Yahoo finally encrypts its email servers (via The Inquirer)
INTERNET PORTAL Yahoo has made good on its promise to encrypt its popular webmail service. The company had received a lot of criticism for not invoking https encryption on its webmail service a decade after most rival services did. From today, the Yahoo…
Yahoo has acquired social mobile service Alike.
The deal is part of a talent acquisition that will leave the original Alike program without a supporting staff.
Yahoo and Alike have not revealed specifics about the deal.
Alike was created by a talented founder in former Microsoft and Zillow employee Maria Zhang.
If you are unfamiliar with the tool it providers recommendations about local businesses to users who have visited those locations in the past. Alike also uses historical data to suggest new places to visit. [Read more…]
After news leaked out that Yahoo! was shutting down Delicious (then announcing plans on selling the social bookmarking service), it looks like the former internet titan has found a new lease on life under new leadership.
Today, we’re pleased to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward. (Official Delicious Blog) [Read more…]
Yahoo Buzz is being discontinued.
The company announced on the Buzz site on Monday that it was a “hard decision” while adding, “however this will help us focus on our core strengths and new innovations.”
The company will allow the product to run through April 21, providing customers with enough time to remove Yahoo Buzz buttons from their web properties.
Buzz was a success during it’s early launch in February 2008, overtaking Digg in May 2008 according to comScore reports, however the aggregator quickly lost market share to social media sharing on Facebook and Twitter, while sites such as Digg and in a larger way Reddit continued to build stronger products while Buzz continued on a rather stagnant non-innovation path.
Personally I was never a fan of the platform, Yahoo appeared in many cases to push their own networks content to the top of popular pages by muddling up what was actually user voted content and what content was placed on the site by Yahoo editorial staff. At it’s core the system favored Yahoo editorial choices and not those stories voted by users which took away from the social aspect of the program. [Read more…]
Has the former search giant finally sold off Delicious? Reportedly Yahoo! was able to find a buyer for the former book marking service, although they apparently sold the platform at a loss.
We’ve received a solid report from a reliable and proven source that Yahoo has sold social bookmarking site Delicious for $5m+. […]
After a heated bidding process, the site has reportedly been sold to a rival bookmarking service – who exactly we’re unsure of but we’ll update once we have confirmation. (The Next Web)
It’s still unclear who allegedly bought Delicious, although if the information above is correct then Yahoo! sold the company at a loss (as they previously bought delicious for $18 million).
While some may suspect Google could have purchased the service (as the company also offers users a social book marking tool), it could have been a much smaller company instead.
Yahoo! as expected is being tight lipped regarding the reports, (they’re refusing to confirm or deny the report), although we will stay tuned for more details to see whether or not Delicious fans have new owners.
Hat tip: Mashable
After causing a brief firestorm amongst the blogosphere, Yahoo! is claiming that they never intended to shut down Delicious and were instead attempting to sell it off to another company.
Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?
– No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.
What is Yahoo! going to do with Delicious?
– We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can. (Official Delicious Blog)
Note: As of this writing their blog is down, although fortunately for us there is a Google cache available.
Although Delicious was a force of its own years ago (perhaps second only to Digg at the time), it has declined in prominence recently as many users have moved on towards other book marking services like Evernote and Instapaper.
While the domain itself is valuable (especially if one wants to start a food blog), it’s unclear who would want to own Delicious, especially after the service became stagnate under Yahoo!’s watch.
Hopefully Yahoo! is able to find a buyer (especially one with talented engineers to keep it going) as shutting down Delicious would be a tragedy for many users still using the service.
(Hat Tip: TechCrunch)
Facebook has officially become the number one online destination among American’s according to a report released this week by web analytics monitoring firm comScore.
According to the report, Facebook users spent 41.1 million minutes on Facebook in August, while Google logged 39.8 million minutes. Yahoo came in third place, with a still decent 37.7 million minutes spent on site.
Google on the other hand can rest relieved, knowing they passed the 1 billion global users mark in that same month, making them the most popular search destination in the world.
Breaking down “time spent on-site” numbers, Informationweek says:
“Americans spent about 9.9% of their online time visiting Facebook, comScore said, vs. 9.6% of time on Google’s sites, including Gmail, Google search and YouTube. Web surfers in the United States spent approximately 9.1% of their Internet time visiting Yahoo properties”
It should however be noted that their is room for a margin of error considering comScore monitors just 2 million worldwide users and each websites’ servers to reach their number, however comScore is typically a trusted source for such statistcs.
The Facebook uptick in time spent on site comes just a few months (July) after they passed Yahoo as the number 2 destination. [Read more…]
It’s confirmed, Foursquare is currently in talks with the nets top search engines, including Google Microsoft and Yahoo.
Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has told the Telegraph:
“Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search,” while adding, “We can anonymise data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment. Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to – and where is trending – not what.” [Read more…]
Yahoo today rolled out a new series of Facebook integrations across various Yahoo services including the companies homepage and Yahoo Mail service. The announcement moves the company one step closer to being a major playing in the social networking aggregation field. The search portal also announced a fresh new look for Yahoo Pulse profiles, although the changes at Pulse.yahoo.com have yet to be made live.
In a Press Release, Cody Simms, Yahoo’s senior director of Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network Guru said that Yahoo has made their recent changes in an attempt to ensure Yahoo is:
“uniquely positioned to provide people with all of the mainstream methods of content discovery – social, search, communications, and editorial,”
The statement comes at a time when Yahoo is desperately in need of a focus for the companies properties, focus that has recently emerged as they have worked to gain momentum in the social networking field, signing a 5 year deal with Zynga (makers of Facebook favorites Farmville and Mafia Wars) and announcing various other partnerships.
Facebook was able to keep popular Zynga games Farmville and Mafia Wars on their network with some last minute negotiations, but they weren’t able to keep their exclusivity which now includes Yahoo user support.
Yahoo has announced that they will allow access to both of the popular games featured on Facebook plus various other Zynga games which can be found directly from the Yahoo homepage.
