Posts Tagged ‘yahoo’

Alternatives to Google

Saturday, August 14th, 2010
Posted in Web · Tags: , , ,

Due to recent statements from Google on net neutrality, privacy and anonymity, I’m beginning to wonder if its a good idea to use one site for everything. After all organizations like WikiLeaks could not exist without anonymity, plus I believe net neutrality is important for information to remain available, the growth of new businesses, services and websites in general. I like many of Google’s products, but I believe it would be best to spread your “data” around. Plus it’s not that hard, many sites use OpenID or don’t require log ins. If you are looking for alternatives to Google, here are some websites to try.

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Yahoo Buzz and DZone

Friday, August 22nd, 2008
Posted in Web · Tags: , ,

There are so many web development blogs, tips and tricks coming out every week it’s hard to get around to it all. I use Digg’s API, feeds from CSS Beauty, CSS Vault and many others going through Yahoo! Pipes and then into Google Reader. This helps me get a lot of stuff, but at the same time filter much of the stuff I don’t want out. But I still miss a few good tidbits of information out there.

Yahoo! Buzz is another story promotion site along the same vein as Digg. Yahoo promises a API soon, but their feeds already send the original story link, category and thumbnail in it. They need to add more categories, however I think the site is too general already. Its great for the person that just wants quick general news in a wide range of interests but more categories or a tagging system is needed to filter out much of the same news all around the web.

Dzone is a developer’s focused Digg site. It’s a decent site, despite it doesn’t have enough users or enough high quality data coming in. They have a huge amount of categories which can help you filter out what you want or don’t want. Personally I’d like it if they added the original story link’s to their feeds.

You might think would decrease the number of people that go to the site, but it would increase the number of people that use the site’s feeds. In return the site might become popular enough to get a higher ranking on Google; Thus, advertising revenue would increase, more people would submit stories to get better SEO, more people would login to vote stories up or down to prevent spam and better control the quality of frontpage and to make comments. But of course this is all speculation, but maybe they should just take that chance to see what happens.

Since using Digg’s API, I’ve found myself going to Digg only when there is a good story that I want to read the comments on, when I get really bored and want to see stories in the categories I’m not using the API for. Digg still gets plenty of traffic, despite the fact their API has been released for well over year. Dzone has potential to pick up where Digg left off but for now I’ll think I’ll pass it up.

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Get Yahoo Weather with SimplePie

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
Posted in Web Development · Tags: , , ,

SimplePie is a new PHP library made to make parsing RSS feeds easy and fun. Yes I said fun, because its very easy and the docs are well written. RSS is more than just news, it can be images, video and podcasts. Mash up the data however you want, I’ve seen some innovative and unique things done so far. They also offer sample code on making a site like popurls/Original Signal.

Figure I’d share some code I used with SimplePie and a Yahoo Weather RSS feed. I can’t post it all on the homepage as its really long. It does transform and output the data nicely (not any CSS styling but I do calculate the wind direction and some other things). Please note that Yahoo only permits you to use their Weather RSS feed on non-commercial sites.

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Yahoo! Auctions Officially Dead

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007
Posted in Web · Tags:

I remember back before 2001 or so when Yahoo! Auctions was free. It was almost like it was a beta version, as they introduced many new features little by little. Sure they copied some ideas from eBay, but one nice feature was to autosubmit auctions until they sold. I used that feature quite a few times. Later on they lowered the resubmission maximum to five times, then you had to recreate the auction to submit it again. Then around 2001, Yahoo decided to make them require people to pay to use them. They went down to about 10% of the auctions they had before. Even after they made their auctions free again around 2005, they never got the users to come back. It was primary a site with lots of fraud going on. I’ve seen lots of new laptops selling for like $100-$300 dollars (almost all sold from Brooklyn, New York), and it seemed all the sellers only had like 2 or 3 reviews all by each other. As far as I know Yahoo didn’t care either that this was going on. If they had stayed free all these years they might of been able to gain market share, who knows. Back in 2001, Yahoo went through a lot of their properties to figure out ways to make some money and cut costs. They also made changes to Yahoo Mail about this time also. They no longer allowed free POP access and it seemed they made their spam filters very weak, in an effort to make people pay extra for better spam protection. I guess Yahoo is having some more growing pains.

Yahoo! US Auction sites are retiring. Last day to list your items: June 3, 2007 | Last day to bid/buy: June 16, 2007

Yahoo! Auctions

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