FriendFeed is a real-time feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/ Atom feed. It is possible to use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share, as well as originate new posts-discussions, (and comment) with friends. The goal of FriendFeed according to their website is to make content on the Web more relevant and useful by using existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information. Users can be an individual, business or organization. Bloggers writing about FriendFeed have said that this service addresses the shortcomings of social media services which exclusively facilitate tracking of their own members’ social media activities on that particular social media service, whereas FriendFeed provides the facility to track these activities (such as posting on blogs, Twitter and Flickr) across a broad range of different social networks. Some bloggers are concerned about readers commenting on their posts inside FriendFeed instead of on their blogs, resulting in fewer page views for the blogger. Continue »
The on-off relationship between Microsoft and Yahoo has been consummated. A new 10-year deal will bind the two companies as they seek to compete with Google.
In January 2008, Microsoft originally offered $47.5 billion to buy Yahoo outright. Despite Yahoo’s ongoing financial difficulties, the deal was rejected because co-founder and then director Jerry Yang demanded more money. Continue »
Yahoo has announced that two of its search engine-powered web services will be officially closed on 31 August 2009:
- Term Extraction — a service that provides a list of significant words or phrases extracted from a larger document, and
- Contextual Web Search — a service which allows you to search the Internet for web pages using a context-based query.
The announcement was made by Brian Cantoni of the Yahoo Developer Network in a Yahoo Groups posting. According to the post, both these public-facing sevices share an internal backend data source that is closing down. Continue »
TinyURL is a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs. Kevin Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 so that he would be able to link directly to newsgroup postings which frequently had long and cumbersome addresses. Continue »