I remember back in the late ’90s when KTU hit the radio airwaves in NYC. For what seemed like the first five years the station played music, they referred to themselves as the “all new KTU”. It seemed like the station was no longer new after the first year or so. (perhaps that’s why some blogs refer to companies as startups over half a decade later!)

This afternoon I received an email from Yahoo regarding their Calendar and Notepad products. The email is labeled as a service announcement and starts with the following text:

“Yahoo! Calendar Beta will soon be renamed “All-New Yahoo! Calendar,” and Yahoo! Notepad Beta will soon be renamed “All-New Yahoo! Notepad.”

The email continues…

“The old Yahoo! Calendar and the old Yahoo! Notepad will close soon, and we will move you to the All-New Yahoo! Calendar and the All-New Yahoo! Notepad in the coming few weeks. We will automatically move your Calendar and Notepad information for you. After we move your information, you will receive an email from us confirming that the information has been moved.”

The email then provides a list of features of the All New Yahoo! Calendar and All New Yahoo! Notepad products. Lastly there’s a link to read more about the new features of the All New Yahoo! Calendar (or ANY!C for short).

So basically here is the net of the email – the current Yahoo Calendar is now the “Old Yahoo Calendar” and the new Yahoo Calendar is now the “All New Yahoo! Calendar”. But soon the “All New Yahoo! Calendar” will become the “Yahoo Calendar” and the “Old Yahoo Calendar” will become the “Retired Yahoo Calendar”. If you are using the “Old Yahoo Calendar”, your info will be moved automatically into the “All New Yahoo! Calendar” which will then, at some point in the future, be renamed to the Yahoo Calendar. Get it?

Find more stories about: beta, yahoo

Earlier this month Yahoo announced that they would be selling, no closing, no sun-setting, no selling the bookmarking service Delicious. Many tech bloggers were very upset at the non-announcement by Yahoo. I believe that Yahoo made developers angry by closing (now they are selling) Delicious.

I immediately thought that the best possible acquirer for Delicious was Disqus. I still believe commenting service Disqus is well positioned to acquire Delicious.

AOL Techcrunch blogger Michael Arrington noted yesterday that Yahoo turned down a Delicious sale in 2009 with an acquisition price of $15 million. He also noted that his base of contacts would be interested in an acquisition with a sub-$5 million dollar pricetag.

Let me explain why Disqus + Delicious makes sense and would help increase Disqus’ visibility and stickyness. More and more sites that I use on a daily basis are using Disqus for their commenting engine (I use Disqus on my transit resource InsideTransit). Disqus provides a page (which I doubt many people ever visit) where you can view all of your comments – or anyone else’s comments left using the Disqus service across any blog.

Since the Disqus software is already installed on a blog, adding the ability to allow for a person to bookmark a story or webpage would be as easy as adding a bookmark button to the Disqus widget. Naturally I know there would be a large integration to move Delicious into the Disqus architecture. I’ve been a part of a number of billion-dollar mergers and have seen both good and bad integrations.

For blogs and websites not currently using Disqus as their commenting service, this new acquisition would be a great marketing vehicle. And more importantly, for publishers using Disqus (either pre- or post-acquisition), it means a wealth of combined analytics regarding who is commenting and bookmarking on a blog or web site. Readers would also be able to see a combined view of their blog participation and the sites they’ve bookmarked.

Disqus has only raised a very small amount of funding but their lead investor is Union Square Ventures. And from what I understand USV’s Fred Wilson just raised a new $200 million round of capital. Just saying…

Find more stories about: delicious, Disqus, social bookmarking, social media, yahoo

During the time CN hoster Rackspace was down (just about three hours!), I read some of the posts regarding the decision by Yahoo to close the web bookmarking service Delicious. I remember years ago that Delicious was a big traffic driver if you hit the front page…no idea if this is still the case as CN hasn’t made the home page since the Jets had a winning season.

You will probably see 50 “top x delicious replacements” posts over the next few days – Zee’s Next Web appears to have posted the first list. I would ask that someone in the Portland area check in on ReadWriteWeb writer Marshall Kirkpatrick over the next few days as I know how much he passionately cared about Delicious.

I am not going to reblog the facts of the case – you can read 100 other posts for that. But I did realize something by reading the posts and the messages on Twitter. Yahoo just pissed off the one group they shouldn’t have. That group? Developers.

I’ve written in the past that Yahoo should have learned to embrace the developer community. I believe Yahoo would be a much stronger company today had they realized that getting developers excited about your offerings means more usage of said offerings. If you look at Apple and Google, the developer community is what made their devices a success. The iPhone or Android phone would NEVER be the huge moneymakers and game changers if it wasn’t for us, the developers.

When I think of building an app using an API, I can’t remember the last time I thought of using Yahoo – whether it’s for search, maps, etc. I go to Google because while Google isn’t known for customer service, they do seem to care about developers. And now I wonder if any developer will want to work with Yahoo when they know that services in their area might be closed at any time.

Look, we all know that Delicious probably isn’t used by mainstream Internet users. My mother isn’t saving her card club website on delicious – she saves it on AOL or in Internet Explorer. But Delicious did have a very passionate community (just see Marshall’s post) of early adopters, developers and other techies who used the service on a regular basis.

I’d love to learn what it actually cost to run Delicious. I just can’t imagine that it was a huge expense. My guess is that the Yahoo executive team saw no revenues coming from the Delicious line item and cut it. Sometimes it’s about goodwill.

I am sorry Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, but I think you just made a huge mistake. One that will sting today but will hurt for a much longer period of time.

Find more stories about: delicious, Web 2.0, yahoo

This morning I attended the Yahoo and Nokia press conference at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square. I don’t attend many press conferences but I have to say this one was a snoozefest. I went in with my developer hat on since I am working on mobile strategies now for my startup. I thought I might hear something about how Nokia/Yahoo would be pulling in developers - but except for a couple times Carol mentioned the word developer, my theory was not valid.

I really want to be excited for both Nokia and Yahoo – but not sure this deal will really bring in any new share for either company. If you don’t use Yahoo Maps today, you won’t when there is a badge for Nokia on it. And I doubt anyone will buy a Nokia handset when they see the Yahoo Mail/Chat logos on the box.

Here are my notes plus a photo of both Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.

• The financial terms were not disclosed
• Nokia will power Yahoo Maps and Navigation under their Ovi brand
• Yahoo will power email and chat on Nokia mobile devices
• The partnership will begin to be seen in production in the second-half of 2010
• Carol Bartz on Yahoo Maps, “we haven’t been focused on our maps platform” and “we lost focus on maps about 2 years ago” – I can’t believe Yahoo is going to try to focus on Maps now when they are the #4 player? I haven’t heard one developer (including myself) ever talk about using Yahoo Maps for development
• Bartz – “we will partners with others to leverage their strengths”
• there was a lot of talk about developing markets and countries – Kallasvuo noted that Nokia is #1 worldwide and wants to be #1 in US market as well.
• the deal isn’t exlusive and Yahoo will continue to push their services on other devices including iPhone and Android
• Bartz said that in a couple of weeks we will be WOWd by the new social features and integration that Yahoo will be launching around Yahoo Mail

I will post my thoughts on this deal in relation to the other players that appear to be dominating the US market (Android, iPhone, HTC) later this week.

Find more stories about: Android, iphone, mobile, Nokia, yahoo

I just received the email below from Yahoo regarding their Yahoo Publisher Network which they have announced will be closing in a month — April 30, 2010 to be exact. The Yahoo Publisher Network was supposed to be just like Google’s AdSense product.

I tried the Yahoo Publisher Network on all of my sites but eventually moved it to only one slot on HTMLCenter. The results were so poor that it almost made sense not to run any ads at all over running the Yahoo Publisher Network. It would be great if Yahoo would provide an overview of why they were never able to get good paying quality ads for their publishers as it might help other ad networks with their fill rates and CPM offerings.

If you are running Yahoo Publisher Network code, you must remove it by April 30, 2010 or nothing will be displayed in the ad slot. Interestingly Yahoo is pushing their publishers to Chitika for search ads. Robin from Techcrunch wonders why Yahoo didn’t push publishers to Microsoft’s ad platform considering their search deal. Perhaps Chitika paid for the promotion? No idea, but Robin’s question is a good one.

There’s no note on the Yahoo Publisher Network website regarding the closure and it appears you can still apply for the program as of the time of this post.

Here’s the full email I received:

Find more stories about: Chitika, online advertising, yahoo

Monster has announced that they will be acquiring the “assets” of Yahoo HotJobs for $225 million in cash. I’m not going to scrape the press release, you can read it here. I wonder what will be left of Yahoo after all of their consolidations, partnerships and sales. Yahoo says today’s sale will allow them to focus on their core businesses and, “delivering exceptional experiences to users, partners and advertisers.”

Here are the specific particulars regarding the agreement on top of the HotJobs acquisition, “Monster and Yahoo! have also entered into a three year commercial traffic agreement, to take effect upon the closing of the acquisition, in which Monster will become Yahoo!’s provider of career and job content on the Yahoo! homepage in the United States and Canada. The traffic agreement calls for performance based annual payments calculated by clicks and expressions of interest, subject to annual floors and ceilings. In addition, the traffic agreement provides Monster with an exclusive right for a period of time following the closing of the acquisition to negotiate similar traffic agreements with Yahoo! properties on a global basis, including countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America, subject to certain limitations.”

The job aggregators including SimplyHired and Indeed are doing well because they pull in jobs from multiple sources. But many of the jobs that the aggregators pull in come from Monster and that means Monster most likely made money on the initial job posting.

The interesting thing here is that Web 1.0 is still alive and kicking. It’s also interesting that when you look at so many categories, the Web 1.0 site in that category is still the biggest player.

As a side note, I still think Yahoo will wind up with AOL – the more they sell off, the more appealing the merger would be. Especially as both businesses get even closer in terms of offerings.

Find more stories about: acquisitions, job boards, Monster, yahoo

I am a happy Yahoo Mail user. I’ve been a Yahoo Mail user since the early days. I also know that I am a bad tech blogger and early adopter because I don’t use (and make love to) Gmail. I regularly get noogies at tech conferences when others learn about my choice.

Lately I’ve noticed issues with email delivery to my Yahoo Mail account. Sometimes emails are delivered on time, but many are delivered late. And the delayed delivery seems to vary – I can’t put my finger on it. Even the exact same email can be delivered in real-time on one test but another test takes half a day to arrive.  At first I thought it was only emails coming from Rackspace servers as they noted there was an issue a couple of weeks ago with mail delivery. But this past week, the delayed email delivery seems to be coming from all sides.

One interesting note – mail that gets forwarded from my gMail account always seems to come immediately. The same message sent directly to my Yahoo Mail account sometimes is delayed.

Yesterday it caused an issue as newer emails showed up before the previous emails which made for a very odd exchange with a client.

Do you use Yahoo Mail? If so, have you noticed any delivery delays over the past few weeks?

Find more stories about: email, mail, yahoo, Yahoo Mail

This weekend Yahoo is hosting the Open Hack event in NYC. The event brings together Yahoo developers and the public to learn what Yahoo has to offer developers as we all build our applications and startups. The Open Hack will run throughout the night as well – and they have provided a dop bag with toothpaste, mouthwash, etc. to stay clean.

If you read CN regularly, you know that I always do my best to grab schwag for all of you that couldn’t make it to the event. I was able to grab the following:

• sheets of stickers as seen below – there are so many stickers on each sheet that I am going to cut the sheets in half so more of you can have them
• a tshirt – I went with Women’s Medium size

If you’d like either of the above, send your address to general-at-centernetworks-d-o-t-com. I will ship anywhere in the world. The stickers are first come first serve and the tshirt winner will be randomly selected on Monday.

Find more stories about: NYC, yahoo, Yahoo Open Hack

Yahoo is bringing their “Open Hack” developer conference to NYC next weekend. The Open Hack will be held on October 9th and 10th. Yahoo says they are still accepting registrations although they manually approve each person. There’s a wiki with more information about agenda, location and speakers.

Here’s Yahoo’s description of Hack Days: “Yahoo! Hack Days started back in 2005, when a team of engineers designed an event to see what sort of interesting and innovative applications people would build using Yahoo! tools and technologies over a 24-hour period. At the end of the day, they presented working hacks to roomful of colleagues and peers. Since then, “hack” has become an integral part of culture at Yahoo!. ”

The sessions run through the night and you can nap at the conference center. They say there will be lots of “geek food” – let’s just hope they don’t bring any Twitter cupcakes – we all know how those ended up for me :)

I am hoping we will learn why we should use Yahoo tools and developer platforms over their Google counterparts.

Find more stories about: NYC, Web 2.0, yahoo

NY-based file sharing service Drop.io has announced a new partnership with Yahoo today. The partnership brings a new application named “Attach Large Files” directly as part of the applications menu within Yahoo Mail.

When you want to attach a file up to 100mb to a Yahoo email, the Attach Large File app creates a drop.io share, uploads the file to it, and attaches a link to the drop.io share inside of the email. In my testing, the application worked well.

The drop.io team notes that the app was built on top of the drop.io API. The app is a default and is available directly in the “applications” menu inside of Yahoo Mail. While I don’t see using the service for uploading a simple image or Word doc, for larger videos or photos it could work very well. And the offering should provide more visibility for drop.io to a mainstream audience.

Here’s a video overview of how the Attach Large Files application works:

Related: Three alternatives to WebEx

Find more stories about: Drop.io, email, mail, nextNY, NYC, yahoo

The big news last week was the partnership that Yahoo and Microsoft entered into. Paul McDougall noted, “Microsoft’s search tools will appear on Yahoo’s sites while Yahoo takes on sales role.”

Sometime last month the default “server not found” page that my ISP provides seemed to change again. The page says it’s powered by Yahoo Search. But after a handful of tests over the weekend, it seems like it’s more a page of ads than anything else. I showed the page to a couple of “regular” Internet users and both were confused as to the provided results. Most people today know that ads on search are separated from the organic results.

What I was provided with by my ISP is some sort of combined ads and organic search results into one result set. In fact on some searches, organic results were nowhere to be found on the first page. What makes this even more odd is that the numbering for the results continues from the paid “sponsored” ads to the organic results.  

Here are a few examples (click to view larger images):

In this example, the domain googl23.com was not found. I was redirected to the ISP search page which displays 9 results – all “sponsored” – no organic results whatsoever and no ability to move to another page. Some of the paid results seem to have nothing to do with Google – car engine parts, high paying jobs with no work needed, and electrical engineering information.

Here we did a search using the search box on the page for Flickr. We get 8 results, first 3 are sponsored and the same pattern follows on all pages. As you can see here, the numbers move from 1-8 with no clear break between paid ads and organic results. What makes this example even more odd is that the first result is for Mike Bloomberg who is running for NYC mayor.

This last example comes from clicking one of the related terms on the Flickr results page above. It’s interesting that apartments, personals and cheap airfares are somehow related to Flickr. I clicked digital photography. Here we see a page with 9 paid search results and then results 10-14 are organic (I think).

It’s a shame that they call the results “web search results” when so much of the page is filled with ads. I understand that this source of income is very important for an ISP however a bit of separation is absolutely required. Sadly I think we will see more of these inline results ads in the future.

Find more stories about: online advertising, sponsored reviews, yahoo

I’ve been a happy Yahoo Mail user forever and to the best of my memory, I don’t ever remember the service being down. As of 7pm Eastern this evening, Yahoo Mail has not been functioning. The few times that I’ve received an error, a simple browser refresh fixes the issue – but not this time. The error message remains even when switching over to the very old “classic” version of Yahoo Mail.

There are lots of people on Twitter who have also had issues accessing the mail service.

As always, please report in if Yahoo Mail is down for you.

Update: 7:45pm – it appears Yahoo Mail is back to normal.

Find more stories about: email, mail, yahoo

German-based Jimdo has put out a call to all Geocities users…a lifeboat if you will. Jimdo launched in 2007 and currently has a staff of 30.  The service offers an easy way to create a website and the company says that no technical skills are required.

Their “lifeboat” is a new offering they are near completion on which will allow Geocities users to transfer their sites into Jimdo. The basic Jimdo service is free and you can upgrade to JimdoPro for $5/month. JimdoPro offers more detailed statistics, larger storage space, personalized domain name, and no ads.

They are offering Geocities’ (and Google Pages) users 10% off the JimdoPro fee. This is a smart move for Jimdo as it makes them look like heros for helping users of a system that is closing.

Find more stories about: Germany 2.0, startups, web, Web 2.0, yahoo

Search engines Yahoo and AOL have released their "2008 top searches" lists today. Check out the Yahoo and AOL year in review websites to view the full lists of all types of searches. Oops she did it again — Britney Spears leads on both search engines. Somehow Yahoo has Britney as the top overall search but not the top search in the celebrity category?

Here’s the lists from the News category:

Some other fun bits….

• How to tie a tie = most popular how-to search on AOL
• AOL says Las Vegas was the most searched U.S. city for travel – NYC placed 5th
• Yahoo shows Jamie Lynn Spears moving up in the celebrity category – hey a teenage pregnancy and a baby daddy will do it every time!
• In Yahoo’s "influential women" category – mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano beat out Michelle Obama
• Heath Ledger and Bernie Mac lead Yahoo’s dead people category

Find more stories about: 2008, AOL, Quick News, search, yahoo

comScore has released their latest m:metrics report showing mobile search usage in the U.S. and several countries in Europe. Nearly 10% of mobile subscribers in the U.S. completed a mobile search and the total mobile search usage is up 68% in the U.S. In Europe where mobile usage is further along, usage is up 38%.

For all of the countries in the chart below, Google leads usage of mobile search. In the U.S., 63% of mobile searches use Google while 34% use Yahoo. In Germany, 85% use Google and in France 62% use Google. Spain and France were the only countries that had near 10% MSN search usage. 

Find more stories about: analytics, comScore, Google, metrics, mobile, Quick News, reporting, yahoo