Yahoo Groups, the most popular online email group service yesterday announced some major improvements. Amongst them the notable ones are:
Startup Squad has highlighted a very real an imminent problem in the Technorati and TechMeme algorithm and visualization of blogosphere i.e “They dont archive the blogosphere in a chronological order”.
What this means is that the users are unable to find out who actually broke the story and who leeched onto it 10 hours later. So popular blogs could at times just get the news from else where and take credit for it as far as Google, Technorati and Techmeme are concerned. This is not a new issue Andy Beard reported an actual event in which he broke a story but Mashable was credited for it.
I personally think this would be a great feature and one that is highly needed. So TechMeme if you are reading, do consider churning it out quickly as this will address a terrible need of a Long Tail of Bloggers in almost all domains. A new entrant might as well take a shot at it, the idea is genuine and the need is real.
Admob, which claims to be the largest mobile ad platform, has raised $15M in a second round of financing. The round was led by Accel Partners and included the existing investor Sequoia Capital. Admobs launched last year and has served more than 1.6 BN ads. The company claims to top player in this space ahead of Third Screen Media.
Admob and Third Screen Media are in a claims clash as well with Admob claiming to serve 600 million ads in Feb and March and Third Screen Media announcing 175 Million impressions served. Admobs has 1200 publishers in 160 countries. It allows advertisers to target geography, behavior, demography amongst other things.
Last week Friendster´s co-founder launched Socializr, yet another social event manager. It seems that Scott Sassa, the former CEO of friendster does not want to miss out the party and is joining in with Uber, yet another social network in the making. This is just not stopping and every now and then a new social network pops up. I dont know how many we need or bear up with.
As for Scott he remained CEO of friendster for less than an year and left at the time of meltdown in June 2005. Before joining friendster he served as President of NBC West Coast. It is yet to be seen how fruitful will be the connections with the media industry and how much he has learned from the friendster debacle.
Anothr, has now announced integration with Google Talk. The service aims to become an RSS delivery platform to Instant Messengers and launched last year by delivering alerts to Skype.
In order to add anothr all a user has to do is add anothr@gmail.com as a friend in Google Talk and start off by typing “?” to get help. Anothr allows you to manage your feeds from the command line.
Widgetbox has launched a new version of their widget platform with improved sharing and usability.
First of all widgetbox now allows single click install of widget for all the major startpages like Google, Netvibes, Pageflakes and others. With this release widgetbox now stands amongst the most compelling widget offerings with widgets for startup pages, web, email, blogging and social networks.
Furthermore the new release has put out a “Get Widget” button that allows you to get the embed code straight from the widget instead of going to their site. This is a very subtle improvement but surely a good thing for the users. One more very important feature is the Widgetbox Blidget, using which bloggers can instantly turn their blogs into a widget.
Joyent has launched Slingshot, a Rails framework that allows application to work offline and online in sync. The framework will be made available to general public in late April 2007.
With the new framework ROR developers would become independent of the Web Browser and develop applications that work seamlessly in online or offline mode. The data would later be synched using a simple and transparent synchronization mechanism. Existing Rails applications can be easily ported to slingshot and in future Slingshot will allow file system accesso remote data as well.
Flickr has just introduced filters into its system as a measure to seriously come down on porn.
The entire system is bundled with the safety level (safe, moderate, restricted) and Content Type (photo, art/illustration, screenshot). So you could set your current preference and also tell flickr what type of content (safe screenshots for ex.) you upload. The search filters are also updated and you can now turn them on and off while browsing. Users can now also hide their photo streams from others and third party access via API. Furthermore the “Flag this Photo” feature now allows you to flag any thing that might be offensive, the Organizr has been upgraded accordingly.
The features will provide improved means to users and the community in general to safeguard and police the system from abusive and adult content. This might also be good for the upcoming launch of Flickr in China.
MyUlist is a Craigslist + Digg clone for colleges. Students can use MyUlist to search for apartments, make new friends, sell used articles, keep up with groups and events, sign petitions or just socialize. Students participate by posting on “Campus Buzz” where others could then link, vote and comment.
MyUlist is very early stage to make any predictions about its outcome, but it could be squashed pretty quickly if established players in the social networking space decides to get serious about classifieds. Boso a YCombinator funded startup is doing something similar in UK. The site is free but intends to generate revenue from local advertisement and paid classifieds.
Skype, the most popular VOIP service to-date will soon be allowing its users to make online payments via PayPal. This was announced by Niklas Zennstrom, Skype co-founder and CEO at a technology conference in Silicon Valley.
The move comes as no surprise to industry watchers as both the services are owned by eBay which acquired PayPal for $1.5BN in 2002 and Skype for $2.6BN in 2005. In fact PayPal is the service of choice for many users to pay for long distance calls over Skype. The service is planned to hit the roads within a month.
Finally the multi-billion dollar acquisitions by eBay are getting integrated.
