools I use to manage this torrent of information. I've mentioned Popurls before as an easy one-stop shop to follow internet buzz, and once registered you can personalise the site to show your favourite digital content sites first.

You can log into Popurls using your user name and password from several other services such as Google or Yahoo. You can create your own Popurls sharing page and automatically post items you share to Facebook, Twitter or Friendfeed or mini-blogging sites Tumblr or Posterous.

However, if you don't want to take the time to personalise Popurls, there are a number of aggregators that pull together a great sample of digital trends. Sites such as Original Signal are good if you want a single page to have a quick glance at sites covering web 2.0 developments, such as TechCrunch, GigaOm, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb. There is a North American bias to a lot of the content because most of the aggregators operate from there, but it's a good start for a filtered view of the web based on the interests of a digital media professional.

Image via CrunchBase

These sites cover the world of web 2.0 with great depth, but if your interests are even more specific, you may want to check out the aggregator Alltop. It takes Popurls to the next level, not just featuring buzz and top-level topics but aggregated pages from sites and blogs covering a wide range of subjects. For instance, you can quickly find blogs and sites covering such specialist topics as web analytics, virtual worlds, rich internet applications or mobile. You can even filter Alltop based on location.

The newest addition to these media news aggregators is also the newest addition to the popular TechMeme family, MediaGazer. TechMeme uses an algorithm and human editors to filter tech stories that are generating conversation. MediaGazer takes the TechMeme model and focuses on media coverage, and it has a very good transatlantic spread, at least in terms of English-language media reporting.

Aggregators are just one way to manage information but, with a little tweaking, they can help the flood of information seem more manageable and relevant.

Nov 4, 2009

Yahoo to Add Real-Time Search Results - WSJ.com

Image via CrunchBase

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

Yahoo Inc. said it is testing a new search feature that will show people results based on relevant information being shared by Internet users in real-time.

People familiar with the matter said Yahoo is testing real-time search results through a partnership with Web search start-up OneRiot Inc., along with other companies. The OneRiot test is scheduled to go live this week.

In a statement, Yahoo said the real-time shortcuts will only appear on certain search queries and that the company is still weighing whether to integrate the results across its user base.

The OneRiot deal is independent from Yahoo's deal to outsource some of its search features to Microsoft Corp., according to a person familiar with the matter.

Unlike traditional Web search results, which are ranked by methods like analyzing what sort of Web pages link to a particular Web page, OneRiot's results are based on the links that people are sharing through services like Twitter and Digg and other data. Searching OneRiot for "Michelle Obama," for instance, may bring up a link to reports about her recent Halloween costume instead of a link to a biography.

Yahoo's move underscores how the largest search properties are focusing on timelier search results.

In October, Microsoft and Google Inc. announced deals with Twitter designed to help them add similar capabilities to their search services.

Still, the search engines are faced with the challenge of figuring out when real-time content is relevant or just clutter. In addition, the business model for real-time search is murky.

In an interview last week, Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams said Twitter is trying to tackle some of those problems. The San Francisco company is devoting more engineering resources to its own Twitter search engine and is focusing on how to show people the most relevant tweet, Mr. Williams said, not just the latest one that matches the terms they searched.

Aug 18, 2009

Neo Cities

Phoebe Connelly | August 17, 2009

When Yahoo announced earlier this year that it was shuttering GeoCities, an online community of user-created Web pages from the early days of the Internet, the response was more mocking than mournful. "So Long GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed" read one PC World headline. When it's remembered at all these days, GeoCities is an Internet punch line, with its amateur code and garish color schemes (one programmer friend termed it "an animated-gif-athon"). But it was a hot startup in the mid-1990s. With its user profiles and pages organized by topic, the service was a precursor to online networks like Facebook, MySpace, and accessible blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress. And, much like those sites, it is owned by a private corporation that has ultimate say over what happens to information, photographs, conversations, and interaction that occurred within that space.

GeoCities began in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI), a California company that offered free Web hosting and development tools. Users could claim space for their Web pages in a variety of thematically organized "neighborhoods," (including "Sunset Strip" for rock and punk music, "Wall Street" for personal finance and investing, and "Area 51" for science fiction). These neighborhoods were run by volunteers known as community leaders who helped patrol for inappropriate content and, according to a 1999 CNET article, offered new users "suggestions to jazz up their pages." BHI renamed itself GeoCities in 1995 and sold the idea that when you joined the service, you weren't just getting a Web page; you were joining a community of users.

The geographic nomenclature of GeoCities gave those new to the Internet a familiar shorthand for how social interaction could unfold. Sure, the tools might be different, but the concept of neighbors and like-minded groups of people, would, GeoCities promised, operate the same online as in the real world. Our desire for community is an insight key to many successful online ventures that have come after. Facebook lets users "become a fan" of bands, magazines, and businesses, join groups that petition for health-care reform, and organize high school reunions. Blogs organize themselves into like-minded groups known as rings, even holding "carnivals" where all bloggers involved publish entries on a set theme.

The demise of GeoCities is not just the disappearance of a gif-riddled online ghost town--it's the death of a pioneering online community. And it's a reminder that we should think critically about who owns online spaces, how they are managed, and what happens when they are razed.

***

GeoCities pages were proto-blogs. "People updated them very frequently," says Alice Marwick, a doctoral candidate at New York University who studies social media. "I think you'll find that personal homepagers of yesteryear are bloggers now." GeoCities was packaged for inexperienced Internet users, and by 1998 it was the third most-visited site on the Web. Jason Scott, who along with a group of around 15 volunteers called the Archive Team is working to archive GeoCities, says the selling point was ease of use: "Users were offered a worldwide audience, and the ability to say things any way they wanted to."

Other online platforms began to spring up, and soon GeoCities became a fond memory for most users. Blogger was introduced in 1999 (and purchased by Google in 2003), making it easy for anyone to start a blog. MetaFilter, a community blog, was launched in 1999. The social networking site My-Space was founded in 2003. These services also marked the entrance of a very public form of socializing--where, unlike email or listservs, the conversation, and content, was accessible to those not part of the conversation. In offering a platform for creating online identities, GeoCities started a trend that has been replicated by companies ever since.

But once those online identities are created, are they the property of the users or the corporations that host them? David Bollier, author of Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, calls corporate-controlled spaces like GeoCities and Facebook, "faux commons." For him, true online community spaces are defined by users having control over the terms of their interaction and owning the software or infrastructure. Corporate spaces come with "terms of service" agreements that lay out the rules users must abide by and what control they agree to surrender in exchange for using the product. "Oftentimes corporate-controlled communities are benign, functional, and perfectly OK," Bollier says. "It's just that the terms of services those companies have or the competitive pressures of business may compel them to take steps that are not in the interest of the community."

Consider the case of Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University. Ludlow ran a newspaper for the virtual community The Sims Online and was kicked out of the community by the owner, Electronic Arts, for publishing accounts of theft, prostitution, and money laundering that (virtually) occurred there. Because it happened in a corporate-controlled online space, his speech wasn't protected. As Ludlow told an interviewer, "The platform owners have responsibilities to care for those communities and see that they are not harmed."

Bollier agrees. "At the point where the business model becomes tethered to a happy community, you have to reach an agreement about how you are going to interact. If you piss people off too much, they are just going to flee the site." When GeoCities was purchased by Yahoo in January 1999, the new corporate overlord immediately began to clash with users. That June, Yahoo changed the terms of service for the site, claiming the right to full ownership of anything users posted to their pages. By December, Yahoo announced it would disband the popular community-leader program. The changes should sound familiar to anyone who has followed recent tempests over privately controlled social-networking sites. Facebook made a similar change to its terms of service this past February, causing uproar among users already annoyed with a redesign and a short-lived feature that broadcast users' purchasing habits. Under pressure, Facebook reversed the decision within weeks.

***

The decay of an online social space cannot always be pinned on corporate ownership. Online communities tend to mirror the shortcomings of the real world--racism, exclusivity, and class privilege. In a presentation at this year's Personal Democracy Forum conference, social media researcher danah boyd asked what really separated users of the older My-Space from the newer Facebook. MySpace, started by the advertising company eUniverse as a rival to Friendster, has always had a low bar for entry, allows users to remain anonymous, and enables more customization of profile pages. Facebook, by contrast, was born at Harvard as an online version of freshman--orientation "facebooks." It slowly opened admission to other Ivy League universities, then most colleges, and finally to the public at large. While both sites enjoy about 70 million unique visitors, in recent years wealthier, more educated users "were more likely to leave [MySpace] or choose Facebook," boyd said. "Those who deserted MySpace did so by 'choice' but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic." She continued, "What happened was modern day 'white flight.'"

In other words, despite some declarations that MySpace has gone the way of GeoCities, it isn't really dead. Not yet, anyway. But because MySpace, like the vast majority of social-networking sites and blogs, exists in corporate-owned space, it is vulnerable to being shut down if it is perceived as no longer having a profitable or attractive user base. Given that we are stuck with much of our digital commons existing on corporate-controlled sites, what then happens when the corporation decides to close its doors? If these are our new commons, what does it say that we abandon spaces once they are clearly marked as unsophisticated?

Scott says the Archive Team's efforts have proved to him the worth of Geo-Cities. "A lot of people see GeoCities as this sea of amateurish, poorly written Web sites. I understand that thinking; I certainly don't want people to think that I'm saying GeoCities is an example of the best the Web could be, but I do think it's an example of what the Web was." Scott says while he's pulled up plenty of pop-culture fan sites, he's also found meticulously detailed outlines of Roma history and documentation for products and software manufactured during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The better-known Internet Archive has announced it, too, is working to archive GeoCities. (Yahoo got in touch with it about preserving the pages.) Still, it's a stark reminder that just because something is published on the Internet doesn't mean it will last forever.

Yahoo has now set an official date for the closing of GeoCities--October 26, 2009--but the question of how we protect and archive the history of our interaction in the digital commons is still unanswered. As the Internet continues to evolve, we will be forced to decide which left-behind digital communities to preserve. "There is a very real chance of this digital culture just disappearing from our lives, and there's not really any formal mechanisms in place to store or aggregate this knowledge, which is really a shame," says Marwick. "There need to be more public efforts to store and archive."

In a keynote address at a 2001 conference on preserving digital media, science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling observed, "Bits have no archival medium. We haven't invented one yet. If you print something on acid-free paper with stable ink, and you put it in a dry, dark closet, you can read it in 200 years. We have no way to archive bits that we know will be readable in even 50 years."

He added, "Tape demagnetizes. CDs delaminate. Networks go down."

Jul 30, 2009

Fast Forward: Yahoo to the Recycle Bin

By Rob Pegoraro
Thursday, July 30, 2009

Adieu, Yahoo.

Not the Web site or the company, but the search engine. Yahoo announced Wednesday morning that it signed a 10-year agreement with Microsoft to combine search and advertising efforts, each ceding much of one field to the other.

"In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers," a press release declared.

Few Web users are likely to miss Microsoft's contribution to Web searching, but most people have fed a query to Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo at some point. Replacing Yahoo's search engine with Microsoft's Bing would delete one of the oldest landmarks in the Web landscape.

It would also take away a choice for users and a source of innovation for Web search, contrary to the claims at the "Choice. Value. Innovation." site that the companies set up to herald the news.

Yet their separate attempts have not slowed Google's steady growth. Yahoo may have no other choice but to make its search engine yet another casualty of outsourcing.

If so, it will mark the end of an long run.

Yahoo began life in February 1994 as a simple catalogue of Web sites put together by Stanford University students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It acquired its name -- short for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" -- not long after and then expanded into a true search engine.

That head start, combined with Yahoo's early proficiency and the missteps of other Web sites (anybody remember Lycos, Excite or HotBot?), allowed the firm to become the Microsoft of search engines for quite a few years.

And then yet another Stanford research project took off. Google found things on the Web faster and more accurately than Yahoo and didn't try to sell you 20 unrelated things as it did. Then Google began adding other Web services -- e-mail, maps, calendars -- that made Yahoo's fare look clumsy by comparison.

In the process, Google ran away with much of the Web advertising business -- a machine that generates most of its profits.

Inertia has helped Yahoo hold on to a respectable chunk of the market even as its search site grew stagnant and new ventures including a music store and a social network flopped. Almost 20 percent of U.S. Web searches ran through its site last month, according to ComScore's data. Yahoo has also kept a spot in many browser toolbars; for example, it remains the only search-shortcut alternative to Google on the iPhone.

Microsoft, for its part, spent years fumbling around with quasi-proprietary online services such as MSN or Windows Live. Two winters ago, it tried to solve its Internet issues by proposing to buy Yahoo for around $47.5 billion.

The Microsoft folks in Redmond, Wash., should thank their counterparts in Sunnyvale for spurning that offer, against the advice of nearly everybody in the technology business. Yahoo's rejection stopped Microsoft from burning through billions of dollars just in time for the economy to plunge off a cliff, then spending years cleaning up after an AOL/Time Warner-esque collision of corporate cultures.

Left on its own, Microsoft had to build a better search site, and with Bing it may have done just that. The site, unlike some of Microsoft's older forays and Yahoo's just-redesigned home page, delivers much of the accuracy and simplicity of Google.

Should the Yahoo-Microsoft deal survive antitrust scrutiny, Yahoo's search technology won't vanish down the bit bucket; Microsoft would be able to add its features to Bing. Likewise, Microsoft will continue to handle automatically placed search ads. And other Web services, such as e-mail and instant messaging, will remain separate -- your Yahoo Mail won't get forwarded to Hotmail or vice versa.

Filo and Yang surely didn't mean for their invention to land in Microsoft's parts bin. But if the alternative is the continued surrender of Web search and advertising to Google -- a competition in which Yahoo has done little to distinguish itself lately -- the company they founded hasn't left itself many other options.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at robp@washpost.com. Read more at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward.

Jun 6, 2009

Internet Resources Briefs #2

Write4Net
http://write4.net/en

Yahoo Adds a Number of New Apps and Widgets to Its Sites
http://mashable.com/2009/06/05/yahoo-apps-widgets/

How Cloud Computing Will Change Business
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/09_24/B4135cloud_computing.htm?link_position=link47

Hulu May Start Charging for Content
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2009/tc2009064_385545.htm?campaign_id=technology_related