Yahoo Messenger with Video Chat Comes to iPhone

Yahoo Messenger with Video Chat Comes to iPhone: "

Remember that iPhone Messenger app with video calls that Yahoo promised us late last week? Well, it’s now live in Apple’s App Store.
The new version of Yahoo Messenger enables users to make video calls and stream live video one-to-one over 3G or Wi-Fi. What makes the app really interesting is the ability to establish a video call between an iPhone and an Android device (provided it has a front-facing camera) or between an iPhone and a PC.
You can also make free voice calls to your Yahoo Messenger friends, as well as low-cost international calls with your Yahoo Voice Phone Out account. Unfortunately, this last bit is available only to users in the U.S., France, Germany, Spain and Singapore.
Finally, the new version now supports multitasking, meaning you can work on other tasks on your iPhone while the app happily runs in the background.
The app is available for free in the iTunes store.

Simpler sign-ups for Yahoo! users with OpenID

How many times have you created a new account at a website and seen a message that said: “Thank you for creating an account. To activate your new account, please access your email and click the verification URL provided.”

Even though you just want to start using the website, this lengthy process requires you to manually perform a whole bunch of steps—including switching to your mailbox, trying to find the message the website sent you (which might be in your Spam folder), opening the message, clicking the link, etc. Until recently, we also required people to follow these steps if they wanted to sign up for a Google Account using their existing email address, such as a @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, or other address.

To make this process simpler, we’re now using an Internet standard called OpenID which is supported by several email providers, including Yahoo!. Instead of the process above, Yahoo! users who sign up with Google see the page below with a button that sends them to Yahoo! for verification.

Once you click that button, Yahoo! shows you a page to get your consent to share your email address with Google.

After you agree, you’re done and can start using any Google service, such as Google Groups, Docs, Reader, AdWords, etc. We have found that a much larger number of people complete the email verification process when this method is used.

In the future we hope to expand this feature to other email providers, and we also hope other website operators will read more on the Google Code Blog about how they can implement a similar feature.

Posted by Eric Sachs, Senior Product Manager, Google Security

source: http://bit.ly/c0nz2k

Yahoo announces Messenger 10, with better video chat

Yahoo announces Messenger 10, with better video chat: "

Yahoo is getting ready to roll out the latest version of its Yahoo Messenger chat app, and a beta version of Yahoo Messenger 10 is already available for Windows users. This time around, the focus is on new features for webcams. Now you can start a high-quality video call (with audio) from within an IM window, which is a step up from the low-quality video calls with no audio that Yahoo had before.

These improvements are only for 1:1 calls to other buddies who have Yahoo Messenger 10, though. If you're using Yahoo Messenger to broadcast video to multiple people, you're still stuck with no sound and lower video quality. Video calling also gets some of the features you might be used to from apps like Skype: putting calls on hold, entering full screen mode, and repositioning your video windows.

Yahoo's also jumping on the 'activity stream' bandwagon: you can put your buddy list in update mode, and see what your friends are doing on other social sites, like Twitter and Last.fm. You can start a chat from the updates view, and the update you're talking about will show up inline in your IM window, so your friends know what you're responding to. Yahoo Messenger 10 also finally has the ability to sort your buddy list by availability, so the contacts who are actually online and available will show up at the top.

Bing Becomes the Main Alternative to Google Search

Microsoft and Yahoo announced a partnership that will allow Microsoft to better compete with Google by consolidating its market share in search and search advertising. Microsoft will acquire a 10 year license to Yahoo's search technology and it will power Yahoo Search.

Bing will become Google's main competitor in search, with a market share of about 28% in the US (comScore, June 2009) and about 11% worldwide (StatCounter). After a successful relaunch in May, Microsoft's search engine didn't convince many people to switch from Google. Bing's ranking algorithms have been improved and Microsoft has a lot of interesting specialized search engines (a great interface for image search, an excellent travel site), but the overall experience doesn't offer too many reasons to use Bing as your main search engine.

"Through this agreement with Yahoo!, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company. Success in search requires both innovation and scale. With our new Bing search platform, we've created breakthrough innovation and features. This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness," said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO.

"As a result of the deal, Microsoft, which has great technologists and deep pockets, will have the scale to bring users faster, more useful and more personally relevant search. Competition equals innovation. But with one player dominating 70% of search, that field has been pretty lopsided. This transaction will create a healthy competitor that’ll keep everyone on their toes," said Carol Bartz, Yahoo's CEO.

I don't think scale is the missing ingredient from Bing's recipe: Google managed to create a search engine that offered great results even when it was just a small project. "Google ended 1999 averaging about 7 million searches each day, a roughly 70,000% increase over the 10,000 searches per day that were performed on the Google site in December 1998," announced a newsletter from 2000. Microsoft should focus on innovation, on finding new ways to improve search quality and to make the results more useful, instead of trying to better compete with Google.

from http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/07/bing-becomes-main-alternative-to-google.html

Communication Evolution

Communication Evolution @ Yahoo! Video