Onlinevortex » google

How does the Microsoft and Yahoo deal affects me

cmr778 — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 03:46:00 +0000

Image by psd

Like everyone in web, I have an opinion on Yahoo/Microsoft deal, after reading a lot of post about this subject I don’t understand why all the tables comparing the earnings includes all microsoft divisions (HW , software, web, games) or at least that is what looks like, because I didn’t see any indication of the contrary and as far as I know Yahoo or Google don’t produce consumer hardware, games, OS or office suites with a licensing business model.

The tables should have been the numbers of Yahoo + the numbers of MSFT but only the web divisions and then comparing that to the numbers of income and profit from Google.

But for the analysis and predictions I will point to some posts were A list blogs have made a better job in describing the situation, effects and timelines.

Read/Write Web

SEOmoz

As a user how will this affect me?. well, first let’s make a list of the services I use on each one.

What services do I use currently or have used in the past on:
Microsoft

Hotmail/Live Mail
MSN Messenger

Yahoo

Answers
Buzz
Del.icio.us
Flickr
HotJobs
Instant Messenger
Mail
MyBlogLog
My.Yahoo.com
Pipes
Site explorer
Yahoo User Interface Library
Zimbra
Search Marketing

And for comparison the services I use on Google:

Alerts
Analytics
Blogger
Calendar
Docs
Gmail
Groups
Jaiku
Maps
Reader
Talk
Webmaster Tools
Youtube
Adsense
AdWords

And I’m sure that some services I use are missing, but as a web user this could mean that I may need to start searching for alternatives to the services that I use on Yahoo, because if we look at this and this the services provided by Yahoo and converted or redesigned to comply with MS guidelines and corporate/web standards will be ruined and/or covered with ads. or I may not like them changed, as simple as that.

Image by Franz Patzig

As a developer, what can I say? I haven’t used IE for the last 4 or so years and I have suffered with the incompatibilities caused by the MS browser, I don’t use any service or API provided by Microsoft, is there any?

As an advertiser, I have used only Yahoo or Google. But I have read about the new tools that Microsoft implemented for advertisers in their network and they seem to be really good. This may be the only good point in the acquisition for me if MS integrate the search volume and the tools of both companies.

The hand of Google

cmr778 — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 01:43:00 +0000

While looking at a library book scanned by Google, I found this image, the hand behind the scanner revealed.

Dale Dougherty

Saw this at O’Reilly Radar, and other “hands” are at Book Patrol

Cool street views

cmr778 — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:02:00 +0000

With the new Streed View feature in Google Maps a lot of strange, funny and unexpected images have been discovered by the users and in one of Wired blogs (Threat Level) there is a request for the Best Urban Images Captured by New Google Maps Tool.

And in Mashable they have the top 15 (so far).

A few examples:

The Void

The internet sucks

Legs

Soon we will need something like this:

More images in Streetviewr

Google Gears

cmr778 — Thu, 31 May 2007 00:45:00 +0000

Recently a trend about enabling web apps to be used offline started to emerge and a few companies announced their solutions: Dojo Offline Toolkit, Joyent Slingshot, Zimbra desktop and even Firefox 3.

Today Google released the beta of Google Gears. A browser plugin (700K) and API that enables developers to create web applications that can be used offline and provides 3 components to do this

A local server, to cache and serve application resources
A database (SQL Lite), to store and access data from within the browser
A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

The plugin is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera on Windows, Mac and Linux.

The first app to support offline capabilites using Google Gears is Google Reader and the rest of the Google apps like Docs, Groups I’m sure will be next.

Google Gears is opensource and licensed under the New BSD license. with this, many developers will be tempted to include in their projects, so we can expect a lot of web apps offering this capability even if the model is not adecuate to be used offline.

Google Reader trends

cmr778 — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 18:33:00 +0000

No me habia puesto a pensar cuanto tiempo se puede llegar a pasar leyendo blogs o en tu feed reader, una de las caracteristicas de Google Reader a la que no le habia prestado atencion es a la seccion Trends, que te muestra los cuantos articulos y de que blogs lees con mayor frecuencia, que porcentaje de estos lees, cuales se actualizan con mas frecuencia y el numero promedio de posts, los tags que incluyen y a cuales de estos le pones mas atencion.

De todos estos datos puedes ver el Top 10, 20 o 40, que me parece util para depurar tu lista de feeds y eliminar algunos que ya no lees. Tambien incluye una grafica y un resumen para darte una idea rapida.

Me pregunto por que no han incluido esto en Gmail y Google Groups? sin duda tambien arrojaria datos interesantes del tiempo que pasamos leyendo emails y grupos de mensajes.

South Park & World of Warcraft

cmr778 — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:45:00 +0000

Recien termine de ver el episodio de South Park en el que se la pasan jugando World of Warcraft. Esta buenisimo, tiene algunas frases memorables tanto para los que juegan como para los que no jugamos, por ejemplo casi al final que los ejecutivos de Blizzard necesitan una cuenta, uno el pregunta al otro que si tiene una cuenta y este le responde: “No, I have a life”.

Si no lo vieron en TV pueden verlo en YouTube; por cierto, la noticia de la semana es que Google adquirio Youtube por la nada despreciable cantidad de $1.65 billones de dlls. en un intercambio de acciones. Los rumores empezaron desde el viernes pasado y al principio muchos no lo creian, incluso en Techcrunch lo negaron pero le dieron seguimiento y ahora tienen una nota muy completa sobre la adquisicion.