August, 2005 Archives | Homepage
PayPal Founder Developing Photo-Sharing Service
ZDNet reports that PayPal co-founder Max Levchin is now developing a new photo-sharing service called Slide. Slide is entering a crowded field that includes leaders like Flickr, Webshots and Snapfish. ZDNet says Slide will offer some unique features to distinguish themselves from the crowd such as the "playback" slide show feature.
Slide's "playback," or slide show, feature is unique too, Levchin said. The desktop toolbar looks like a strip of film with different photos in each frame, and it continually scrolls through a trove of stored images that people would probably rarely view otherwise. When consumers mouse over a particular shot, the slide show pauses and enlarges the image. The program gives people the option of e-mailing the photo from there.
The company plans to let members incorporate video, text and news headlines with photos too, creating multimedia "channels."
"I want it to be the preferred way people share digital media with each other," Levchin said, describing his vision for Slide.
For now, Slide works only on Windows computers, but the company is working on versions for the Macintosh.
Posted on August 29, 2005
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AOL News Search Gets Heavy Traffic
AOL debuted a news search engine in June to compete with Yahoo News, Google News, Topix.net and other news search tools. Search Engine Watch points out that AOL's new search engine already has considerable traffic and is a solid competitor in news search.When America Online launched of its new AOL.com portal back on June 21, the relaunch of AOL News went largely unnoticed. However, Nielsen//NetRatings has just disclosed its monthly data for July 2005 and it turns out that AOL News has a unique audience of 16.5 million.AOL also has a large subscriber base and the use of content from Time Warner to promote its news search tools.
While the unique audience of AOL News is about 29% smaller than Yahoo News, AOL News is more than 2.4 times larger than Google News and almost 6.8 times larger than Topix.net. This catapults AOL News into the big league of news search engines.
Posted on August 25, 2005
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Google Launches Google Talk Beta
Google has launched a new instant messanger and internet phone tool called Google Talk. The tool will compete with similar instant messenger (IM) products from AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo. Google Talk's web phone tool will compete with products like Skype -- although Skype has the advantage because it can call land line phones and Google Talk cannot.
Update: Looks like Skype doesn't want Google's launch to steal its thunder. ZDNet reports that Skype is launching IM developer tools to promote its instant messenging software.
The company on Wednesday unleashed its SkypeWeb and SkypeNet developer tools. By doing so, the company says, it's opening up its platform to people who wants to integrate Skype Instant Messaging -- a lesser-known feature of Skype -- into their applications.
"Skype to wants to embrace the rest of Internet," Skype co-founder Janus Friis said during a recent interview.
Skype IM is given away free, along with the company's Net phone software, to people who register with the company. The company says that it has 51 million registered users but did not provide an estimate of how many of those people use the IM service. Skype says, however, that it can be a significant threat to instant-messaging giants America Online, MSN and Yahoo. Representatives of AOL and MSN did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Posted on August 24, 2005
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Can't Find it on Google?
Not everything can be found easily using Google's search tools. For people that are unable to find something on a Google a new website has launched called Can't Find on Google. The website allows people to post new items about things they cannot find including the information they are looking for and what type of Google query they have already tried. Other people using the site can then post comments to help guide this person toward a URL that contains the information they need.Posted on August 23, 2005
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IE7 Will Be Feed Friendly
InternetNews.com reports that IE7 will be very feed friendly. A Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch told InternetNews that IE7 will make it easy for people to find and use RSS and Atom feeds."Feeds are like a TiVo for the Internet," said Dean Hachamovitch, head of Microsoft's (Quote, Chart) IE7 team. "With RSS, subscribe replaces browse and search."Mozilla's Firefox browser already allows people to subscribe to feeds and automatically recognizes when a feed is available. Firefox displays an icon in the bottom right corner of the browser that lets people quickly subscribe to a blog or website's feed.
The new browser version, released in beta Aug. 3, makes it easy to find, preview and subscribe to feeds in the RSS or Atom formats. A 'feeds' button lets users determine whether a site offers such content. Clicking on the site's various feed buttons shows a preview of how the feed would look in the main browser window.
A search bar is integrated into the preview, so that users can identify how keywords and concepts are used within that content. Users subscribe to feeds by clicking their favorites button. Feed subscriptions are automatically placed in a special section within the favorites list.
Posted on August 22, 2005
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OnfuegO is a Growing Video Community
OnfuegO is a new video community that allows users to upload videos and video blogs. The site supports QuickTime (.mov), MPEG(.mpg, and .mpeg) and Windows Media Player formats (.wmf). Onfuego allows visitors to view, rate and reviews the user-submitted videos. A search tool is also provided to make it easier to find videos on OnfuegO. OnfuegO offers both free and paid subscription levels with paid subscriptions getting more uploads and web space. More about video blogging can be found here on our BloggersBlog.com website.Posted on August 20, 2005
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NTT Developing 3D Browser
Akihabara News reports that NTT Software Corporation will release a 3D web browser called the SpaceBrowser this October. The browser works with Windows XP and Windows 2000. You can see more about the browser on this translated Japanese page.Posted on August 18, 2005
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Writers Write, Inc. Launches Workers Work
Writers Write, Inc. has launched Workers Work, a blog covering work-related news and trends. The blog will cover workplace topics like career studies and surveys, job news, career advice, resumes, hot industries and office humor.Posted on August 17, 2005
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Firefox Loses Marketshare to Internet Explorer
Mozilla's Firefox browser gave a little back to Microsoft in July after months of grabbing marketshare from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Computerworld reports that a study by NetApplications found Firefox's browser marketshare fell from 8.71% to 8.07% while Internet Explorer's marketshare increased slightly.Last month, Internet Explorer, by far the most used browser, regained lost ground and pushed back the upstart Firefox for the first time since Version 1.0 of the open-source browser debuted late last year, according to NetApplications.com, an Aliso Viejo, Calif., maker of applications for monitoring and measuring Web site usage.Firefox starting gainging on Internet Explorer after IE faced repeated virus problems and Firefox released hot features like tabbed browsing and RSS tools.
Firefox's share shrunk to 8.07% from 8.71% in June, while Internet Explorer grew its market slice to 87.2% in July from 86.56% last month.
Posted on August 16, 2005
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Gigablast Expands Index
Search Engine Watch (SEW) reports that Gigablast has expanded its index to over 44 million pages after adding another 2 million + webpages. Gigablast's site includes specialty blog and government searches. According to SEW the search engine also provides search results for Snap.com.Posted on August 15, 2005
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Tag and Search Bookmarks With SearchFox
SearchFox is a new social bookmarking tool that also includes search features. Websurfers can add and tag their favorite websites and then search through their bookmarks. Users can also import their favorites into SearchFox. SearchFox provides a downloadable toolbar that contains the functions found on the searchfox.com website. SearchFox is in beta mode but a blog is provided to keep people updated on new features.(Via Micropersuasion.com)
Posted on August 11, 2005
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Yahoo Says Its Index is Nearly Twice Google's Size
Size matters to the search engines. The Red Herring reports that Yahoo has announced that its index of web pages, audio and video files and images now contains 19.2 billion total documents. Google's index includes over 11.3 billion objects. We would not be surprised to see Google make an announcement in the near future that their index has passed Yahoo's.Posted on August 10, 2005
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Searching Harry Potter
Our sister site, The Internet Writing Journal, has created a Harry Potter Links Page to help web surfers quickly find Harry Potter related links. It includes some top resources as well as some links that are configured to help you quickly find Harry Potter content at Blogpulse, De.licio.us, Google, Technorati, Yahoo and other search resources. This month issue also has a feature on J.K. Rowling that is worth reading if you want to know more about the author of the Harry Potter books.Posted on August 8, 2005
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Yahoo Launches Audio Search
Yahoo has launched a beta of its new audio search which it says searches through 50 million audio files for podcasts, music, speeches, interviews, newscasts, jokes and sound effects. The song results are linked to stores where people can purchase the song but they do offer short samples provided by Loudeye. (Via B2Day)Posted on August 6, 2005
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Search Engines Give Vastly Different Results
InternetNews.com reports that a new study by the multi-search tool Dogpile has found that each of the major search engines provides vastly different results. After running 12,570 queries through Yahoo, Google, MSN and Ask Jeeves and comparing the top results (page one results) Dogpile found that a mere 1.1% of the results could be found on all four search engines. 2.6% percent of the results were found on three different search engines and 11.4% were shared by two of the search engines. Yahoo had the most unique results of any of the four search engines."The top four search engines are very viable sources of information," said Brian Bowman, Infospace vice president of marketing and product management. "But they're vastly different on page one. And most people never go beyond page one."The theory suggest that using only one search engine for in-depth research may be a very bad idea since each of the search engines provides greatly different results.
Breaking those stats down by search engine, Google had the lowest percentage of unique results, at 66.4 percent. Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves all were within 3.1 percent of each other, with Yahoo having the highest percentage of unique results at 71.2 percent.
Posted on August 5, 2005
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Shutterfly to Offer Members Free Photo Sharing Webpages
EcommerceTimes.com reports that Shutterfly is going to offer its members free webpages where they can display their photos. This will place Shutterfly in competition with popular photo sharing tools like Flickr, Shoebox and SmugMug.com.
Shutterfly Collections, as the service is known, enables users to create their own Web addresses where they can store digital pictures and invite friends, relatives and others to view them. The company had previously offered a single photo album, but now will let users create two personalized Web URLs where they can store and share an unlimited number of virtual photo albums.
Shutterfly customers can choose to control access by setting password requirements to enable viewing of some photographs. They can also enable others to add photographs or comments to their online albums.
Posted on August 2, 2005
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Web Surfers' Top Pet Peeves
A recent survey by the Hostway webhosting company found that web surfers have specific things that don't like about websites and if they discover one or more of these pet peeves they are unlikely to revisit that website again or buy something from the website. Here is a list of what web surfer pet peeves (Via EcommerceTimes:Over 76% of respondents said they would be unlikely to return to a website that had one of these peeves and over 70% said they would not buy something from an irksome website.
Update: Bloggersblog.com points out that the lack of all or most of these peeves may be another reason why blogs are so popular.
Posted on August 1, 2005
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