Archive for September, 2008

Recently, some of our users reported problems with editing, publishing and auto saving posts. We have released a fix which should prevent this from happening. If you still have problems, please try clearing your cache and cookies and try again. Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

Nige and I are getting ready for a busy week ahead.

We have lots to prepare for:

• Nige is speaking at the annual Search Solutions Conference
  
• Sponsoring a Trexy Pub Trail
  
• Exhibiting at Ad:Tech 2008
  
• Nige is also speaking at Ad:Tech
  
• Meeting up with partners, and last but not least,
  
• Launching our latest Trexy product - Ad Trails.

If you use Google Gadgets for Linux, be sure to get the 0.10.2 version, which was released Saturday. It fixes over 20 bugs, enabling support for many more gadgets.

Don't feel like compiling the code? No problem! It's now easy to find binary packages created by the community, thanks to a new page that points to Google Gadgets binaries for the major Linux distributions.

Posted by James Su and Kathy Walrath, Google Desktop Team

Yahoo! Search now offers full song playback directly from the Search results page for thousands of popular artists and songs.

In conjunction with Yahoo! Music’s new partnership with Rhapsody, we are pleased to announce the recent rollout of several improvements to Yahoo! Search’s music artist “WOW” shortcut originally launched in the Fall of 2007.

Now, in addition to gaining access to all of the artist background that you could before, you can also play up to 25 full songs a month, as opposed to the 30-second samples from before. And, by tapping into the vast catalog of songs available on Rhapsody, we’ve expanded the number of audio files that are available for playback and increased the number of tracks in the shortcut from three songs to four. If you want to look over a greater list of songs, you can now link directly to Yahoo! Music right from the shortcuts; full song playback will soon be enabled in Yahoo! Music as well, so stay tuned.

Yahoo! Search is using the FoxyPlayer (formerly known as the Yahoo! Media Player) to power the new Search experience. The player is easy-to-use, offers full functionality for song playback, and includes an expandable playlist tab. Users can continue browsing the results page while the player is in use, as search results will continue to scroll while the player stays in place near the bottom of the browser window. The player can be turned off at any time with a single click, or by simply navigating away from the Search results page. Try it out with a few of my favorites or go to Yahoo! Search and search for your own.

Pink Floyd
Johnny Cash
The Mars Volta

There’s no need to sign in to get your 25 full length streams. Just click a play button and the full length track will start playing. If you listen to all 25 songs before your 30 day period is up, you’ll hear 30 second samples until 30 days have passed from the time you first clicked play. If you are already a Rhapsody Unlimited subscriber, you can listen to an unlimited number of songs through the FoxyPlayer. Just click the “powered by Rhapsody” logo in the player and click the link to sign in on the next page.

We at Yahoo! Music are pleased to have helped Yahoo! Search become the first major Search engine to offer full-song playback directly from the Search results page. We are confident our users will appreciate the enhancements we’ve made to the FoxyPlayer and music artist WOW shortcuts. Keep an eye out for more Rhapsody-related releases down the road, as we are planning several additional updates to showcase even more of Rhapsody’s deep music catalog in the near future.

For more information on our partnership with Rhapsody and how the FoxyPlayer works with Yahoo! Search, check out our help page.

Dave Warmerdam
Yahoo! Music

 

Posted by Aaron

After months and months of hard work (and a lot of fun!) the Windows Live Messenger team is proud to release our latest beta! I’m so excited I dressed up for this post!

If you love Messenger as much as we do, head over to http://download.live.com and grab the new beta. If the beta is not available for your area just yet, keep checking back throughout the day. We always welcome your feedback, so head over to the forums and let us know what you think. If you run into a problem check out the help page. Also head over to Windows Live Wire to see where Windows Live is going.

Over the next few weeks the Messenger bloggers and I will be going through many of the new features in more detail. For today, I’ll give you a brief highlight.

Favorites.

                If you are like me, you have a few IM buddies you chat with a little more frequently than others. People like your family, best friends, or significant other hold a special place in your heart, and now they hold a special place in your favorite IM client.

Groups.

                Messenger has had groups for some time now, but they were nothing like the new Groups! You can create a group of friends that has its own conversation window, among many other benefits. It’s a whole new way to stay in touch with your sports team, community group, or just a bunch of friends.

What’s New Feed.

                Any time your buddies update their Space, add photos, change their display picture or PSM you’ll get a quick notification in the What’s New Feed. It is a great way to keep up to date with your friends.

New Look and Feel.

                This is probably the first new thing you’ll see when you install the beta. A lot has changed in the latest version, from the main window to the conversation window, there are all sorts of visual changes to make Messenger even better.

Personalization.

                Messenger has always had great ways to express yourself, but in the latest version we take it to a whole new level. Dynamic display photos, animated display photos, and hyperlinked personal status message URLs,.. but the most dramatic feature has to be Scenes. Wait until you see it!

Sign in from multiple places at the same time.

                Now you can sign in to Messenger from several locations at once! Keep your home PC logged in and sign in at work, school, or the local internet café for a quick chat with friends without signing off your home PC.

Photo sharing

                Messenger now lets you share photos in your conversation like never before. Two-way, fully synchronous photo sharing is a really sweet way to share photos.  

There are tons more features that I just don’t have time to talk about, so head on over to the http://download.live.com to grab the beta and explore all the new features for yourself. Stay tuned to MessengerSays for detailed posts about all of the features above in the coming weeks!

When first launched in 2005, the swicki self serve product was one of the first to let anyone build custom search engines. Now, a number of search providers offer custom search tools for developers (Yahoo's BOSS is one of the most recent entries into this market), and now there are plenty of established search destinations for specific verticals.

Unlike every other search product on the market though, swickis add a layer of community behavior to search results. Every search, vote, click, and comment made by a user is recorded by the swicki. This community information is then combined with matching algorithms to serve community powered search results to the next user.

There are two reasons for a web user to return to a swicki. First, a swicki is a verticalized search destination, specializing in a particular type of information. Second, a swicki displays community behavior directly on the results pages, explicitly telling a user which content to view first.

Over the last three years, we've seen developers, bloggers, and webmasters leverage swicki technology to make highly-trafficked swickis around a variety of topics, all of which have also generated significant revenue for their builders.

As niche social networks continue to grow, and as search marketing continues to prove to be one of the most lucrative advertising markets on the web, we're confident that developers will continue to find exciting and lucrative new ways to use swicki technology, and that general web users will continue to adopt specific swickis as destinations for custom search.

Thanks to everyone who has made a swicki over the last three years, and who has continued to use swickis for custom web search. We are currently as excited as ever about our community search product, and hope that you find exciting and helpful ways to leverage this technology as well.

If you have any further question or concerns about the product, please don't hesitate to email us.

This month's Flag & Bell trivia quiz saw some of the teams reaching for their mobile phones!

As you can see I was too busy trying to read the quiz let alone catch people out. So instead of trying to stop people using the Internet, from now on, if your wetware isn't up to answering the question you can reach for some software too - it's a technology group after all.

Looking forward to the next one.