AOL makes a move on Craigslist's classified territory
AOL Classifieds, which launches today in the US and Canada, allows sellers to post listings free, just as Craigslist does. (The service makes money from selling increased-visibility ads, sort of the way eBay makes money from the featured-auction option.) A UK version of the service will launch in the near future.
The service is powered by Oodle and aggregates listings from over 80,000 sources and 250 partner sites, many of them intensely local in orientation. Higher-profile members of the Oodle network include the Washington Post Express, Military.com Classified, MySpace Classifieds, Etsy, LiveDeal, and Local.com Classifieds.
AOL's Bebo becomes more of a SocialThing
By consolidating some of its acquired technologies, AOL now hopes that folding together functionality from two of its recent acquisitions will ease the pain.
AOL bought Bebo back in March 2008 for $850 million. The service, which is similar to Facebook or MySpace, skews young and is most popular in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. In August, AOL picked up SocialThing, which is a "lifestreaming" service -- that is, it aggregates status updates and other information posted by friends on multiple social networks. FriendFeed is a lifestreaming application, and the Flock browser has lifestreaming functionality as well.
A more social way to sync mobile contacts
While major service providers like Google, Microsoft and Apple offer cloud-based contact synching for personal records, DubMeNow is like a mobile business card swap.
With the Dub application loaded onto a user's phone -- the company says all US mobile phones are supported -- the user's contact information can then be blasted out to e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or other Dub users. Let's say you meet a potential client whilst out somewhere, you enter that person's number into the Dub app, and it then sends all your flagged contact information directly to that person's address book. It syncs with Outlook and CRM apps such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, and Siebel, allowing for a single contact to be sent to multiple recipients in one action.
CBS/Hulu conflict lends power to third party sites
This week, NBCU/News Corp. joint venture video service Hulu removed its content from CBS Interactive's TV.com without specifying a motive, just like it did with Boxee earlier this week.
While content producers affiliated with CBS and Hulu two are busy sorting out who's entitled to the other's content, third party sites continue to offer content from both services.
Oh, Yahoo, that's just rich
Yahoo celebrated the fifth anniversary of its own home-brewed search engine this week, and to mark the occasion they're folding multimedia ads into the sponsorede-links mix -- a big step for the company's ad program.
According to Jeff Sweat at the Yahoo Search Marketing blog (from which the above image is borrowed with thanks), the new system had a test run with a limited group of advertisers late last year, and that group saw great improvement in click-through rates -- as much as 25% in some cases. Advertisers are trying a big of everything with the new system; Pedigree has video, while another advertiser might choose to go with their logo or even an interactive element (though the example Yahoo gives -- a search -- leads to headache-inducing thoughts of recursivity).
Who needs Android? Windows Mobile gets the rest of Google's apps
Just about one year ago, Google finalized its plug-in for Windows Mobile that brought a Google search field to the WM home screen. Now, the app has expanded to include Maps, Gmail, News, and more in the same small window.
The resulting plug-in is actually more like a Google browser toolbar than anything else, due to the Windows Mobile interface, but the functionality is no less salient.
Yahoo up, Ask and Fox down in latest search rankings
ComScore's January 2009 numbers are out, and the most popular search site in America is...oh, that one you can easily guess. The less obvious numbers involve who's gaining ground, and which mega-funded search entity seems to be slipping.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, Google leads the pack in market share, accounting for 63% of all search traffic from home, work and university locations in January. Interestingly, that's down one-half of one percent -- precisely the amount by which second-ranked Yahoo is up for the month, at 21%.
Hulu apologizes as it bids an early goodbye to Boxee
Freeware media center Boxee is still very young, but offers a comprehensive solution for both managing a user's existent collection of movies, music, and photos, and discovering free online content. Unfortunately, it will be continuing ahead without support from Hulu.
In a blog post entitled Doing hard things, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar today announced that Hulu's content will no longer be available on boxee after this week. Done at the behest of content providers (aka Hollywood Studios), Kilar said that Hulu really had no choice but to suspend support for boxee.
CBS to move 'March Madness' to Silverlight
If Microsoft's Silverlight is indeed fizzling, someone didn't get the message out to the NCAA. For its annual endeavor in covering all the NCAA basketball playoff games online, CBS has opted to triple the NCAA's bandwidth over last year by switching from a Flash-based player -- which already received rave reviews -- to a Silverlight player produced in conjunction with Microsoft.
Like last year, the NCAA March Madness player will deliver every game in the NCAA Championship series to individuals who sign up for free. Online telecasts will be ad-supported, in the wake of poor reception to a subscription-based model in 2007 and earlier years, produced at the time in conjunction with YouTube. The 2008 move to an ad-supported player, the network says, led to 4.8 million total unique visitors downloading the player throughout the Championship series -- a 164% annual jump -- watching a total of 81% more hours of video.
MySpace expands smartphone support, embraces Symbian
Social network MySpace is now battling back against Facebook by adding more smartphone support to its mobile site, including new applications for both the Palm Pre and Symbian OS-based Nokia S60 phones.
Beyond the newly added Palm and Symbian, the MySpace mobile site already supports the iPhone, BlackBerry, Sidekick, and Google Android mobile platforms.
Facebook backpedals on terms snafu, seeks advice
Switching it up a bit from its usual privacy-undercutting changes to their Terms of Service, Facebook's recently changed ToS slipped in new language that many users identified as a violation of personal privacy and copyright... and, after mass uproar, promptly rolled them back again.
Controversial Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg described the changes to the ToS as an attempt to "clarify a few points for our users," but close reading of the new terms indicated it might not be that simple. (Of course, Zuckerberg claims in the same post that "In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want," an assertion that anyone who's attempted to quit the service and remove all their information can easily refute.)
iPhones will be among first to get Yahoo Mobile service
Yahoo's announced Mobile service for smartphones, which goes into beta today, will be available in March for iPhones, but not until May for hundreds of other models running Windows Mobile, as well as other major brands.
Those brands that will have to wait it out include Motorola, Nokia, RIM, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.
Half of charges against Pirate Bay dropped
Only into its second day, the criminal copyright infringement case against file sharing site The Pirate Bay has already begun to crumble.
Exposing a clear misunderstanding of how .torrent files work, the prosecution was forced to drop all charges except those of "making available," a term common among all file sharing suits.
Mobile app stores: Nokia and Microsoft each get one, too
Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia announced that its Ovi suite of mobile applications will be getting its own App store in May, and Microsoft announced Windows Marketplace for Windows Mobile devices.
Nokia's store fits into the company's Ovi suite of mobile services, and will appropriately be named The Ovi Store. It will carry the applications, games, videos, podcasts, widgets, and "personalization content" (likely wallpaper and ringtones) previously found on Download!, MOSH, and WidSets, now combined into a single location.
Moonlight 1.0 means more Silverlight apps run smoothly on Linux
Microsoft had always promised interoperability as one of its key goals for Silverlight. The way it's accomplishing this on the Linux side of the scale is by empowering Miguel de Icaza to take the project and run with it.
This week marked an important milestone in a genuine effort to take a pretty good graphical Web applications platform and make it workable for Linux. The Mono Project, a team backed by Novell and Microsoft whose goal is to make the .NET Framework workable on other platforms, including Linux (and even, if you can believe it, Windows) has released its first non-beta version of the Moonlight 1.0 plug-in.
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