Archive for January, 2009

Yahoo! is heading to Seattle this February to host Open Tech Night at the University of Washington. We’ll be showing off our new open platforms, spreading hack-fu with UW Hack U!, and featuring a very special keynote “JavaScript: The Good Parts” by our resident JavaScript guru, Douglas Crockford.

This is a great chance to hear about Yahoo!’s new APIs and new tools like YQL. Learn about building OpenSocial apps for Yahoo!’s vast audience and the social web while hanging out with Yahoo! engineers and thought leaders.

Event details are on Upcoming:

• Yahoo! Open Tech Night Part 1 - http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1515889/
• Yahoo! Open Tech Night Part 2: Hack Demos + Crockford on JavaScript - http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1516819/

Hope to see you there!

Last week, we gave you a sneak preview of our seasonal display ad templates for Valentine's Day and President's Day. We're excited to let you know that these new templates are now available for you to use in your campaigns -- just visit the "Seasonal" section of the Display Ad Builder gallery in AdWords to get started.

We're always interested in your feedback and ideas for more template themes, so let us know if you're looking for something special. One of our advertisers, Jason Barnes of Superb Internet Corporation, helped us come up with the idea for easier, more timely display ad promotions. Jason and his team wanted a way to bring more relevancy to display ads, without the cost or lead time it would otherwise require, so he got in touch with us. Here's what Jason had to say:

Using Google's display ad builder is just a smoother process. Say we wanted to do a one-day holiday sale of 50% off, and the rest of the week, 30% off. That can be a hassle with standard image ad directories, but with the Display Ad Builder, we can easily swap in text if we have an image. It's a great time saver, and we'll definitely continue to use it that way.

You can adopt Jason's strategy of making quick text changes to your image ads in the Display Ad Builder, whether or not you decide to use one of our new seasonal templates.

If you're new to Display Ads, you can get started by clicking "Display Ad Builder" on the "Create an ad page" within a new or existing campaign. To learn more about creating and running display ads, visit our Display Ads 101 tutorial site.

Posted by Heather Lane, Inside AdWords crew

The 80's cartoon Lion Force Voltron featured a team of five pilots commanding five robot lions, which could be combined together to form Voltron, a powerful do-gooder whose whole was greater than the sum of his parts. At the Cloud Connect event last week a bunch of developers came together to create our own cloud version of Voltron by combining cloud services from Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com to create applications that could do good for businesses and consumers.

The event started with Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager for Google Apps, making the case for why businesses should move their IT systems to the cloud to a panel of CIOs. Check out his presentation and leave a YouTube comment to let us know if you're convinced.

During the second day to we ran 30 or so developer-to-developer training sessions where we had Google engineers instruct on implementing Google App Engine, and GData and Google Maps APIs with the hope that they'd use our services when building their cloud-based apps.

And on the evening of the third day, we didn't boil the oceans, but coding teams did create some pretty sweet apps using only cloud services. One of the cooler ones was an socially-aware job search app for the iPhone which used Google App Engine, and Facebook and Google Apps APIs. Check out developer Claes Nygren's demo:

Cloud Connect did a great job of testing the ease of interoperability and data portability between cloud computing providers. We want companies to be able to use the best services for their needs across multiple providers, and ensure that we are more flexible than traditional on-premise software platforms.

There are two new ways that you too can play with robot action figures – I mean Google code. Test your app ideas in real-time at the new AJAX APIs Playground. Or register for Google I/O, Google's largest developer gathering, coming to San Francisco, CA from May 28 - 29, 2009.

Posted by Kevin Gough, Google Apps Team

Since the release of Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, we’ve listened, watched and learned a lot about how people use the new features and our focus has been to refine them for RC1 (the Release Candidate).

This post will give you an overview of the end user changes we’ve made which we’ll discuss in detail over the coming weeks.

In IE8 we made a big push to make sure you can easily get to the sites and use the services you care about. If you’re anything like us, you visit a lot of websites and use a lot of different services or, maybe you’re not like us, and you might have a set of favorites that you stick to. Either way, IE8’s features work together to streamline the experience – it takes fewer clicks and less time.  We’ve also worked to get rid of tedious management tasks. Put a favorite on the favorites bar if you want to go there often. Use the Smart Address bar to get to any place you’ve been – favorite or not. Can you still organize the web into folders? Sure, you just don’t have to.

Let’s talk about a few of the changes we’ve made since beta 2.

Search box

Some of the first feedback we received concerned the search box’s quick pick. People really liked the visual search suggestions and it created a new usage pattern. Now people have more search providers and they switch between them. For example, I might search for a camera on Live.com and then want to check prices on Amazon. In the past, as soon as I clicked on Amazon, it took me to the site. In RC1, it now shows visual search results for Amazon.

Because of this change, you can refine the search on Amazon, switch over to Ebay or your favorite search engine.

Figure 1: Amazon.com and Ebay.com visual search

Here’s a link to get more search providers to try this out.

Smart Address bar

We received consistent feedback that people wanted to see more typed URLs. We also saw that the top four items selected from within the Smart Address Bar are: Open a previously typed URL, Open a history item, Delete a typed URL, and Open a Favorite. Conversely, Open feed and Open autocomplete suggestion were rarely selected.

Based on that information, we tuned the experience of the Smart Address Bar. We made feed results optional and hid them by default. We also streamlined the autocomplete suggestion so now it simply shows the Shift+Enter shortcut and not an entire section. This freed up space to show more results in the list – particularly when you click in the Address bar and press the down arrow.

The resulting feature delivers more typed URLs with less visual clutter.

Figure 2: Smart Address Bar -- more typed URLs

Favorites bar

The Favorites Bar is the way to keep Web Slices, favorites, and feeds one click away. People wanted to be able to add more to the point that they’d take extra steps to manage them. The most common technique was to rename each favorite in the favorites bar so that it had a shorter name. While this allows you to have more favorites showing, it’s tedious. For those of you that would like to fit more on the favorites bar there’s now a way to customize the bar to show shorter names or even just the favorite’s icon. To try this, right click on the Favorites bar and choose Customize title widths.

Figure 3: Favorites Bar with Long Titles

Figure 4: Favorites Bar with Short Titles

InPrivate

In Beta 2 we introduced InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking, which help put you in control of data on your shared computer, and as you browse the Web. We heard that some of you wanted the ability to use these features separately, so we’ve done that. We’ve also made numerous other tweaks to the UI based on your feedback – more on that in a later post.

More

Some other popular features were Tab Groups, New Tab Page, Find on Page, Accelerators, SmartScreen Filter and Web Slices. As we blog more about the details of the IE Release Candidate, we’ll discuss these plus changes to support developers, security, performance and reliability.

We hope you enjoy browsing with the release candidate, and just like with Beta 2, we’d like your feedback and are looking for ways to make IE better.

Thanks,

Paul Cutsinger Principal Lead Program Manager Internet Explorer User Experience

Jess Holbrook User Experience Researcher Internet Explorer

This post announces an update to Graded Browser Support. The GBS page on the YUI site always has the most current information. This post includes a list of primary changes, the updated chart of browsers that receive A-grade support, and our GBS forecast.

Primary Changes

This GBS update adds A-grade support for IE8 on XP and Vista. A-grade support is discontinued for Firefox 3 on Win 2000 and Mac 10.4, keeping the A-grade testing surface at 15 platforms.

• Initiated A-grade support for IE 8, Win XP
• Initiated A-grade support for IE 8, Win Vista

• Discontinued A-grade support for Firefox 3, Win 2000
• Discontinued A-grade support for Firefox 3, Mac 10.4

• Incremented supported version of Opera to 9.6
• Incremented supported version of Safari to 3.2

The dagger symbol (as in “Firefox 3.†”) indicates that the most-current non-beta version at that branch level receives support. Put another way, † means “the most recent” instead of “all.”

GBS Forecast

In addition to the effective-immediately changes, we’re forecasting the discontinuation of A-grade support for Firefox 2 in the GBS update toward the end of June 2009.

The GBS Archive

• GBS Update, 2009-01-28
• GBS Update, 2008-07-03
• GBS Update, 2008-02-19

Tags: gbs

by Mike Krumboltz

Has Mickey Rourke lost it? The Oscar-nominated star of "The Wrestler" recently announced that he (or rather, his character in the film, Randy "The Ram" Robinson) will wrestle the WWE's Chris Jericho at this year's "Wrestlemania" on April 5.

The bizarre announcement came on red carpet at Sunday's Screen Actors Guild Awards. According to the AP, Rourke said he was happy about how the movie had been accepted by pro wrestlers — except Jericho. Rourke then added that he was going to "toss Jericho around the ring like tossed salad." Really, we can't make this stuff up.

We're not sure if Rourke's alter ego going toe-to-toe with a real-life wrestler will boost or decrease his Oscar chances. But we do know that the stunt has set the blogosphere ablaze. Wrestling blogs across the Web are weighing in, especially after Rourke and Jericho appeared on the Larry King Show. Jericho said that, despite Rourke's claims, he loved the actor's performance. But that wouldn't stop him from stepping up to Rourke's challenge. Rourke then seemed to back-track a bit, saying that he may have "stuck his foot in his mouth" when he challenged Jericho. Too late, Mickey.

Still, Rourke is no stranger to combat. Several years ago, he famously turned his back on a promising acting career to become a professional boxer. Anyone who compares photos of the pre-boxing Mickey to the post-boxing version can see that he probably should have stayed an actor. Stay tuned to see if he's made another mistake by challenging Jericho.

by Vera H-C Chan

A citizen brigade, released from presidential campaigning, seeks to funnel its energy elsewhere.

Workers, who used to occupy their days with a (paid) occupation, want something to do between jobs... and maybe get some cross-training in while they're at it.

These two different (but not mutually exclusive) forces could be at work—or not at work, as the case may be—for the renewed Search uptick in "volunteer work." January lookups for volunteer organizations mark an all-time high over the past three years.

The absolute numbers don't indicate a giant upswell by any means—the term "volunteer," for instance, ranks within the top 120,000 searches on Yahoo!. But the lookups show a slow, steady increase with few signs of letting up. 

Volunteering actually has been rising over the past 30 years, although the numbers dropped off a bit between years 2005 and 2006. Some already have credited President Barack Obama's call to civic duty for the latest increase in service. The Sun Sentinel wondered about an "Obama effect" in the local Peace Corps' 35% enrollment jump among Floridians. Down in Houston, the nonprofit Big Brothers, Big Sisters directly credited its 300 percent increase in possible mentors to Obama's call-to-service theme. 

Perhaps just as important is who's interested in volunteer possibilities: In looking at the age spread, people 17 and under conducted 19% of online research into volunteerism, while 20-somethings accounted for 25% of lookups. Ages 20-24 have the lowest volunteer rate.

Whatever the impetus, there's no lack of opportunities to help others. And for those unfamiliar to that "working for nothing" experience (except for maybe pulling weeds from your parents' lawn), a Huffington Post article gives kinesthetic encouragement on why to jump right in. Take a look at the ways Searchers have been considering to help out.

1. Volunteer Match (+670%)
2. Volunteer Work (+58%)
3. Volunteering (+48%)
4. Volunteers of America (+25%)
5. Volunteer Opportunities (+12%)

1. Donating Plasma (off the charts)
2. Plasma Donation Centers (off the charts)
3. Organ Donation (off the charts)
4. Salvation Army Donation Pick Up (+17%)
5. Locks of Love Donation (+15%)

by Claudine Zap

Here's your mid-week buzz.

1. Geri Halliwell (+2,4418%). The former Spice Girl caught buzz for her reported engagement to an Italian yacht tycoon, who she has known for just two months.
2. John Updike (+2,349%). The seminal American author who spotlighted the middle class in his writing has died, causing a surge in look-ups.
3. Chocolates (+706%). Word is that with the recession, chocolate lovers are trading down from fancy boutique brands to good 'ol Hershey's.
4. G.I. Joe movie (+537%). The TV show more commonly associated with the action figure is getting a movie. To get buzz started, Paramount Pictures has released posters to advertise the summer flick.
5. Obama interview (+175%). The president set the tone by giving his first post-inaugural interview to the Arab-language news network, al-Arabiya.

by Mike Krumboltz

Unless you've been living in a gilded tower for the past several months, you're already aware that we're in the middle of a rather grisly recession. Job cuts and layoffs have been well-publicized, but companies are also taking more creative steps to trim costs.

Rain, sleet, and snow are no problem. Recessions are something else.
The United States post office is considering cutting a day of delivery. According to Postmaster General John Potter, "massive deficits facing the post office could force the agency to cut out one day of mail delivery per week." Apparently the dwindling mail volume (curse you, email!) and rising costs have the post office deep in the red.

No more hand lotion. Ever!
According to an article from ABC, some hotels are cutting free amenities. Marriott hotel chains have removed hand lotion from rooms, and Wyndham Hotels are cutting back on the number of towels they provide. Not even the mega-fancy hotels are immune. The Wall Street Journal writes that the Ritz-Carleton is doing away with fresh cut flowers, electing to display cheaper potted plants instead. The horror! According to hotel reps, these small changes add up to big savings... provided guests stick around.

Want decaf? That'll be four minutes.
Starbucks, long considered an unstoppable force of corporate sprawl, has also trimmed its costs. According to the financial sages at Bloomberg News, the java giant will stop brewing decaffeinated coffee after noon. If a customer wants a cuppa joe minus the jitters, the barista will brew it up special. Alas, that takes about four minutes, and some wonder if folks who are used to instant gratification can wait.

Only the big games get sold.
Although the videogame market has remained strong during the recession, some retailers are altering the way they sell games. Game blog What They Play explains that stores are going to focus more on "big-name titles." That means retailers will sell fewer "small games" and "cut orders to avoid overstock." In other words, unless the game you're looking for is a runaway hit, you'll have a harder time finding it.

by Claudine Zap

Life is like a box of chocolates. A low-cost, no-frills box.

Consumer cut-backs have finally hit the gut. The food of the gods has always been a go-to sweet treat, especially during times of woe. But chocoholics, don't get too worked up about the box you may be getting from your beloved this Valentine's Day: This year, your truffles may come in the shape of a Kit Kat bar.

Hershey's, the convenience-store candy bar standby, had a very good quarter, with sales unexpectedly up. The mega-chocolate brand noticed that frugalistas are fleeing fancy boutique labels for the humble Hershey's name, giving their stock a boost. While connoisseurs are loath to give up the ultimate comfort food, they don't want to pay a lot for their chocolate.

The candy company also announced cost-cutting measures that will result in relocating production of its adored specialty brands Scharffen Berger and Joseph Schmidt from the California Bay Area to its plant in Illinois.

Clearly, the era of the high-end chocolate purveyors looks grim, especially in time for that romantic February holiday.

On the other hand, unless you like your chocolate indulgences dipped in gold, they're still cheaper than diamonds. So consider the small, sweet luxury getting off easy.