Tag: Yahoo

I just published my first two Yahoo Pipes. I use them, so I know they’re at least a bit useful. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for making improvements to them.

From the del.icio.us blog (via TechCrunch):

We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We’re also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

Congratulations to Joshua Schachter and the rest at del.icio.us.

Yahoo is looking more clued in than Google every day.

Last night Yahoo released a new beta version of its mapping software. I’ve used it a few times today and have found it to be surprisingly good. (Surprising because I generally dislike Flash-based applications.) It’s getting late, so rather than write my own review, I’ll just point to reviews on TechCrunch and Solution Watch.

I’m happy to say that I’m now completely Google-free.

From BetaNews (via Slashdot):

Starting in the second quarter of 2006, customers of both services will be able to see their friends’ online presence, share emoticons, and add new contacts from either Yahoo! Messenger or MSN Messenger to their buddy list.

It’s a bit late. Everyone routed around this stupidity a long time ago.

Last week, Yahoo launched a podcast directory. One interesting thing I’ve discovered is that they’re listing video enclosures from one of our sites. They don’t work when you try to listen to them. But they’re there.

A couple months ago, I decided that Dashboard wasn’t totally worthless and started using it to keep tabs on baseball games, post to my blog, look up phone numbers, check the weather, and look at the calendar. After a couple weeks, however, I went back to not using it. One of the main points of having widgets is quick access to information. This goal is undermined when it takes several seconds for widgets to begin functioning after Dashboard is invoked.

Last week, when I saw that Yahoo had bought Konfabulator and released it for free, I didn’t consider trying it out. Not sure why.

As I was going through my feeds today, I noticed that one of TUAW’s writers had switched back to Konfabulator, I decided that I should at least give it a chance. So, I installed it and used TinkerTool to disable Dashboard.

So far, I’m happy to have made the switch. Konfabulator’s memory footprint seems to be much smaller than Dashboard’s. And because they’re always running on my desktop, the Konfabulator widgets are ready to be used as soon as I need them. There is no warmup time for network-enabled widgets.

But the biggest difference between Konfabulator and Dashboard is choice. Dashboard is always on. Its widgets are only available on Dashboard desktop. (Yes, I know that these things can be changed. These are not things that the average user would know how to do, though.) Konfabulator can be stopped and started, just like any other application. Its widgets can live on the desktop with everything else. Or they can live on their own desktop. They can behave like windows or be part of the desktop. They can be made to stay on top or in the background. You get the idea.

Steve Rubel discovered that Yahoo is testing an RSS search application. (via Scripting News)

So, the long-awaited iTunes 4.9 was released this week. It’s another sign that RSS and podcasting are all grown up now. It’s another blow against “old media”, which I think is a great thing. Of course, this has its downsides, too. Apple hasn’t done much to acknowledge the people who actually did all the heavy lifting. If the iTunes Music Store were your first exposure to podcasting, you might think it was all brought to you by Apple, ESPN, ABC, and Adam Curry. (This is not a jab at Adam. It’s a jab at the people who think he is the first and last word in podcasting.)

And that funky RSS extension spec. Ugh. First of all, why did Apple choose to publish it as a PDF? Last time I checked, it was pretty easy to use HTML to make black and white documents with unreasonably small fonts. Google was able to do it. Either way, be sure to bring your microscope.

Sam Ruby, one of the authors of the FeedValidator, asks:

What happens when the authors of the FeedValidator can’t decipher a specification?

What about the average developer? Ideally, they try to start a conversation with the spec’s author(s) to try to get some clarification or suggest improvements. The problem is that Apple has no developer blogs. No wiki for the spec. Nothing that would indicate that they’re interested in working with the developers in the trenches. I hate to say it, but there are some people at Microsoft who are doing this much better than Apple. They came to Gnomedex to speak with people about what they were doing. After taking their lumps, they set up a wiki and proposed a change to their spec. Yes, Microsoft is still Borg, but there is progress being made. (I don’t want to go too far with my praise for Microsoft, however. They are trying to buy the company formerly known as Gator, after all.)

In the absence of being able to communicate with the spec’s authors, what can developers do? Some will choose to ignore the spec. Others will do the best they can to implement it and hope things work out. I’ll probably end up falling into the latter group. The marketing types are very excited about podcasting these days. Of course, things don’t always work out how you want them to. We implemented Yahoo’s Media RSS module on a couple of our sites several months ago. To date, we have seen zero results from this effort. As far as we can tell, we have implemented the spec correctly. There is no validator. Yahoo’s bot reads our feeds every day. But our videos never show up in their video search, even if you search for our company’s name. I spoke with someone from Yahoo about this at Gnomedex. We’re definitely not the only ones who are having problems. So now you have my business card, Yahoo. This is a test.