Don't be frightened, but evil and frustration lurks in your web browser. Yeah, that same seemingly benign and ultra flexible tool that you're using to read these words has a dark side. Something you probably don't think about much, because you're numb to it. It's hidden in plain sight, so hard to see because it's everywhere, filling your day on the web with a nameless angst. Lest you write me off as a nutty zealot, I cease my babble and reveal the little bugger:
Looks innocent, doesn't he? Melodrama aside, it's really a terrible experience using browse boxes to upload 20 pictures. My pictures are usually named IMG_4087.JPG or something equally descriptive, and furthermore they're usually tucked away in one or more places that I'm not used to browsing -- but often I can click over to them pretty fast. It's even worse when they stack these guys 10 deep and expect us to spend more time finding the photos than it takes to upload them!
About a week ago Yahoo! proposed a solution to this mess. The PhotoDrop application lets you upload pictures to Flickr by dragging and dropping them into your web browser. You can drag any number of pictures at once, and without any delays you get a preview of the pictures you've selected. Furthermore you can rotate, scale, crop, and apply filters to these pictures all right on your desktop without talking to any servers or watching a spinning beachball (or rotating hourglass, if you're so inclined).
This solution is based on a new technology released by Yahoo! called BrowserPlus™. The cool thing about the technology is that it will soon be open for anyone to use, so that regardless of where you spend your time on the net, the folks who build the websites that you use will be able to make your uploads faster, and let you do a whole lot more right there in your browser.
Finally, BrowserPlus is a piece of software that you have to download and install, and a lot of us are weary about installing plug-ins. That's the bad news. The good news is that you only have to install it once. Having done so any number of sites that use it can run without interrupting your browsing. We're focused on making this first time install as painless as possible, and at the same time keeping BrowserPlus lightweight and secure. So check out the prototype and let us know what you think! till the next, lloyd
Popularity: 42% [?]
Yahoo! Developer Network evangelist Jeremy Zawodny spoke with Paul Donnelly from the Pipes team about the new Pipes badges that launched today. A badge is a simple way to display the output of your favorite Yahoo! Pipe on your website or blog.
There are three types of Pipes badges you can add like widgets to your webpage or blog: the map badge, when there's geocoded data; an image badge that includes slideshow functionality; and a list badge, for all other valid data. Help us spot the first generation of creative Pipes badges out in the wild, by posting your badge sightings and URLs in comments here. Read more about this release or watch this video introduction:
Popularity: 71% [?]
We’re excited to share with you Yahoo! Live, a new experiment in live video from the Advanced Products team at Yahoo!. Y! Live was dreamed up as a way to make it possible for anyone to create their own live video experience. Broadcast the concert you’re at. Webcast your own live DJ set. Lifecast. Build your own live video speed dating application. We’ve created a website and an API that lets you do all these things and many more.
On Y! Live, you can use your webcam to broadcast your own live video channel. Or just tune in to other people’s channels. The video and audio are in real time, and as you watch someone’s channel or broadcast your own, you can interact chat-room style with other viewers.
There are limitless channels and anyone can be a star. Even if you don’t want to broadcast your own channel, you can still activate your webcam to broadcast while you’re viewing someone else’s channel.
If you're a developer, check out the developer preview of our API and embeddable components, as well as a sample app and quick tutorial.
We’re looking for your feedback, and we'll be incorporating it as we get to version 1.0 of our API in the coming months. Let us know what you think. We’re always interested in seeing what you’ve built, and we’ll feature cool stuff you build on our site.
Who built it
How do I get it
Keep in mind that Y! Live is an experimental release. The Advanced Products team is a small incubation team at Yahoo! – Y! Live is currently a limited capacity release, so bear with us as and we may reach our limits in periods of high traffic. Our top priority now is to hear your feedback – send your comments to ylive@yahoogroups.com, and follow our twitter feed to hear about headline broadcasts and notable things happening live.
For more information on getting started, Click here.
Popularity: 36% [?]
The last 30 days have been a revelation. After spending the past year working on web music applications in Yahoo!'s Media Innovation Group, I'm starting to believe that this digital music thing is finally coming together. I can almost taste how it's going to work.
Today we're releasing a piece of very early, very experimental (possibly dodgy) alpha software -- a desktop application called Blog Remix written using Adobe AIR. Blog Remix immerses you in an active music blog experience. It merges blog posts and MP3s and lets you mix together different tracks or blog entries from your favorite MP3 blogs. Save the mix for yourself, or share it with the rest of us as an XSPF playlist, podcast, or feed (using Atom, my personal favorite syndication format, or RSS).
Until recently I was never much of a music blog reader. Don't get me wrong, I've been a big MP3 blog fan for a while. The whole independent, organic nature of the music blog space appealed to me. But really, I was in it for the music. In my mind, music blogs were like radio stations. Last year, Joseph Magnani and I built the Easylistener player, so we could easily turn any webpage into a radio station or mixtape.
The original mixtapes, those magnetic cassettes we used to know and love, had context - usually something along the lines of "Songs for Amy", "Cottage Mix" or "My Badass Supermix." In the worst-case scenario the mix would involve some Don McLean or James Taylor tunes, while you curled up in the fetal position lamenting love lost or betrayed. But a mixtape can be enjoyed on many levels even when removed from its original context.
This is what the Music Blogs application aims to do. It's like a virtual crashpad where you can pick out all kinds of great mixtapes. Every music blog has its own personality, and you get a sense of what each blog is about simply by listening to the music that's posted.
This was my line of reasoning when I developed these apps last year. But music blogs are not just mixtapes. They are so much more. As one prominent music blogger wrote to me,
"Said the Gramophone - and numerous other blogs - put so much emphasis, commitment and spirit into the writing on the site. They are not just vehicles for the transmission of MP3s… Our focus is equal parts curation (selection of songs) and writing (thinking about the songs)."
Within Yahoo!, we've been having the same conversation, with Ian Rogers, our Media 2.0 visionary leading the charge. The problem, from a developer's perspective, is that in order to empower publishers to marry content with context, music bloggers (and all publishers) must share their work in a way that a computer can understand.
As much as we'd like it to, our Facebook Music Blogs app doesn't seamlessly merge MP3 tracks with the associated blog posts because we can't get it to work consistently, in a way we can automate and scale. This is because of the variations in how music blogs syndicate (or share) their content. Some music blogs don't even provide an RSS or Atom feed!
This has become a bit of an obsession for me, and I've even set out to classify the different ways that blogs currently share content. In the process of developing the Blog Remix app, I've realized that many blogs already do this correctly.
The application comes preloaded with a set of "Popular Music Blogs." You may notice that many popular music blogs aren't on this list. By necessity, the app is populated by blogs that share their content well. This is a prerequisite for creating rich experiences that meld audio content with original context.
Check out Saidthegramophone using Blog Remix and you can almost taste the red wine they're drinking as they write. Music blogs are like the new album art and liner notes, open for anyone to interpret, reinvent, and share with the rest of us.
But it works only if music bloggers share content in a way that applications like Blog Remix can understand. We need an RSS or ATOM feed that includes media content and the entire post written within the feed. If you're feeling particularly progressive, go the extra mile and incorporate the hAudio microformat into your HTML markup.
These small steps make it possible for developers like me to create powerful new distribution channels for your blog and the artists you write about. Together, we can build the open media web. You can start right now by trying out Blog Remix for yourself and letting me know what you think.
Popularity: 24% [?]
William White, January 15th, 2008 on 11:38 pm
Editor's Note: This post was originally written as an entry in GigaOM's Optimism 2008 contest. Om Malik's assignment was: "Tell me, in 200 to 400 words, what you’re most optimistic about for 2008, and why." The writer of the winning entry received a Sonos Digital Music System. Rabble's post, which you can read below, came in second (runner-up). Rabble might still be optimistic about a Sonos system, so let him know if you have a spare.
Difficult question. I know what i’m excited about right now. It’s that cloud computing is becoming a reality. More specifically I’m really impressed and excited by lightweight key-pair databases like CouchDb and Thrudb. Amazon’s SimpleDB is interesting as endorsement of this idea of a database, but not as interesting technically. There are whole classes of applications which are hard to do using a relational database that will be easy to build and scale using key-pair style databases like CouchDb, Thrudb, and SimpleDB. Applications like delicious, twitter, facebook, and flickr are difficult to build on the backend due in large part to a poor match of database storage engines. With that fixed, and it seems like we’re finally getting around to fixing it, we’ll be able to push forward in building social apps which can scale while doing interesting things. Something that has been hard is going to become easy in 2008.
What else? The mobile handset world is going to be interesting. Apple will release an SDK that, if done the right way, will create a fountain of new applications. Android will come along and the creative of mobile apps will spread to more devices, but they won’t be as slick. The iPhone is the Mac of phones: Apple’s one device/one screen size/one interface system will be a massive win for building interesting applications. It remains to be seen if Android will become like Linux, with hackers doing cool stuff but not much end-user acceptance; or more like Windows, widespread but clunky because of the hundreds of devices which need to be supported; or cool like OS/2, but simply ignored out of existence.
I’m excited about computing and watching the net extend to non-computer devices. The dash navigation system is one example, chumby and Kindle are others, there are plenty more. So far they’ve had a hard time getting built and released. Hopefully, in 2008 the net will stop being about laptops, desktops, and servers. The iPhone is a stage along that path, but there’s so much more. Perhaps it’s too optimistic to hope for great new devices in 2008--building physical things requires much longer lead time. Eventually, the device makers will learn what the desktop application makers have learned: tying a device to the net means you can push updates onto it easily and be much more agile.
The last thing I’m excited about is maps. This isn’t new, map development has been going on for a while, but there are neat things happening with maps, geo, and location-based services. I hope there is enough space for people to build apps which are social and useful, rather than just marketer dreams (...yet another app to find the nearest Starbucks).
Popularity: 12% [?]
Evan "Rabble" Henshaw-Plath, January 7th, 2008 on 7:40 pm
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