Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Yahoo is finally releasing its web Mail program out of beta stage, at the same time integrating some new features, the most notable of which being the email to mobile phone messaging facility. 

With the new feature, Yahoo mail users who enter valid contact numbers in their contacts’ profiles can opt to send text messages or instant messages that will be sent directly into their contacts’ mobile phones as an ordinary sms or text messages. The Yahoo mail interface is also improved to facilitate shifting from one type of messaging to another.  These messages can be received by the users even if they are not connected to Yahoo mail via their mobile phones. Previously, Yahoo users can only send instant messages to their contacts whenever they are online via their mobile phones.

Of course, fully utilizing this feature requires faster connection since the new Yahoo mail portal is heavy and peppered with a lot of widgets and stuff. Users who still refuse to use the new Yahoo mail portal and are sticking it out with the old Yahoo mail portal won’t be able to use this facility. But if this new feature is not enough reason for you to shift to the new Yahoo mail portal, then might as well stick to the simple and yet faster Yahoo mail interface. 

There is no doubt that this is a great feature for a web mail. It gives users more options to connect to their contacts anytime and anywhere. But in order to be successful, Yahoo must at least try to improve on the loading time of the new Yahoo mail portal that would benefit users with slow internet connection. The new “widgetized” look of the Yahoo mail portal is a turn off among hard core web mail users who wants simple and straightforward web mail client. There’s nothing wrong with being lavishly punky, but most of the time simplicity and functionality are still what matters.

I used to read the New York Times quite a lot — this was several years ago. Eventually I just trailed off. It seemed like I was spending more time logging in than actually getting anything read. Now NYTimes.com is making My Times available, which is a portal (AAAAH! NOT THE P-WORD!) for Times content. I might have to do some more reading. You can check it out at http://my.nytimes.com/ .

I dusted off my ancient account and logged in. And actually it’s quite a bit more than NY Times content — as you can add RSS feeds and other content modules from all over the Web. When you first log in you’ll actually have a pre-populated page with all the usual portal favorites (weather, stock quotes, etc.) Choose Add Content to start making the page yours.

The front part add content page has three columns: one of Times content, one of stuff from around the Web (BBC, Yahoo, etc.) and one of widgets (photo browser, movie showtimes (?!), etc.) (You can also add RSS feeds of content that the NYT doesn’t list. Do that from the home page.) Be sure when browsing available content to explore the tabs on the left, which will give you access to more in-depth NYT items. These tabs are divided into topics and show the New York Times’ offerings and then suggestions for other content from around the Web. The eager recommendation of other stories in addition to the Times’ own makes the NYT look generous, confident, and smart. Good on you New York Times.

Anyway, moving the content around the page is as simple as click and drag. A nice feature is that you can add additional tabs to the main page; so you could have several sections divided out by category. (Gee, just like a newspaper.) As a matter of fact, if you didn’t have TOO many to read, My Times would make a very nice RSS feed reader. I’m going to have to try that for stuff I don’t want to check every day.

The only oddness I found about this site was the search for sources. I did a search for sources relating to Google and while I got Google News from the NYT as a search option, I also got pointers to NYT’s China news section. Since Google/China have recently been in the news, I can sort of see it, but I would rather see search blogs, official blogs from other engines, etc. in my search results. A search for Yahoo brought more expected results.

Lots of content, very responsive, easy to use, might be a useful feeder for low-moderate numbers of RSS feeds. I think My Times might be a portal I actually like.

Questia Media has released a library of over 5,000 books for free access on its Web site. You can get started browsing at http://www.questia.com/publicdomainindex .

You can look at the top ten books (which include Tarzan, Freud, and Huckleberry Finn) or browse the collection alphabetically (by title or author.) Listings include title, author, publisher, and publication date (I guess these are all public domain books.) Click on a book and you’ll get a screen that looks something like Google Reader (make sure you have JavaScript enabled.)

You can page through, read the text, and search, but if you want to do things like highlight pages, you’ll need a Questia account. Despite the fact that access to these books is free, Questia itself is not. (There is a free trial available but it’s a trial.)

Since school is starting, this would be a quick place to find and search the classics if you’ve got a paper to do. Of course you’ve also got Project Gutenberg…

* Don't need to pay for unnecessary power user licenses
* No software to install, and no continual updates
* Minimal, if any, training required
* Relatively easy to include workers outside the enterprise
* Online documents are not scattered on C drives or fileshares
* Integration of past application silos

* Power users and sophisticated documents are not supported
* Records management is difficult and requires extra work
* 99.9% uptime guarantee is for Gmail only
* Google is not liable for lost data, profits, or revenue
* Live telephone support is 17/5
* Difficult to plan for product capabilities and rollouts

Google has caught the attention of enterprises with its inexpensive Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) product: available at $50 per user per year. However, the seductive price can spell trouble for enterprise architects and their companies if they don't do their homework: the solution's rudimentary feature set means that enterprises need to pick carefully and implement slowly.

While Google's entrance is adding momentum to using software as a service (SaaS) for communication, collaboration, and content management, it's unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it's accelerating.

A couple of weeks ago Yahoo announced that it will be integrating video content into its photo sharing site, Flickr aside from intensifying content development into its Yahoo video portal by pushing more licensed videos from its partner content providers. But this seemed to have not generated too much hype and interest from the online video consumer crowd. And so, Yahoo has been silent since then until Mike Folgner, general manager of Yahoo video and Rebecca Paoletti, director of video strategy told the NYT about what Yahoo is really planning to launch which is:

a complete YouTube like video portal where users can view and share videos, create playlists and interact with other members

The question now is whether Yahoo is buying another YouTube clone? or is it developing a new video portal from its current Yahoo video and the technology used by Jumpcut, the video portal founded by Mike himself Buying another YouTube-like video portal is a pretty bleak option due to the scarcity of video portal start ups available for buyout and of course I don’t think Yahoo would be willing to stake into another video startup after buying out Jumpcut.

Yahoo’s new video portal is slated for launch before the year ends. We could only hope it could offer something new and far better features than the very popular and currently the leading video search portal, YouTube. Otherwise, Yahoo’s new video portal may be doom to fail even before it is launched.

The Microsoft adCenter announced it will be changing its trademark policy in September.

While "[t]he heart of the trademark policy is unchanged". adCenter reported, but they will not keep lists of approved affiliates etc.

They seem to be moving towards the Google model.

Google yesterday announced they’ll be rolling out a new look for their social network Orkut. It’s only being shown to a small portion of users right now. I can’t see it, for instance, but others now posted their screenshots, like the one below by Info-Mundo.net (Creative Commons licensed).

Old design

New design

Shown above is user “Thiago.exe”. This is not the homepage you see when you log-in, which contains less information, but the profile page of that user. In the new design, many of the edges have been rounded off for a smoother look. The custom, more playful first letter in Orkut style has been removed. The top bar, displayed in Portuguese here (Orkut is very popular in Brazil), wraps up some of the main functionality and integrates a search box. The three tabs social, professional, and personal moved a little bit lower, and look more traditionally tab-like than before. The blue and cyan color tones got a little bit more fresh and lighter, and there’s some additional shades and gradients throughout the page as well.

[Thanks DPic, Haochi and TomHTML!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Want to get a face removed in Google Maps Street View? Now you can, even if it’s not you who’s been photographed. According to CNet’s Elinor Mills, Google changed the policy for their street view photographs to better protect privacy and clarify “the intent of the product” (looking at houses and stuff, not people!).

To request a recognizable face to be removed – no questions asked, as Google implies – it’s probably enough to click on the “Street View Help” link at the top right of a photograph, and select “Report inappropriate image.” Same is true for license plates in Street View now. I just asked for this guy pictured above to be removed to see if this really works, and will report how it goes.

Now, unlike a change in, say, a wiki, this removal of a face (which removes the whole photograph, instead of just blurring a single face, though Marissa Mayer argued it won’t really be noticeable) probably can’t be undone by the next user who wants to get a clear view. Which means unlike a wiki, this system isn’t self-correcting. Then again, if indeed more and more faces become blurred over time, Google might be able to just map a city anew with their cam-cars fleet. If they really wanted to get rid of faces, they might as well employ one of their face-detection algorithms.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

I am writing this blog post looking out onto the Googleplex courtyard where webmasters are dancing and talking. We just finished the “Meet the Engineers” Q&A. Lots of people came inside building 43 to ask about crawling, duplicate content, and more. I wish I could easily summarize it, but it was just straight questions for two hours.

I think I’ll go down to dance and talk myself. If you’re at the conference, you’ve still got a couple days to catch me and chat more.

Whether you call it blended search, 3D search (Ask’s name), or universal search, it has the potential to surface as many relevant results as other hot search topics such as personalization. At SES yesterday, I sat in the back of the Universal Search session. There are good write-ups on the PowerPoint and presentations, but not as much coverage of the questions.

Just to give you a flavor of the sort of questions that people asked afterwards, here are a few as I remember/interpreted them:

Q: (This was for David Bailey, the Google rep.) You showed a snapshot of metacafe.com entering Google’s search results via universal search. How can a video site get included in Google’s universal search?
A: Quite a few sites are already in there, and we would love to open that up more. Factors include things like reliable playability, lack of copyright concerns, no porn, etc. They’ll keep working to expand the sites that can participate.

Q: Do you expect to be crawling the web for videos?
A: Not right now. For the time being, you could submit your video to YouTube or other search engines if you wanted to.

Q: (for Yahoo’s Tim Mayer, I think) Do you expect to use 3rd party rating such as BizRate to help with ratings and abuse?
A: For now, we’re just using ratings on Yahoo.

Q: We have 20-30 videos on our corporate site. We wouldn’t show up in universal/blended/3D search?
A: Not right now, but you could always submit your videos to the different engines.

Q: (for Google) What other types of data do you expect to surface?
A: A good guess is the types of data that we already help search over, e.g. things like patents or code could be interesting, or Google Base has different feeds for real estate and jobs. Data that we already have is the most likely near-term, but most people probably care about well-known types of data like news, video, local, etc.

Q: Different IPs will see different search results? How can I see what someone in San Diego would see?
A: There’s not a great way right now. Some people use proxies.

Note from Matt: Google does provide quite a bit of this functionality. For example,
http://www.google.com/search?q=bank&gl=us searches as if you’re in the U.S., and returns Bank of America at #1. But http://www.google.com/search?q=bank&gl=uk does the search as if you’re in the UK, and returns Lloyds TSB at #1.

You can even look at ads based on lat/long, regions, cities, U.S. ZIP codes or U.S. designated market area (DMA). See this way informative post for more details.

Q: What future plans do you have to extract text from audio or video?
A: Everyone was silent for a while. David Bailey of Google gave the only reasonable answer that most search engine employees can give when you ask about future plans: we have researchers that work on such projects, but we have nothing to announce at this time.

Q: What are your three best optimization tips for video?
A: (various panelists answered.)
1. Choose a good title that describes your video
2. Tim Mayer from Yahoo mentioned exploring MediaRSS.
3. Erik Collier from Ask said “Make a kick-ass video.” Well-said, and a good reminder that compelling content makes optimization much easier.

Apologies if I’ve paraphrased any questions or answers incorrectly. Feel free to comment if you think I got something wrong.