TechBuzz » Yahoo

YouTube Founders Buy Delicious from Yahoo

Thilak — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 18:37:39 +0000

Yahoo announced their intentions to either sell or shutdown Delicious bookmarking service back in December last year. The fate of Delicious was not known for almost four months. Good news is that YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have announced their intentions to buy the service from Yahoo for an undisclosed amount and continue to innovate under the new umbrella of AVOS.

Delicious blog:

Today, we’re pleased to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward.

Yahoo will continue to run the service till July, 2011 and all your bookmarks will be moved to the new owners. Delicious will ask you to agree to AVOS terms of service for the transition to be completed.

New Firefox Add-on for Delicious

According to the transition FAQ on Delicious, AVOS will continue to innovate on Delicious platform and help share new content in a much easier fashion. They intend to release a Firefox add-on for Delicious as soon as possible. AVOS’s WordPress powered blog is down at the moment, but a plain text version of the press release is still available.

This is perhaps the best thing to have happened to Delicious. I’ve been using Delicious since the time it was del.icio.us (pre-Yahoo acquisition) and it was a pain moving all my bookmarks from Delicious to Google. Delicious has a huge fan following. Some Delicious users even wrote plugins to scrap bookmarks and tags such as this one. Glad to see Delicious not dying on itself.

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YSlow is now Available for Google Chrome

Thilak — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 16:17:27 +0000

Developer Related: Most of my development associated tools are Firefox-exclusive as of now, but that seems to be slowly changing. There are quite a few tools I cannot do without and YSlow is absolutely one among them. It helps me analyze the overheads, which are adding up to increase my page load speed.

YSlow grades pages on three predefined ruleset or user-defined ruleset. It gives recommendations based on Yahoo’s known speed perfection technique such as Compressing Components using GZip, Putting CSS on Top, Adding Expires Headers and many more.

YSlow is now available for Google Chrome, and you can install it from here. Unlike YSlow for Firefox, where YSlow is actually an add-on for another well-known tools called Firebug, YSlow for Chrome sits in your extension bar as a standalone add-on.

A recent substitute to YSlow is Google’s Page Speed. Google even has an online version of PageSpeed which is worth taking a look at.

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Bing search is now the No 2 search engine in the world

TechBuzz — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 21:47:29 +0000

StatCounter a web analytics company claims that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is now ranked second among the search engines worldwide(in terms of market share), one spot behind the ever so dominant Google. The numbers are quite interesting.

Google’s total market share last month was 89.94% with Bing at second place with 4.37% followed by Yahoo at 3.93%. Though Google has seen a minor fall in its market share since August 09 (before which its share was above 90%), its competitors still have a lot to make up.

It must be noted that, even though Bing has a slender advantage over Yahoo worldwide, it doesn’t really benefit from Yahoo’s loss in market share in certain parts of the world, since Bing powers Yahoo’s search results in some countries like Brazil, Australia, Canada and the US. In the US, Yahoo still has a slight advantage over Bing, with 9.74% of the market share compared to Bing’s 9.03%.

Microsoft have been endlessly funding Bing with a goal to overthrow Google as the number one search engine, but it doesn’t seem likely considering the dominance Google has over Bing and Yahoo.

Via: StatCounter

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Google launches Delicious bookmarks importer

TechBuzz — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 03:47:01 +0000

Google have just launched a convenient tool to import your Delicious bookmarks to Google bookmarks. This tool, makes use of your login details and and imports all bookmarks with tags and labels.

The Google importer comes at a very important time since Delicious have announced that they will be going under. There are lots of other companies coming up with Delicious importer tools of their own, but Google’s version seems like a direct attack on Yahoo, considering what Google’s approach has been towards Yahoo in the past few years.

This app should come in handy if you use clients like Google Reader, Gmail, or Google apps.

Here are some screenshots:

Via: Mashable

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The fate of Delicious hangs by a string, save your bookmarks now!

Thilak — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 19:51:21 +0000

Yet another piece of Internet’s history is shutting down! Yahoo had a major layoff, and the Delicious team is said to have suffered the most. Ex-Yahoo employees are now tweeting about their and the products fate. As far as Delicious is concerned, I’m sure all avid Delicious fans will share a same feeling, as I do.

Although Yahoo has announced that they aren’t shutting down Delicious, the fate of Delicious still hangs in a string. With nearly all employees from Delicious team laid-off, Delicious has clearly been put into “maintenance-mode” with just enough man power to run the service.

My friend over at Ashfame has put together a detailed tutorial on how to import your existing delicious bookmarks to your browser or your WordPress installation. Although, we can get our bookmarks back, we’ll still miss Delicious. It wasn’t just about bookmarking that we loved so much about Delicious. It was like Twitter for sharing links before Twitter! We could share links with your friends, and do much more with Delicious. Let’s just hope Delicious won’t be axed just how Yahoo killed Geocities.

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Yahoo! brings Life with an exclamation point

Thilak — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 08:01:43 +0000

Yahoo! has a reputation of creating buzz every year with its new software releases. So how could this year be an exception you’d wonder? Many had speculated before the 2008 International CES that the company was developing a new social network platform based around its popular email client, Yahoo! Mail. And when Yahoo!’s CEO, Jerry Yang, previewed Yahoo! Life (formerly called the Inbox 2.0), the audience was left asking for more. In fact, the company has not settled on the name Yahoo! Life, but Yang referred to the concept during his CES presentation as “Life with an exclamation point.”

The email Inbox forms the crux of Yahoo! Life. It enables you to communicate with your email contacts in a variety of ways. For instance, Yahoo! will arrange your incoming email messages in the order of your most important contacts (of course, how it’ll decide which contacts are important is anybody’s guess!)

In addition, you’ll be able to leverage other Yahoo! services, including Yahoo! Maps and Messenger.

In my opinion, Yahoo!’s ultimate goal is to integrate Yahoo! services. So don’t worry the next time you receive an email asking for a good place to hang out. Just drag it into a map to get pointers.

Yahoo! will also allow access to third party applications and services like Evite and MySpace through this service.

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Yahoo! unveils Modular Go 3.0 Beta at the 2008 International CES in a bid to counter Google

Thilak — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 09:37:45 +0000

A few months ago Google unveiled its Android open operating system for cellular phones. There were speculations back then that it was Google’s way to show a measure of disparity between the company and Yahoo!, one of its biggest rivals to date. And many were expecting a similar move from Yahoo!, whose reformation strategy till that point revolved around paring its failing entertainment ventures, and analyzing its search, responsive content, and advertising platform. Yahoo! needed to present the mobile part of its platform in order to equalize its standing, counter Google’s attack, and most importantly, as a kind of open service unto itself.

Guess what? All those prayers were answered finally yesterday when Yahoo! co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang showed off the latest version of its Yahoo! Go 3.0 beta mobile platform at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which is underway in Las Vegas.

Yahoo! Go is essentially a solution for anyone with a mobile phone. It’s an all-in-one offering, letting you enjoy the best of the web on your phone. And did I mention for free. Using the Yahoo! Go, you will be able to send an email, upload photos, download maps, search for answers, check stock quotes, or get breaking news.

With this launch, Yahoo! intends to market Go as an open platform for third party widget developers and unlike Google’s Android operating environment, the Yahoo! Go platform will work on over 250 mobile devices that Go already works on. The inclusion of the Mobile Widget Platform will render access to third-party widgets on the Yahoo! Go and Yahoo! Mobile pages.

Yahoo! Go also features an intuitive User Interface, optimized for the mobile device. The home page is customizable, and includes a new email at a glance, messenger, Flickr, news, calendar, weather, finance, sports, entertainment, and so on.

Consumers in the U.S. will be able to download Yahoo! Go 3.0 on over 30 mobile devices from major manufacturers worldwide and use it on most wireless networks. Yahoo! promises that over the coming months it will make Yahoo! Go 3.0 available on hundreds of devices worldwide, accessible to millions of users.

Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Connected Life, Yahoo!, said in a statement,“Today’s launch of Yahoo! Go 3.0 is a game-changing mobile development from Yahoo!. This new open environment provides consumers with a highly-compelling user experience and robust, personalized starting point to the mobile Internet. We are providing users with increased control over their experiences as well as increased choice in getting the content and services they want while on the go.”

“With our innovative mobile services like Yahoo! Go 3.0 and deep partnerships across the industry, we are focused on making the promise of the mobile Internet a reality for consumers around the world,” he added.

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