Yahoo News & Articles

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Facebook Verified App Directory Now Live
• Flock is Updated With More Support for Twitter, Other Services
• Facebook Accepts OpenID
• Should You Switch Back To Yahoo! For Search?

Yahoo! turned on support for deep links and images from Wikipedia and a select few other modules. This lurch toward enhanced search results is part of Yahoo!’s effort to lead the search market and allow structured data from third parties using the SearchMonkey platform. What will this mean for your site? More work.

Social Media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here's the week's top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• Searchmonkey and the Future of Wikipedia
• Unwrapp-- Follow Web App Updates
• Retweetist = Digg for Twitter
• Networks Get Social Media-Savvy for Obama's Big Day
• Twitter Updates, Adds Suggestions

Searchmonkey and the Future of Wikipedia

Wikipedia celebrated its 8th birthday last week, and ReadWriteWeb took the opportunity to look at what new technologies are being brought to bear to keep the online encyclopedia top of the pile.

Perhaps the biggest deal of the lot is one which comes not from Wikipedia itself, but from Yahoo!. It's SearchMonkey Wikipedia application went live last week, and integrates Wikipedia articles with Yahoo! search results. SearchMonkey is a development platform built by Yahoo! which allows open access to search data, and enables developers to roll their own search applications (check out our previous coverage). You should see the results of this monster mashup in action right away in your Yahoo! SERPs : it's turned on as default for users of Yahoo! search.

Apart from the new Yahoo! integration, Wikipedia plans to vastly increase media storage space, and to build in-site integration with 3rd party media sites like Flickr. This new focus on multimedia archiving makes eminent sense for the organization. If it succeeds in becoming the, er, Wikipedia for video and other media apart from plain text, there's no telling what kind of traffic volume it can expect in the medium term. Expect the next donations drive to be aiming for a multiple of those of the past to pay for all the new servers needed.

 

In these days nearly every tech company is seeking the holy grail of new services, software, SaaS options or enterprise 2.0 solutions. The organizations want to get that edge they may need to hold their ground.

However, it seems a little odd that anyone would think that another webmail client is really what we need. MySpace seems to think this is the case, and has a stealth webmail client in the works as their newest 1-2 punch.

Social Media moves so fast, its hard to keep up. Here’s the week’s top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• Yahoo Glue Comes to the US
• Using Tarpipe to Unclog the Social Media Pipe
• Google’s Getting a SearchWiki
• Get Yer Free Blog on TypePad

New Apatar Connector was recently released to aid those struggling with integration of open source suite SugarCRM with third-party applications, databases, flat files, other CRM/ERP applications and Web 2.0 destinations.

Apatar claims to be able to do it all “without coding.”

What do you do in turbulent economic times? Downsize or produce more? Yahoo! chooses the latter and attempts to re-incarnate itself and “make history again” with the release of its Open Strategy (Y!OS) platform.

The idea behind this initiative is to open up to developers and let them “tap into benefits once only available within Yahoo!” Yahoo! has opened quite a few features, including content, traffic and Yahoo’s user base.

Yahoo!, the struggling Internet giant, has managed to complete its latest product: Yahoo! Web Analytics. While the name is uninspiring, the product actually looks like it has some potential. If anything, it has a sexy look and feel to it.

With this being a “controlled access launch,” not everyone interested in trying the new product will be able to do so. Hence, Google Analytics doesn’t have to worry. At least not yet.

Yahoo continues its foray in the world of openness with the release of Yahoo BOSS: Build Your Own Search Service. This is the second announcement — the first being Yahoo SearchMonkey — that is part of their new directive called Yahoo!Open Strategy, or Y!OS and a move they hope will take away a bit of Google’s strong-hold on the search market.

Web forms are the one thing that consistently stand between the customer and the product, as well as between companies and their profits. If the web form proves successful, the customer receives his product and the company, their money. Yet, if the form isn’t successful, the company can bet that they have not only lost revenue, but a customer as well.

Thanks to a new book published by Rosenfeld Media, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, author and Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. Luke Wroblewski lays out the basic principles needed to apply toward the right design solutions for your web forms.

Zoho really wants people to try out their applications. They have opened the doors to users with Google and Yahoo accounts to access Zoho applications without having to create a new username/password. Is this Zoho’s step towards the OpenID? Or a ploy to steal Google Apps users away?

The open social party is apparently the place to be. Even old Microsoft just announced LiveMesh). Now Yahoo, who’s Flickr photo sharing site is the second most popular used API on the web, has rolled out a limited preview to the developer platform they announced in February called SearchMonkey.

NewsTools2008 takes place April 30-May 3 at the yahoo! Conference Center in Sunnyvale, California If you’re a Drupal programmer, user-experience expert, social-network innovator, or web 2.0 entrepreneur, you’re invited! The topic of the event is “Technology and the New Ecology of News: How will technology innovation support journalism and participatory democracy?” It’s billed as an event in which journalism’s ideals will meet Silicon Valley’s tools in a three-day, conceptual mashup. Groovy.

Online advertising is a huge business, that’s a no brainer. But those of us who have dealt with the inner workings of the online ad world know that there is much room for improvement in the management department. Purchasing, selling and managing impressions alone can take weeks of time, when they really probably shouldn’t.

But cheer up, young publisher, Yahoo! wants to help. To the cynics, Yahoo! also wants to increase its perceived value to force Microsoft to raise its bid to purchase it, but that’s for another article.

Anyway, Yahoo! is moving forward with plans to release their new ad management system, dubbed AMP!. It’s a web-based, online advertising management platform that they say will simplify the process of creating, buying, and selling ads online.

The other day, colleagues and I made a list of of things that sound bad but aren’t — such as Jawbreakers and Chunky Monkey. But now I’ve started making a list of things that sound good but aren’t. Topping the list are sites catered toward women.

Don’t get me wrong, women rock. And what makes us so visibly cool is that we have diverse interests, moods and yes, emotions. But that doesn’t mean we can’t handle weeding through the Internet to find what we seek, whether it be the weather, a great pair of shoes or gasp! —news.

However, Yahoo! begs to differ. They think that the gentler sex are easily distracted by all the choices available to us on the magical Web that we need a one-stop shop offering content from women’s magazines and blogs with a “distinctive voice” .

Why else would they launch Shine?