Tag: yahoo

Somebody once called me the wikipedia of online dating…

OK only one person has but its kinda of stuck.
Why do I recommend OkCupid? Because its a great dating site and highly recommended by many…

OkCupid. This site tops the list, and maybe because their demographic skews younger and it’s a little more engaging with members than some of the classic dating sites. Most of the searches were conducted by men (68%).

Interestingly…

PlentyofFish. This dating site has a bit of a reputation, but that hasn’t stopped people from checking it out. Formerly known for its “intimate encounters” section, POF has recently undergone an image change to focus on matching people with relationship potential.

Pof… I heard on a film (was it thor2?) the other day. Its certainly starting to grow in popularity specially since they cleaned it up? Free online dating is growing and pof is positioned its self right behind okc in my personal line up. Glad to see I’m not the only one…

Tinder. This mobile app was made popular by college students, a sort of “hot or not” version of online dating. With its easy-to-use and convenient set-up, the app has taken off among singles who like to see who’s close by and wanting to meet a little more spontaneously.

Tinder also known as the grindr of the heterosexual world. This has really taken off and to be fair I can’t knock it. I hear its great if your female (like most dating sites to be honest). Unlike the rest of the mobile apps its damm simple and ties directly to your Facebook. Even bettering OKCupid in the regards you don’t need to fill in a profile. Wonder how long till my dating site idea happens, although tinder is pretty close already.

Dear Delicious User…

delicious

Received this in my mail yesterday,

Yahoo! is excited 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, Hurley and Chen have firsthand expertise enabling millions of consumers to share their experiences with the world. Delicious will become part of their new Internet company, AVOS.

To continue using Delicious, you must agree to let Yahoo! transfer your bookmarks to AVOS. After a transition period and after your bookmarks are transferred, you will be subject to the AVOS terms of service and privacy policy.

Reasons to let Yahoo! transfer your bookmarks

• Continue uninterrupted use of Delicious.

• Keep your Delicious account and all your bookmarks.

• Enjoy the same look and feel of Delicious today plus future product innovations.

What happens if you do not transfer your bookmarks

• Delicious in its current form will be available until approximately July 2011.

• After that, you will no longer be able to use your existing Delicious account and will not have access to your existing bookmarks or account information.

AVOS? Really? Yahoo, sound overjoyed about the whole thing… to be honest I’ll switch over and see where the rabbit hole goes…

Plumbing for the next web at Xtech 2007

I have uploaded my presentation, pipelines: plumbing for the next web fresh from the first day of Xtech 2007 today to Slideshare.

The general view is that the presentation went down well and made sense. However I think people really wanted to see something which worked instead of slideware.

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Hackday officially live – sign up now

hackday in Sunnyville

As previously mentioned on the backstage blog. Hackday.org is now official and you can sign up and grab yourself a ticket now.

The dates are the weekend of the 16th – 17th June at Alexander Palace (yes now it makes sense why I had pictures of the venue on my flickr stream)

Its a partnership between Yahoo! Developer Network and BBC Backstage, which we've been developing for quite sometime. Matthew Cashmore, Tom Coates, Matt McAlister and many others have been involved in this from the start.

As the hackday.org site says, stimulation will be provided in Food, Drinks, Feeds and APIs. Like BarCamp, you are welcome to play werewolf sorry hack or (sleep) through-out the night. Tomski's already offered his shower for Sunday morning. Its going to be a very cool event. No I won't
be doing a live DJ session from stage 1 afterwards but nor will Beck this time around.

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Yahoo catches on to the idea of internet pipelines

Yahoo Pipes

I can't believe I missed Yahoo's Pipeline beta. Chris from Touchstone actually dropped me a email and asked if I've seen it. But all I get now is…

Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!

Well in the meantime a lot of people are talking about it (Techmeme). Tim O'Reilly has a long piece about it on his Radar blog. He starts with,

Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” that allows you to “create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in
turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.

In agreement, but I'm worried Yahoo might be focusing too much on aggregation that general purpose pipelining of any data source online. Tim then talks about why he's excited and points at some of my also favorite posts in this area. Jon Udell's keynote at the 8th Python conference and the JavaOne keynote which really gelled with my thoughts about
Pipelines at the time. This is also another reason why I got fed up of the Gillmor Gang without Jon Udell. Anyway back to Tim's post, here's a couple of other things I found interesting.

But perhaps more significantly, to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer. Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone.

This is certainly very true, coming from a design background I just couldn't understand why pipelines were not used more in application development. I actually thought the move towards objects in programming would be the start of this, but I guess not.

Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the “ue” this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops.

RSS and XML are easy targets for a beta service. But whats really needed is more input adapters. Microformats, FOAF, S5, WebAPIs, XMPP, etc. The transformers are predictable bar the user-defined filters (which I would assume would be XSL?). There's other services like RSS Mix and Feed Rinse which do the same thing. Chris is right filters are old hat.

Talking of Chris, in his post he seems quite down on his own pipeline: Touchstone. Personally I think their further down the line because the interesting part of the pipeline is being able to mix local and remote content not just remote. Also the widget style UI is very powerful. You could use Yahoo Pipes and I guess Yahoo Widget Engine to create something like Touchstone but your missing the Relevancy engine (APML) which did a great job of finding me screenshots of Windows
Mobile 6.

I'm a little worried about the focus on the GUI used for Yahoo Pipes. It sounds good but there needs to be thoughts about interopability. I don't want to create a great Pipeline and then be locked into Yahoo Pipes forever more.

Anyway, I can't talk much more about it till I get a chance to play with it first hand. Good work Yahoo.

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Yahoo are at it again…

I think it was about a year ago when Yahoo tried to sweet talk everyone who used Flickr into upgrading to a Yahoo ID. Old Skool flickr members revolted and staged a large protest. Well its happening again, I wonder if there will be a large protest again? I just received this email from Yahoo.

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

On March 15th we'll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

We're making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year, but some Flickr features and tools already require Yahoo! IDs for sign in — like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go program for mobiles, available at: http://go.yahoo.com.

95% of your fellow Flickrites already use this system and their experience is just the same as yours is now, except they sign in on a different page. It's easy to switch: it takes about a minute if you already have a Yahoo! ID and about five minutes if you don't.

You can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you'll be required to merge before you continue using your account.) To switch, start at this page:

http://flickr.com/account/associate/

Nothing else on your account or experience of Flickr changes: you can continue to have your FlickrMail and notifications sent to any email address at any domain and your screenname will remain the same.

Complete details and answers to most common questions are available here: http://flickr.com/help/signin/

Thanks for your patience and understanding – and even bigger thanks for your continued support of Flickr: if you're reading this, you've been around for a while and that means a lot to us!

Warmest regards,

– The Flickreenos

So as Neil and others have pointed out, the Yahoo/Flickr protest is back and this time Yahoo don't seem to be rolling over. So whats my beef with Yahoo? Well let me tell you in a couple of points.

  • I bloody paid for 2 years of Flickr not Yahoo.
  • My Yahoo ID is something completely different and getting ianforrester or anything close is going to impossible (trust me I tried)
  • I don't want my non-commercial licensed photos involved in Yahoo's promotional warez.
  • Sorry but I preferred to have my own ID not linked to Yahoo, simple.
  • Why on earth does Yahoo want to know Birthday and Postcode? Is this needed just to share pictures?

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Flickr releases maps for photos

Flickr Maps for London

There's some debate if this is geotagging or geo anything so I've used maps for now. Found via Digg, Thomas Hawk has a nice review of the new mapping feature in Flickr.

I have to say its pretty neat and works even better than Frappr at the moment. Although I'm wondering open this data is? For example will I be able to take the geo data out of Flickr once I've arranged all my pictures so nicely on the map? And if so, how? But for right now, London is looking a little bare at the moment so go add pictures! Look out for the lack of mapping from Yahoo maps outside northern america.

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Its all about Yahoo, again?

The one to look out for is certainly Yahoo. This week they released there UI library into the public domain under a BSD licence and then showed off there design patterns which I sent around to our designers for consideration. I also got the chance to read through Tom Coates fantastic presentation at the Carson workshops future of web apps summit and to top everything off. Yahoo is now hiring semantic web developers? Yahoo is once again on a roll. No wonder why Tom Coates moved. Oh by the way, don't forget to check out Simons notes which are great when flicking through the pdf presentation offline.

Forgot to mention Jeremy Zawodny has taken the main points and broke it down into something which can be translated for product managers. Yahoo are certainly on a run!

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Yahoo! buys Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us

Well, well. You help but feel Yahoo are on a little bit of a roll. Acquiring Flickr.com was pretty fantastic and Kodak must be kicking themselves now. Yes its not been a clean buy with people protesting the whole big company feel. To be honest I still use my Flickr ID not my Yahoo ID. Straight afterwards Konfabulator was bought and improved. Then recently Yahoo bought upcoming.org which was not a bad move at all, specially if/when Google Calendar launches. But now del.icio.us is part of the Yahoo pool of services. Its kind of odd because Yahoo's My Web 2.0 was a exact copy of Del.icio.us, so I expect Yahoo will combine the two at some point or at least provide someway of crossing between them for a while. You can already export all your bookmarks from del.icio.us and import them into myweb 2.0. I dont believe the opposite is the same. Joshua has a short entry about joining the Yahoo family.

The question remains if Yahoo will keep it free or offer a pro version which costs. I mean a Flickr type model would go down like a lead ballon to start off with but maybe if they were to offer advanced features beyond the current del.icio.us then maybe they could charge for them. I'm not bothered really, maybe Yahoo could use it just to study there audience's useage platform which woud be a great source of information. Maybe it could be a lost leader like Konfabulator.

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PIM Overview please enable URL’s

PIM Overview

Quick thought, I was messing around today looking at new widgets for Konfabulator for my laptop and workstation computers. I havent really messed with Konfabulator since Yahoo! bought it, I just simply downloaded the updates and kept all my old widgets the same. Anyhow, I had a good look through them today and found this really nice one by Yahoo called PIM Overview.widget. What it does is look at your Outlook or Ical file and displays the data as a Windows mobile type today screen. This is great if your running Outlook as it just picks up the outlook pst file and goes from there. If your using ical you need to point to a place where the ical files actually exist. Luckly I've been playing with Mozilla Sunbird, so I was able to point to somewhere on the local machine.

But what I dont get is, why is there no option to look at a remote calendar? A simple URL out to Eventful or even Upcoming.org would be so useful to people who dont use Outlook and may not use a application as such. This would make so much sense for Yahoo! as Konfabulator is now a Yahoo application and Upcoming.org is a Yahoo! service. I mean what more of a reason do you need Yahoo? Hell, I might even try doing it myself, I've been meaning to build and hack a few widgets for a while.

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