Just a few days from being launched and Yahoo Pipes is putting lots of minds to work:
- five cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes
- del.icio.us flavored web search
Lots else. What comes next? Only time will tell.
Yahoo! has just launched a new service called Yahoo Pipes which offers users the ability to easily create data mashups from remixing popular feed types, including Yahoo! Search, Google Base, Flickr photos and any RSS feed on the web. Yahoo! describes it as an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator that allows you to create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.
Pipes also provides a set of functional modules to let users manipulate and transform data in oder to get the desired output. This set includes a powerful content analyzer, several data formatters, sorting modules and even translating services using BabelFish translating engine.
All these modules are integrated in an easy-to-use visual drag and drop editor that simplifies the job of building a mashup without writing a single line of code. The resulting feed can be for private use or shared with the Internet community. As Tim O’Reilly has defined it:
Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.
According to Google, their mission is to organize the information. In this case Yahoo! has won a battle letting the users create more organized, filtered and useful information by theirselves. Could it be a step towards Web3.0 in which users not only contribute but can take advantage of the rest of information their own way and share it? What comes next? Only time will tell.
Google is going to transform its Google Video service, in which users upload video content to be shared, into a Google Video Search service, a search engine to look for video content no matter where it may be hosted.
A logical step considering Google’s world-famous mission which is to organize the world’s information. Even more, after YouTube’s acquisition, Google has had two compiting products on the market and finally it’s time to fully integrate YouTube into Google’s product portfolio.
Additionally, according to Financial Times, Google is planning to share advertising revenues on YouTube with the users who upload the clips. Good news for top YouTubers and one more incentive for those users producing quality videos. Could it be the first step in building a real Google TV? What comes next? Only time will tell.
Chinese online population hit 136 million people by the end of 2006 becoming the world’s second largest behind the U.S. with a total online spending of $35,5 billion (47% more than the previous year).
Average Chinese Internet user spends $22 a month online, including payment to online services providers as well as shopping ang gaming. Still, the most popular Internet services in China are search engines (dominated by Baidu and Google and, to a lesser degree, by Yahoo!) followed by Internet portals (led by Sina.com, Netease.com and qq.com) and e-mail services.
But the most rapid growth in usage last year came from blogging. China now has 20.8 million bloggers. Top blogging sites are hosted by Sina, Qzone and MSN. Other new Internet services that are gaining particularly wide acceptance are personal Web pages similar to those on MySpace and video-sharing based on the Web 2.0 standards similar to YouTube. What comes next? Only time will tell.
MySpace.com, the leading social networking and lifestyle portal, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® (NCMEC), announced today a partnership to distribute localized online AMBER Alerts via MySpace.
In addition to its traditional distribution methods, the AMBER Alert program will now benefit from the mass distribution of the MySpace network and provide rapid, viral support to law enforcement in bringing home an abducted child. The AMBER Alerts on MySpace go live today. In other news, MySpace today announced a new set of safety features to increase online safety and privacy for its community, including email verification and an “over/ under” privacy tool for all users.
That’s very good news in finding missing children and fighting against sex offenders. Hope other big social networks will join this initiative and one day no AMBER alert will be needed. What comes next? Only time will tell.
It’s well known that there is a lot of copyrighted material from Hollywood Studios available for free on YouTube. It’s also well known that the Studios also have taken advantage of YouTube in order to get their films more popular at low cost.
But the real challenge has arrived and Hollywood is wondering whether YouTube is friend or foe. Being aware of the potencial benefits they could get, all of the major studios are negotiating licensing agreements with YouTube, but in the meantime they are also pressing YouTube to adopt filtering mechanisms faster to keep unlawful material from even showing up. Even more, some people think that Studios will sue if they don’t get the licensing deal they want.
On the other hand, Google’s is being pressed by their own investors who are willing to see whether YouTube is worth the $1,65 billion they paid for it or not. What comes next? Only time will tell.
The British Broadcasting Corporation plans to develop its online presence by providing social networking sites based on its most popular brands such as Top Gear.
BBC is thinking of following the success of such sites as MySpace or YouTube in which users contribute comments and video footage to share with other users.
Looks like the biggest traditional media corporations are starting to realize of the influence and power of social networks. This kind of corporations were thought to be the losers with this trend, but in fact, according to a Deloitte’s report, can be ideally suited for benefit as this trend develops consumer loyalty. What comes next? Only time will tell.
Recently we saw the acquisition of StudiVZ, an online german student community (facebook clone), bought by a german media giant. Now it’s turn for MyBlogLog that has been acquired by Yahoo!, as stated in MyBlogLog official blog. The unofficial numbers are around $10 million.
MyBlogLog is an online service that creates communities among blog readers who like to read the same blogs and so far it the latest step in the so-called Yahoo!’s “social media” expansion that began in 2005 with the acquisition of flickr, a photo sharing site, and continued with del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site, and Upcoming a calendaring site with, of course, capabilities to share events in the purest web2.0 style. Who comes next? Only time will tell.
Congratulations! An online german social network focused on students relationships called StudiVZ has been acquired by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, a german publishing holding company.
According to Financial Times Deutschland, Holtzbrinck has paid €85 million (about $110 million) for a community of about one million users. That makes more than $110 per user!
Furthermore, the site is a shamelessly clone of Facebook, replicating not only their business model but also information architecture and design and graphical details proving that fast-cloning is still profitable in this new web2.0 bubble. What comes next? Only time will tell.