Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Yahoo!, Social Software, web 2.0

While Yahoo! fields merger/hostile takeover offers, the company’s development team continues to push out new services. Today Yahoo! launched a retooled version of its video site. And Valleywag is reporting that the company will be launching a brand spanking new service on February 26th: A news and entertainment page featuring popular stories from around the internet.

Yahoo! Buzz as it will reportedly be known will be something of a cross between Digg and Google Trends. Top stories will be chosen through a combination of user votes and popular search results.

But Digg has one thing that Yahoo! Buzz won’t. At least not immediately. And that’s a list of links from an unlimited number of web pages. Yahoo! Buzz will only feature links to about 100 web publishers at first. Eventually the company will reportedly open Buzz up to the Yahoo! Publisher Network, which means that anyone who sells Yahoo! ads on their site could be featured on Yahoo! Buzz.

While that might sound like a good reason for people to sign up for the publisher network, as incentive to get more social networking traffic, it also means that Yahoo! Buzz is by definition going to be more limited than Digg, StumbleUpon, or other social news and bookmarking sites. But this is all rumor and speculation at this point. It’s possible Yahoo! Buzz won’t be as limited as Valleywag recommends. Or maybe it’s not even real.

If you go to buzz.yahoo.com today you’ll find a page with top search results trends. But if Valleywag is correct, that site will be the future home of Yahoo! Buzz.

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Yahoo!, Social Software, web 2.0

While Yahoo! fields merger/hostile takeover offers, the company’s development team continues to push out new services. Today Yahoo! launched a retooled version of its video site. And Valleywag is reporting that the company will be launching a brand spanking new service on February 26th: A news and entertainment page featuring popular stories from around the web.

Yahoo! Buzz as it will reportedly be known will be something of a cross between Digg and Google Trends. Top stories will be chosen through a combination of user votes and popular search results.

But Digg has one thing that Yahoo! Buzz won’t. At least not immediately. And that’s a list of links from an unlimited number of web pages. Yahoo! Buzz will only feature links to about 100 web publishers at first. Eventually the company will reportedly open Buzz up to the Yahoo! Publisher Network, which means that anyone who sells Yahoo! ads on their site could be featured on Yahoo! Buzz.

While that might sound like a good reason for people to sign up for the publisher network, as incentive to get more social networking traffic, it also means that Yahoo! Buzz is by definition going to be more limited than Digg, StumbleUpon, or other social news and bookmarking sites. But this is all rumor and speculation at this point. It’s possible Yahoo! Buzz won’t be as limited as Valleywag suggests. Or maybe it’s not even real.

If you go to buzz.yahoo.com this day you’ll find a page with top search results trends. But if Valleywag is correct, that site will be the future home of Yahoo! Buzz.

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Yahoo!, Social Software, web 2.0

While Yahoo! fields merger/hostile takeover offers, the company’s development team continues to push out new services. This day Yahoo! launched a retooled version of its video site. And Valleywag is reporting that the company will be launching a brand spanking new service on February 26th: A news and entertainment page featuring popular stories from around the internet.

Yahoo! Buzz as it will reportedly be known will be something of a cross between Digg and Google Trends. Top stories will be chosen through a combination of user votes and popular search results.

But Digg has one thing that Yahoo! Buzz won’t. At least not immediately. And that’s a list of links from an unlimited number of web pages. Yahoo! Buzz will only feature links to about 100 web publishers at first. Eventually the company will reportedly open Buzz up to the Yahoo! Publisher Network, which means that anyone who sells Yahoo! ads on their site could be featured on Yahoo! Buzz.

While that might sound like a good reason for people to sign up for the publisher network, as incentive to get more social networking traffic, it also means that Yahoo! Buzz is by definition going to be more limited than Digg, StumbleUpon, or other social news and bookmarking sites. But this is all rumor and speculation at this point. It’s possible Yahoo! Buzz won’t be as limited as Valleywag suggests. Or maybe it’s not even real.

If you go to buzz.yahoo.com today you’ll find a page with top search results trends. But if Valleywag is correct, that site will be the future home of Yahoo! Buzz.

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Filed under: World wide web, Productivity, Web services

Ever get the feeling you’d be a lot more productive at work if you didn’t spend 3 hours a day on YouTube, and another 2 hours updating your Facebook profile? 8aweek is a new Firefox plugin that helps you keep track of thet time you spend on web pages. And if you need a gentle reminder that you just can’t handle the freedom, you can tell 8aweek to restrict the amount of time you spend on certain sites.

When you install 8aweek and then reboot Firefox you should see a new browse toolbar. Click on the View habits and you’ll be taken to a web page showing how much time you’ve spent on every web site while logging was enabled. 8aweek seems to know the difference between a page you’re actively looking at and a page that’s open in a background tab and will only log pages in the foreground. But it doesn’t differentiate sub-sites. For example, Gmail and Google Reader are lumped together as Google. And since Download Squad’s blogging client Blogsmith is hosted by our parent company, AOL, 8aweek reports that we’ve been spending a lot of time at AOL.com.

You can also click on the restricted tab to add pages that you don’t want to spend too much time on. Then click the preferences tab to determine how much time is too much. By default, this setting is 30 minutes. There doesn’t appear to be a way to set different time limits for different sites.

The browser toolbar also lets you “save” links to pages you want to come back to later. So you can use 8aweek as an alternative to Read it Later or Instapaper, but with a nagging/analytic feature.

[via TechCrunch]

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Filed under: World wide web, Productivity, Web services

Ever get the feeling you’d be a lot more productive at work if you didn’t spend 3 hours a day on YouTube, and another 2 hours updating your Facebook profile? 8aweek is a new Firefox plugin that helps you keep track of thet time you spend on web pages. And if you need a gentle reminder that you just can’t handle the freedom, you can tell 8aweek to restrict the amount of time you spend on certain sites.

When you install 8aweek and then reboot Firefox you should see a new browse toolbar. Click on the View habits and you’ll be taken to a web page showing how much time you’ve spent on every web site while logging was enabled. 8aweek seems to know the difference between a page you’re actively looking at and a page that’s open in a background tab and will only log pages in the foreground. But it doesn’t differentiate sub-sites. For example, Gmail and Google Reader are lumped together as Google. And since Download Squad’s blogging client Blogsmith is hosted by our parent company, AOL, 8aweek reports that we’ve been spending a lot of time at AOL.com.

You can also click on the restricted tab to add pages that you don’t want to spend too much time on. Then click the preferences tab to determine how much time is too much. By default, this setting is 30 minutes. There doesn’t appear to be a way to set different time limits for different sites.

The browser toolbar also lets you “save” links to pages you want to come back to later. So you can use 8aweek as an substitute to Read it Later or Instapaper, but with a nagging/analytic feature.

[via TechCrunch]

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Filed under: World wide web, Productivity, Web services

Ever get the feeling you’d be a lot more productive at work if you didn’t spend 3 hours a day on YouTube, and another 2 hours updating your Facebook profile? 8aweek is a new Firefox plugin that helps you keep track of thet time you spend on web pages. And if you need a gentle reminder that you just can’t handle the freedom, you can tell 8aweek to restrict the amount of time you spend on certain sites.

When you install 8aweek and then reboot Firefox you should see a new browse toolbar. Click on the View habits and you’ll be taken to a web page showing how much time you’ve spent on every web site while logging was enabled. 8aweek seems to know the difference between a page you’re actively looking at and a page that’s open in a background tab and will only log pages in the foreground. But it doesn’t differentiate sub-sites. For example, Gmail and Google Reader are lumped together as Google. And since Download Squad’s blogging client Blogsmith is hosted by our parent company, AOL, 8aweek reports that we’ve been spending a lot of time at AOL.com.

You can also click on the restricted tab to add pages that you don’t want to spend too much time on. Then click the preferences tab to determine how much time is too much. By default, this setting is 30 minutes. There doesn’t appear to be a way to set different time limits for different sites.

The browser toolbar also lets you “save” links to pages you want to come back to later. So you can use 8aweek as an alternative to Read it Later or Instapaper, but with a nagging/analytic feature.

[via TechCrunch]

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Filed under: World wide web, Features, Productivity, Web services, Google, Googleholic, Search

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!

This edition covers:

• Google My Maps Viewer
• Google helps get Photoshop support in Wine
• Simplify mapping with Google Spreadsheets
• Google Business YouTube channel
• An overview of the other Google stories we’ve covered this week

Continue reading Googleholic for February 15, 2008

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Filed under: Internet, Features, Productivity, Web services, Google, Googleholic, Search

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!

This edition covers:

• Google My Maps Viewer
• Google helps get Photoshop support in Wine
• Simplify mapping with Google Spreadsheets
• Google Business YouTube channel
• An overview of the other Google stories we’ve covered this week

Continue reading Googleholic for February 15, 2008

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Filed under: Design, Internet, Utilities, Web services, web 2.0

If there’s one thing we love more than an image editing application with a ton of features, it’s an image editing application with a ton of features that are incredibly simple to use. And FotoFlexer seriously fits the bill. Much like Picnik, Splashup, and PikiFX, FotoFlexer is an online image editor.

You can either create an account or simply upload an image to start using FotoFlexer. You can also edit live images from your webcam or import an image from Photobucket, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, or Picasa.

The editing application is incredibly easy to use. You can perform a ton of advanced transformations with a easy mouse click. For example, we clicked the “cartoon” button to make the image above. You can also turn any image into a blueprint, Andy Warhol-like pop art image, or make your picture look like an old black and white photo.

There are also more practical tools for eliminating red-eye, reducing blemishes or wrinkles, cropping, resizing, rotating, slicing and pasting your images. If you know what you’re doing, you can also add layers to your images, much as you would with PhotoShop or GIMP.

[via Mashable]

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Filed under: World wide web, Features, Productivity, Web services, Google, Googleholic, Search

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!

This edition covers:

• Google My Maps Viewer
• Google helps get Photoshop support in Wine
• Simplify mapping with Google Spreadsheets
• Google Business YouTube channel
• An overview of the other Google stories we’ve covered this week

Continue reading Googleholic for February 15, 2008

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