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Yahoo! Says They’re Not Building A Library
Yahoo! insists that they are not developing anything to compete with Google Book Search.
Google slapped Yahoo! with a subpoena on November 20 inquiring about their activity in the library lawsuit. In response, Yahoo!’s lawyers released a legal brief claiming that the company has no intention of competing on the library front and has simply been financially backing the parties involved in the case against Google.
“Yahoo has not launched an independent book scanning project or a ‘Yahoo Book Project’ as defined by Google in the Subpoena,” reads the brief. “Instead, along with over 40 other entities, including public libraries, major colleges and universities and leading Fortune 500 companies, Yahoo has backed a non-profit alliance run by the Open Content Alliance (OCA) and Internet Archive to digitize books and make them searchable through any web search engine. Yahoo supports the approach adopted by the OCA which digitizes only text in the public domain or where copyright holders have expressly given permission for such works to be included, and Yahoo exercises no direction and control over the OCA’s operation of its project.”
In early October, it appeared that Yahoo! would spearhead the OCA operation, which is contesting Google’s rights to digitize books. Now Yahoo! seems to be backtracking, claiming they only have given financial support to the project but have no authority on the matter. This is very passive-aggressive on behalf of Yahoo! in the never-ending Yahoo!/Google saga.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Yahoo! TV Gets A New Do
Yahoo! redesigned their TV listing
site this week. Certain bloggers have expressed their displeasure with the makeover. I think it looks good but certainly could be more functional.
Most Yahoo! pages are getting Flash-ier so it was time for the TV listing page to go under the knife. Some complaints have been that the Ajax interface slows it down but that wasn’t my experience.
The problem is not the “cool” new color scheme. The problem is the design placement. The most pertinent information is not close enough to the top. I have to scroll down too far from the Scrubs, Ugly Betty, and Grey’s Anatomy promos before I get to the “My TV” grid, which is the reason I would go to this site in the first place. They’ve also placed “TV News,” “Juicy Gossip,” and “Latest Recaps” before the actual listings. I’ll go to the PerezHilton blog if I want that crap.
I don’t think this is another example of Yahoo! spreading its peanut butter. I think this is Yahoo! giving itself the makeover it needs but maybe trying to hard to be cool. Function before fashion, Yahoo! Learn from Meevee.
Update: Apparently Yahoo has had seen the backlash themselves on their own blog regarding the TV listings page. It’s not pleasant. Hopefully they’ll take note.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Can Yahoo! and Local Papers Save Each Other?
Yahoo! announced this morning a partnership with a number of large newspaper chains, controlling a total of 176 publications, to share content and functionality. Both Yahoo! and local papers around the US are in a state of crisis, which is amazing if you consider the market and mind shares both still control. Will this partnership make a significant difference for either party? I don’t think it will.
Small, agile, low-overhead local sites that incorporate everything from the authenticity of blogging to the power of video to the immediacy and usefulness of mobile devices are just around the corner. Newspapers will likely retain superior access to other lumbering social institutions for some time, but all parties are going to have to change faster than they will be comfortable with.
The partnership will include the following:
- Local content will appear on Yahoo! presumably similar to the way AP content does now. That’s a logical and smart move; though local newspaper content is hardly thriving perhaps an infusion of traffic will help improve it.
- Local jobs listings will appear on Yahoo! HotJobs. I don’t think anyone cares about this - there’s such a proliferation of online job listings that no jobseeker is likely to rely on one centralized site. Imagine trying to be the all-encompassing housing listing site - that too would be a losing proposition.
- Yahoo will sell ads, provide site search, maps and the Yahoo! toolbar on local news sites. This will mean nothing unless the content on those sites become for more dynamic and compelling.
Comparisions are being drawn in the NYT to Google’s recent partnership with a smaller number of more high profile publications and to similar efforts that have failed in the past decade. Google’s newspaper deal is of course just one of many things they are working on, including selling radio advertising. This Yahoo! deal is too little too late.
It’s a new world and both of these companies face incredible competition. Those competitors, best exemplified by local blogging networks but ultimately just a web of diffused readership, are just beginning to get their game on.
Is there any hope for local papers? The smartest ones are looking to leading examples, like the Lawrence, Kansas Journal World. That local paper has long done incredibly innovative things online - everything from local music blogs to mobile notification of schedule changes for local kids’ sports games. There is hope, but it’s going to require a greater paradigm shift than is represented by today’s announcement of co-operation between staid local sites and a giant portal. The things made possible by new media are just too exciting; this deal will go down in history as a tiny band-aid on top of a massive hemorrhaging in the old media industry.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Yahoo! has acquired Jumpcut
The Yahoo! family expanded again today with the acquisition of online video editing service Jumpcut. Here’s the Jumpcut post on the announcement and here’s the Yahoo! Search post. Based in San Francisco and launched just six months ago, Jumput specializes in letting users remix videos already online or edit their own video with its interface. Mike Arrington gave the company a good review when it launched, writing that it was even better than Motionbox - a service he called the best yet for sharing online video just days before Jumpcut launched.
Yahoo! Video already has one of the biggest video search indexes online and will be all the more compelling with the added ability to remix posted content and edit original video online.
The terms of the deal are not being disclosed, although our guess is that Yahoo paid nowhere near the $65 million in cash that Sony recently spent to acquire Grouper, a video sharing site with a P2P focus. Wether the Jumpcut acquisition was large or small - it’s very cool. It’s one more example of the growing importance of remix culture and online video.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Yahoo! Launches Better Video Content
On a day that saw its stock take a hit, Yahoo! has teamed up with Current TV to launch Yahoo! Current Network, a video site with a mix of professional and user submitted videos arranged in channels. Current TV is a cable and satellite channel backed by environmentalist Al Gore that shows short user-submitted shows and segments in what it called ‘viewer created content’. Yahoo! has been granted the rights to exclusive Current TV content for its video portal, and in return some of the best user submissions to Yahoo! may make it onto the terrestrial Current TV channel.
Current TV have previously made a little-known deal with Google to release Google Current, which was a similar concept though hosted on the Current TV site and servers (what they got from the relationship with the search giant is unclear, other than splashing the companies name throughout the videos). Back at Yahoo! there are now four channels of Current content (these names are going to get confusing very quickly) - Yahoo! Current Action, Yahoo! Current Buzz, Yahoo! Current Driver and Yahoo! Current Traveler. We will leave the descriptions of what each of these channels are as an exercise for the reader. Some of the content is actually pretty good, much better than what you would find on YouTube or other amateur clearing houses. As an example, this video gives you not only a decent intro to what Yahoo! current is all about, but is a short clip from Bono and ‘The Edge’ from U2. If you are a U2 fan, you might appreciate the clip of Bono walking into The Edge’s room and waking him up in the morning (the unreleased directors cut has Bono follow him into the shower) and discovering that Yoga is actually a product of Wales.
With the popularity of YouTube and the launch of similar video services from every other company, this is a good effort from Yahoo! to raise the quality of video posts and perhaps appeal to a broader audience. Yahoo! video is actually a good service, the videos are of good quality and there is a lot of solid functionality. Yahoo! now has some good video content to give it’s service a bit of a nudge, but this is a highly competitive space so expect more professional video content from everybody over the coming few months.
Yahoo! stock plummets as CEO says ad sales are slowing
Yahoo! stock has dropped more than 13% today since CEO Terry Semel told investors that ad revenue is slowing in the automotive and financial sectors. The company’s third quarter sales and profits will likely be at the low end of forecasts, the company’s CFO confirmed. Stock in Google, Amazon and eBay also took a hit in the hours after the statements as well.
So many questions could be asked and now seems like as good a time to ask them as any. Are the chickens about to come home to roost? Is the recent explosion of innovation on the web made possible only by an advertising market that isn’t sustainable? Are all the exciting new tools coming online subsidized at best by tried and true sectors like news and the ads bought against it for things like automobiles and financial services? Will a weakened Yahoo! finally get scooped up by Microsoft or another major player in both a vindication of old school computing and preparation for the future?
I think that such statements would be far too drastic. The web is here to stay as a primary communication technology and it’s a great place to advertise. An ongoing US economic downturn would impact every industry negatively and doesn’t reflect a greater than average weakness of the web. If anything, I think there’s still every indication that long term consumer trends point towards greater economic activity online due to decreased overhead, etc.
One thing that is worth considering is wether ad buyers are really being served well in the current market. They may well be adjusting to lower than expected returns. If click fraud is tackled meaningfully, cost per action advertising becomes more important and other innovations in online advertising make it a more positive experience for ad buyers then things could change. The emergence of Microsoft as a player in the contextual advertising market will change the overall landscape as well.
Yahoo! will launch its own new advertising program, code named Panama, that will be released in by the end of this year, according to the company.
Live.com and Yahoo! bulk up for local search brawl
A hefty list of new features were added to Microsoft’s Live Local Search yesterday and just tonight to Yahoo! Local. As both rivals get stronger, you can’t help but wonder what’s going to come after coupons for Google’s local search. Both Yahoo! and Live Local are looking good.
Yahoo! Local
Yahoo! Local now lets search users build personal collections of search results, tag locations, write reviews, see recommendations, upload pictures and build sideshows all in a dashboard based service called “my local.” Photos you tie to a particular location and mark public are visible to other users when they look at the location’s profile page on Yahoo! Local search.
I haven’t been able to tell yet whether there’s any Flickr integration with Yahoo! Local Search, but that would be a very logical step. Given that there were 1.2 million Flickr photos geotagged in the first 24 hours that the feature was available, you can imagine how powerful integration of public, geotagged photos with local search could be.
This upgraded Yahoo! Local is impressive. It’s a lot like Yahoo! TripPlanner, but I foresee it being much more useful. Google’s local search is pretty good, and I appreciate the reviews they pull in, but Yahoo! functionality appears to have taken the lead. I use Google local search every time I go to a new restaurant, for example, but I think I’m going to be trying Yahoo! and Live first for awhile. That said, integration of the several related domains on Yahoo! is still quite awkward and I hope that will change.
Live.com Local
Microsoft’s Live Local Search added new features yesterday as well. Those include a white-pages style people search, the ability to draw on and annotate maps and a cool feature to have any business’s details sent by text message to your mobile phone so you’ll have them without going online. Live Local already offered a service to simultaneously connect your phone and a business’s phone with one click.
This Live Local upgrade also extended to more than 100 the list of cities you can get a Virtual Earth powered “bird’s eye view” of. The Live Local team says that there are now hundreds of thousands of new WiFi access points that Live uses for its “locate me” feature - determining your physical location on its map.
Update: Live just put out a mobile version, see CrunchGear for coverage.
It’s been clear that local search has always had a lot of potential; it’s exciting to see these two major players innovating and making it a much richer experience. As the usefulness of local search grows, so does the business that can go on there. I love many Google services, but its local search is looking pretty sparse now compared to Yahoo! and Live. Ask.com’s local search and Plazes are worth a look as well. There’s a whole lot going on in local search these days.
Yahoo! Go for TV puts more Yahoo! properties on your TV
Yahoo! Go for TV will release a new beta version tonight with better Flickr integration, picture in picture viewing capability, movie recommendations from Yahoo! Movies, the ability to access music on your local network and support for a larger number of TV tuner cards. The basic Yahoo! Go for TV product is a downloadable digital video recording service for Windows machines. The first version launched in April. It’s competition with Microsoft’s Windows Media Center, which is preloaded on computers at purchase versus the free download from Yahoo!
Yahoo! Go for TV previously allowed users to peruse various general streams from Flickr (”interestingness” for example) but will now provide access to personal photos so those can be shared with a group around the tube. Windows Media Center allows photo display but doesn’t include an online component.
The Yahoo! movie recommendation engine on Yahoo! Movies asks users to define their taste on a continuum from indy to Hollywood and then rate up to 10 apparently psychologically revealing movies. It then suggests movies playing in theaters near you, movies available for purchase on DVD and movies playing on TV. The previous version of Yahoo! Go for TV didn’t offer any personalized recommendations. Windows Media Center allows movies to be purchased through MovieLink.
The ability to access locally stored music is already available from Microsoft’s product and the feature’s absence was a common complaint when Yahoo! Go for TV launched. I won’t try to do an extensive comparison of the two services here, but if you are interested in a media center type service then you can check out Yahoo! Go for TV will be a more full featured option starting today. Flickr users may be particularly interested.
Yahoo! inches Flickr into search
Apparently for the first time, limited photos from Flickr are now appearing in Yahoo! Search results. User driven indexing for search is part of what made Flickr exciting all along, I know it’s the first place I go to find images of plants (try searching by Latin names), places and events.
Lingxian Ding wrote on the Yahoo! Search blog today that the integration is starting with searches like funny photos, interesting photos, travel and black and white. It’s a very limited trial (those are literally the only search queries that appear to bring back Flickr results) but the company will presumably expand the integration across more search results in time.
As I wrote last night in a profile of startup Pixsy, image search is a rapidly expanding part of the search world. It’s also quite a task to keep image search up to date. In Flickr, Yahoo! has a userbase of hip photographers continually uploading and tagging pictures in real time. Things could get very interesting if Yahoo! started putting recent Flickr photos into news search, though that may be easier said than done.
It’s also notable that neither Yahoo! nor Google run ads on their image search pages (Ask.com and Pixsy do) so any way that quality images can be leveraged on pages with advertising makes sense.
The Yahoo! Photos site is much larger than Flickr, but its users are just getting introduced to the idea of sharing their photos with the world. Flickr users are accustomed to this, but may post edgier photos as well. With a reported 1.5 billion images indexed as of last year, Yahoo! is clearly looking to Flickr for quality and not quantity. Traditional image search usually brings up a lot of low quality photos that are only marginally related to your search term - that’s not the case with Flickr.
Comscore: MySpace Video traffic doubled in July
Web traffic analyst firm Comscore has released their numbers for July and the most striking finding was that traffic to MySpace Video has doubled since June. Prime competitor YouTube saw a 20% increase according to Comscore, putting the site in the top 50 sites visited on the web. Still leading the online video pack? Yahoo! Video, with 21.1 million visitors, up 28-percent from June.
Traffic numbers are a real stab in the dark, and the last time we reported on Comscore numbers it was regarding Del.icio.us. Comscore showed a decline in the site’s traffic, owner Yahoo! insisted that the data was incorrect and Hitwise backed up Yahoo! statements with numbers last week.
What to make of it all? Well, throw in a giant grain of salt, but there are some tentative conclusions you could draw here. I think it’s an interesting quantification of the impact of MySpace’s video play, launched in January in competition with third party video services like YouTube. It also shows that those MySpace’s actions that have hurt the viral nature of third party services in the MySpace ecosystem have not stopped YouTube from seeing continued growth. You have to wonder about other companies launching today though, with MySpace being a less hospitable environment than it was when YouTube took off.
Ultimately though, just as the much beloved Flickr is far smaller still that the legacy site Yahoo! Photos (which is almost 10 times larger), so too is Yahoo! Videos the silent leader at the top of the heap while everyone is talking about the spread of innovation amongst its smaller competitors.
A related study by research firm InStat last week argued that they expect the market for online video to grow to ten times its current size over the next 5 years. Who will be the major players in that market? It may be tough for any particular feature set to overcome the momentum of the early movers. Will they be able to monetize their positions? The future of online video certainly looks like a fight. See also this morning’s post on the new partnership between three video startups, Eyespot, Blip.tv and Veoh.
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IM interoperability: not just a dream anymore
Microsoft just announced that today marks the first day that interoperability between its IM client and Yahoo! Messenger with Voice is available. Microsoft says this is the first time two distinct, global consumer brands have made their IM clients interoperable. The combined user base of nearly 350 million accounts is the world’s largest, the company says. IM interoperability took so long that I thought it was never going to happen.
Windows Live Messenger is the newest version of MSN Messenger. Yahoo! Messenger with Voice is the newest IM client from Yahoo!
The lack of interoperability across IM systems has long been a primary complaint from users. Services like Trillian for Windows or Adium for Mac have helped bridge the gaps between services, but at a loss of the unique interfaces and some features from one system or another that users may prefer.
Today’s news should make IM much more valuable for dedicated users of both systems. It’s good to see that though both companies have been working hard at developing value added interfaces for their own messaging services - they aren’t so afraid of losing customers that they pretend other IM clients don’t exist.
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Yahoo! China faces new copyright law
The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry, an organization with an antiquated name at the very least, has announced that it will file suit against Yahoo! China for copyright infringement under a new law that came into effect in China this weekend. The Federation says that around 90% of all music sold in China is pirated and Yahoo! China includes links to unaffiliated sites selling pirated music. The whole thing leaves a terrible taste in my mouth.
When Yahoo! handed over information on a number of dissidents and reporters to the Chinese government, it said it was just following local laws. Those individuals faced serious consequences. If international pressure is able to change Chinese law, those are the laws that should have been changed - not laws seeking to enforce a false scarcity over an ephemeral product like digital music.
When Google lost its appeal in a French court last week and was ruled guilty for including search results for counterfeit Louis Vuitton hand bags, most international observers thought it indicated an unrealistic and anti-American sentiment in France. For some reason intellectual property infringement in music is taken far more seriously. I hope people will think about the international politics at issue in the Yahoo! China case as well.
Specifically, it indicates a serious misplacement of priorities by US influence wielders. Trying to change 90% of any practice seems like tilting at windmills to me, so I have a hard time believing that pressuring China to stop persecuting electronic dissidents isn’t happening because it’s unrealistic. I think we all know why there aren’t serious resources invested in such a campaign - but I don’t know how much profit there was to be made in challenging apartheid South Africa, either.
Estimating damages from such practices in the developing world seems unrealistic, as it’s hard to imagine that most pirated goods would be bought at full market value if pirated alternatives were unavailable. Having read about highly militarized raids on the producers of pirated movies in the developing world, tying this case into larger questions of IP law like drug patents (lobbyists tie them together) and thinking about that number - 90% - really makes me think that some other business model other than scarcity has got to emerge around fluid commodities like digital music. For a good read on these topics, I recommend Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy.
Of all the laws to change in China, what a shame this is the one that international influence worked its power on. What will Yahoo! Music do? They weren’t willing to challenge Chinese law on human rights, will they do so when it comes to search results and listings? If it makes sense for Yahoo! to change their practices in China, does it make sense for Google to change its practices in France? What does this mean for search?
Yahoo! Messenger releases Mac IM 3.0
The Yahoo! IM team just released the 3.0 version of Yahoo! IM for Mac. Yahoo! Messenger for Mac was last updated in September, 2003. Its feature set is interesting, but it appears to lack two of the PC version’s most compelling qualities: VOIP and the growing library of plugins built on the recently released software development kit. It’s hard for me to imagine using any single IM client on my Mac when I can use Adium and connect with all major IM systems at once.
Here’s what it does have:
- A new interface built in Cocoa, very OS X looking.
- Avatars and animated emoticons, which I’m sure will appeal to a wide audience.
- Webcam support, compatible across PCs and Macs - though I personally IM when I don’t want to communicate intimately.
- Custom stealth settings, eg. everybody but my ex-girlfriend can see that I’m available if I don’t want to talk to her.
- Visual notifications using the Growl system.
- IM alerts for Yahoo! Calendar, Mail and Personals. Good idea on their part, but IM alerts for any RSS feed would be even better.
Coming soon: chat with Windows Live (MSN) users. It will be a beautiful day if even the smallest amount of forward progress towards IM compatibility appears.
I’ll be very curious to see if the VOIP and plug-ins available to PC users are included in the future features the company promises.
