The new second sign-in verification feature is opt-in at this point in time, and only available to users from the United States, Canada, India and the Philippines.

Yahoo! users can enable the second sign-in verification feature from the Yahoo! account info page. Here they are asked to enter a mobile phone number for verification purposes. This number needs to be verified via SMS before the new account verification option is enabled for the account.

Yahoo! users can enable the new security feature on this page. They can alternatively sign in on the Yahoo! homepage, hoover over their name and select Account Info from the options to open their profile preferences and select the new security option there. It is however usually easier to open the page directly.

Yahoo! users who turn on the new account verification step have the option to use their security question and mobile phone, or only their mobile phone when they are asked to verify account ownership.

Mobile phone has to be selected either way. Once you have made the selection you are asked to enter your mobile phone number and country in a form. Yahoo! sends a SMS to the phone with a verification code that you need to verify ownership of the phone (more precisely the phone number).

The second sign-in verification feature works slightly different from Google’s 2-step verification login. Yahoo! will only ask the user to verify the account in a second step if the company suspects that the account may have been hijacked. It is likely that this is an automated process that checks IP addresses, countries of origins, and maybe even header data and sign-in times.

A confirm your identity:answer security question prompt is displayed after sign-in in this case. It basically blocks the signing in by asking the user to verify the account ownership either by entering the answer to the selected security question or by entering a security code send to a verified mobile phone.

Yahoo will roll out the feature to all of its worldwide audience by March 2012. (via Techdows and Yahoo Developer Network)

I’m subscribed to a few feeds that are published in a language that I do not understand. Many of the links on those sites point to English websites, which is why I have those sites in my feed.

I do not subscribe to many foreign feeds because of the language barrier. Machine translation may help overcome it, but translating feed items manually is not exactly the most comfortable thing to do. I’m going to show you how to create a pipe that translates one or multiple feeds automatically.

Visit the Yahoo Pipes website and log into your Yahoo account there.

Locate the Sources group on the left sidebar and drag & drop the Fetch Feed module to the work area.

Copy and paste a feed that you want translated into the form. Click on the Deprecated link afterwards and drag & drop Babelfish to the work area.

Link Fetch Feed to Babelfish, and Babelfish to Pipe Output. Congratulations, you have just created a pipe that translates the selected feed automatically. That was not difficulty at all, was it?

Here are some advanced options.

You can translate multiple feeds of the same language easily. Just click on the plus icon of the Fetch Feed module and add additional feeds to it.

You then need to click on Operators and drag & drop Sort to the work area. Place the module between Fetch Feed and Babelfish. Select item.PubDate from the sort options and check the output with a click on Pipe Output.

You should now see translations for all feeds that you have added beginning with the newest post.

You can experiment with other operators. Truncate for instance will cut the feed before or after translation so that only the first x characters are delivered in the translated feed.

Click on Save in the upper right corner when you are done and name your pipe. Click the Run Pipe link that appears on the same page after you have saved your pipe. This opens a new page with many different options. You find options to grab the RSS feed at the top.

Just subscribe to that feed in your RSS reader to get the translated feed delivered to your inbox automatically.

Yesterday now we read on the official Delicious blog that the “YouTube founders acquire Delicious”. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who have founded YouTube and sold it less than two years later to Google have acquired Delicious which will become part of their company AVOS.

A blog post on the Avos company website reveals that they have intentions to improve the site by making it “more fun to save, share and discover the web’s “tastiest” content”. For that, they “plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload”.

Delicious users who log into their account will be greeted with a “Delicious is moving to a new home” message. Users have to agree to transfer their bookmarks, account information and other data to the new company. Account data of users who do not agree to move and who do not log into their account in the migration period will become unavailable around July 2011. This screen is shown on every log in.

Users do have the option to export their bookmarks to a local computer

A FAQ has been put online that addresses several pressing questions. One of the interesting tidbits is that AVOS plans to build a Delicious extension for Firefox 4 and publish it as soon as possible.

It is likely that Delicious will lose a good chunk of its bookmarks, at least the private ones, during the transition period. First from users who once used an account but do not anymore, and from spammers who have auto-created hundreds of thousands of Delicious accounts to place links to their sites on the popular bookmarking service. It is not clear how AVOS will handle public bookmarks of users who have not agreed to move their data.

It feels logical that the company could use those bookmarks in anonymized form on the new Delicious, considering that they have been public all the time.

It seems as if AVOS has every intention to improve Delicious, and it will be interesting to read more about the company’s plans and see them in action on the site.

Yahoo Pipes offers one of the easiest options to combine multiple feeds into one. You do need a Yahoo account to make use of Yahoo Pipes but that is the only requirement.

Visit the Yahoo Pipes website and log in with your Yahoo account, or create a new account either directly on site, or by connecting via a Facebook or Google account.

Yahoo Pipes basically works by combining elements on the right. You drag and drop elements on the workplace, configure them and combine them to create something.

For combining multiple RSS feeds into one, we need to do the following. Drag and drop the Site Feed module to the workplace and copy paste the first feed url into the form. You can add additional feeds by clicking on the + icon next to url. Repeat the step for all feeds that you want to combine.

You need to click on Operators now in the left sidebar menu to drag and drop sort to the workplace. Now connect Fetch Feed and Sort by clicking on the blue circle below the Fetch Feed module and connecting it to the blue circle on top of the Sort module.

Now click on the blank field on the left side of in ascending order and select item.pubDate to sort all articles that get posted on all sites by publication date.

Connect Sort to Pipe Output and select save at the top to save the new Pipes.

Enter a name for the pipe and select Save. Click the Run Pipe link afterwards at the top of the screen. This opens a new page that lists the output of the pipe. You find links to snag the pipe as an RSS feed on that page.

Just copy and paste that RSS link into your RSS reader of choice. And there you go, you are now subscribed to one feed that combines multiple RSS feeds.

Then there is the issue of who you host your email and other services with such as online document editing. The argument here is exactly the same however this is less about clutter and more about interoperability. It’s great when things just work well together, and bringing all these things together with a single service provider can often achieve that.

So it might come as no surprise to hear that I also believe in sticking with a single cloud-services backup provider if at all possible. More so, I’d recommend that this cloud backup provider should be the very same company that you host your email, documents and everything else online with.

So why you might ask am I being so stupid? Only this week Amazon became the latest company to experience huge issues with its cloud services. Also if you wanted everything hosted with Google what about the privacy concerns over services such as Streetview and Buzz, and the repeated hacking of GMail by the Chinese government. After all, if the Chinese can hack Google’s email service, surely so can any other determined group.

It stands to reason, quite logically then, that if you store everything with a single provider that if something were to go wrong the potential impact could be astonomical, and I agree that under a worst case scenario (the worst case obviously being a very, very worst thing that could ever happen, ever) this would indeed be the case.

However… Online backups are supposed to be just that, backups. I am hearing from an increasing number of people who are looking for a good service online to store their digital photographs. Be this Flickr, Google, Facebook or another service this is a terrible approach. We should not be looking to move our lives wholesale into the cloud, rather we should just be looking at the cloud as a way to back it all up with the added convenience of then being able to access those files from anywhere we like.

This is where services such as Dropbox and Mozy win out. They’ll automatically and invisibly synchronise the files on your PC with those in the cloud. The only problem with these services, and others such as Amazon’s S3 cloud backup, is that the companies that offer these don’t also offer all the other cloud services that we need and use on a day to day basis.

In truth, nobody else does either with the possible exception of Microsoft, and even there it’s complete online storage solution of 25Gb is not yet available to Windows users due to the technical limitations of having to merge two different online storage solutions, Live Mesh and Live Sync, into a single entity. It’ll happen and will no doubt be in place by the time Windows 8 comes around, but it’s far from available yet.

Google is even worse, not offering any kind of online backup at all (unless you count the Picasa online photo albums) and neither does Yahoo! and yet here we’re talking about three of the world’s largest email, online document and life management cloud providers. These are the companies we need to be storing everything with, surely.

Okay, I talked a little while ago about how disastrous things could turn out if your put all your eggs in one basket, so by this point you should be heaving a huge sigh of relief that you can’t actually do this yet. I would argue the opposite. Let’s set aside for a moment that simple fact that it is much easier to be able to actually do things with your files and data in the cloud when its all stored in the same place, that’s obvious. There are also important security and privacy pros to consider.

This being that it is very unlikely that anything more complex than username and password stealing will ever happen. There might be the odd occasional piece of annoying data loss, I myself lost some emails when Hotmail crashed recently, but there’s none of the annoying interconnectedness that you get when you have multiple services.

The upshot of this is that should there be a security breach you only have to go into a single service and change a single password. But! I hear you cry, this is exactly what I’d do if one of my many services were compromised! I’d beg to differ, for the simple reason that the more services we use in our lives, the more likely it will be that we’ll use the same usernames and passwords across them.

If you find that one of the cloud service providers you use has been compromised then you could have to change your Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay and other password because they’re all the same.

If you have your main online life in a single place then this, arguably most important, part of your life can be kept separate because it would be much easier to remember a different username and password if you only have to remember one for this and another for everything else.

Let’s not forget that if eBay, PayPal, Amazon or the like are hacked, much in the way Ashampoo was only this week, you only have to worry about how long it will take your bank to refund any fraudulent payments that are made. If your life in the clouds is hacked things will get far messier.

But! And you’re starting to get angry now I can feel, “if my Amazon password is exposed I will also have to change the password on eBay, PayPal etc you doofus!” This is exactly the point I wanted to make. While you will most likely have to change your password for these sites, firstly the impact will almost immediately be greatly minimised as you’ll most likely be using only one or two bank cards across all of them, and secondly your personal files and email will still be secure.

In creating your life in the clouds by putting all of the important things in a single place you are effectively minimising the damage that can be done elsewhere because that single place can have a seperate, very secure password. There can be no sending of spam from your email address (we all get spoofed from time to time), there can be no searching your online documents for sensitive financial information and you can rest much more pleasantly at night.

I firmly believe therefore that there’s a very strong case to be made for Google, Microsoft, Apple and the like to pull their finger out and provide a holistic cloud-based service for us all. We can then rely on Facebook to get us logging into shopping websites (which again helps minimise any damage as there’s less surface area for a hacker to attack) and the ultimate upshot is that we’re not only happier and more secure, but we’ll suddenly find that we have a better online life with it too.

At its core, it is almost identical to Google’s solution. The search results are automatically updated whenever you enter or remove characters from the search form.

But similarities end there. Yahoo displays an overlay search box on the search page that is automatically updated, while the search results page is updated on Google.

A box opens around the search form that indicates the direct search interface. It is made up of the search form and button, a list of suggested search terms and a selection of the top results for the selected term.

If you enter win in the search form you see suggestions for Windows Media Player, Windows Live Messenger, Winrar, Oprah Winfrey, Winzip and Windows Update at the top.

It is possible to switch between those suggested results with the keyboard up and down keys or the mouse. The search results change whenever a new suggested term is selected, or if characters are added or removed from the search term.

The results listing displays different results, from the top 3 sites for that search term over shopping information pulled from Yahoo Shopping, interesting locations or places for countries or cities to media information with direct trailer links.

A search for London demonstrates one of the weaknesses of the algorithm. One would expect to find London city information, but the direct result is for the movie London.

A click on the search button loads the standard search results. Surprisingly enough, the first search results is either Yahoo’s own London visitor guide or the Visit London website. It feels rather strange that the movie is displayed instead in the direct search interface.

The new search interface has only been enabled on search.yahoo.com and not the main Yahoo domain or a country subdomain. A search on the main Yahoo website on the other hand loads the website where Yahoo Search Direct can be tested.

The way the results are presented will surely drive Yahoo revenues up, considering that many searches only reveal hits from Yahoo Shopping or other Yahoo properties.

It is however just the next logical step for search engines, from indexing and sorting the web, to keeping users on their properties to increase their revenue even more. Google does that as well with integration of their services in the search engine results.

I personally cannot see myself using Yahoo Search Direct. The limit of three results, and sometimes even less, is just not enough most of the time to find what I’m looking for.

What’s your impression of the new feature?

Disable Yahoo! Search Direct

It is possible to turn off Yahoo! Search Direct. Click on More > Preferences on the main search website

Locate Search Direct – Change the Search Direct Layer Frequency on the new page and click the Edit button right beneath the setting. Click on Off and then the Save button to save the new preference.

These settings are saved temporarily if you are not logged into a Yahoo account, and permanently if you are logged in. Temporarily means that Yahoo saves a cookie on your computer that contains the control. If the cookie is deleted, the information that Yahoo Search Direct has been disabled are lost and the function becomes active again.

Yesterday Flickr announced that they have extended the feature to allow all users, new and existing, to sign in to the service with either a Google ID or Facebook ID.

What does it mean? It means that it is now possible to link a Flickr account to either a Google or Facebook account and use the information from that account to log in from then on.

Flickr users who do not use other Yahoo services can effectively remove the Yahoo account from the list of active accounts, if they choose to do so.

All that needs to be done is to click on the Facebook or Google button on the Flickr sign in page. This opens the login prompt of the selected service where users need to enter their username and password. They then need to select Sign In to connected on the next step to link the Yahoo account with the selected account on Facebook or Flickr.

• Sign out of Flickr from the top right of any page.
• Sign back in.
• You will see Google & Facebook sign-in buttons. If you don’t see them click “Sign in with another account”
• Enter your Google or Facebook login info.
• Now you should see this screen to enter your Yahoo! ID.
• This is where you will setup logging in with Google or Facebook

The Flickr team has added another interesting option. Flickr users who use Facebook or Google as their login ID can share their public photos automatically on Facebook when they upload them to Flickr. Users who like the option need to configure the connection with Facebook in the Flickr account settings.

(Flickr blog, via)

Other products to be closed include MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Picks, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz and Delicious.

AltaVista was launched in 1995 and, for a great many people including myself, was the search engine of choice for many years.  It was set up by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Western Research Laboratory.  It was for a while the darling of the web with daily searches starting at 300,000 on launch day to more than 80 million within two years, and that was 1997 when nobody was online yet!

AltaVista became the search provider to Yahoo! in 1996 and was then sold to Compaq.  The dot.com bubble bursting in 2000 hit the company hard and resulted in its eventual sale to Yahoo!

In a statement, Yahoo! said…

“Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond. We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.”

It will be the closeure of Delicious that will have most people upset though.  All a spokeswoman would say about it is…

“We continue to operate Delicious today, and will communicate specific details when appropriate.”

Update: Delicious has recently been sold by Yahoo. The service continues to be available on the Internet as an effect of that. It is also interesting to note that AltaVista is still operational and accessible as of today.

Other services have indeed been closed down though.

Yahoo Messenger 11 will offer users some games created by Zynga (not Farmville it seems) and games by other companies so that you can spend even more time using the Instant Messenger, is not that great?

Internet users who want to install Yahoo Messenger 11 should switch from Typical Install to custom Install. Why? Because typical install does not offer to say nay to the Yahoo! Toolbar that gets installed alongside the instant messenger. That is of course unless they want the Yahoo Toolbar and Yahoo BrowserPlus installed on their PCs.

Yahoo! Toolbar – See if your friends are online and change your online status right from your browser. Plus enjoy anytime access to Yahoo! Search and your favorite Yahoo! sites.

Yahoo! BrowserPlus – An add-on for your web browser that makes it easier to send attachments, upload photos and take advantage of other cool features in Yahoo! Mail, Flickr and other Yahoo! services.

Yahoo Messenger 11 will also make yahoo.com the default browser home page and install Yahoo! Search Protection which alerts the user when anyone tries to change the browser’s default search engine. Make sure you remove the options if you do not want some or all of those features.

Yahoo Messenger 11 Features

So what is new in Yahoo Messenger 11? We have already mentioned games.Another new feature is the ability to chat with Facebook friends right from the messenger. Facebook integration goes even further by allowing the user to share and update the status, post comments and keep up with conversations across Facebook and Yahoo from within Yahoo Messenger 11.

More Features

• Use the instant messenger on mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android devices or other Internet enabled phones
• Easily find or invite friends from other services to come chat with you
• Now you can chat with high quality full-screen video.
• Make free PC-to-PC calls and PC-to-phone calls for as low as 1¢ a minute (plus free voicemail!)
• Send text messages (SMS) to friends’ mobile phones for free*
• Instant message with one friend, or conference in a bunch
• Show your style with emoticons, Avatars, audibles and IMVironments
• Use the built-in media player to watch web videos and view photos with friends

Yahoo Messenger 11 is available as a beta release for the Windows operating system. Users can download it directly from Yahoo’s Messenger homepage.

Every Yahoo Mail user can switch the interfaceto Yahoo Mail Beta with options to go back to the old Yahoo Mail (available under Help > Return to original mail). Yahoo users can sign up for Yahoo Mail Beta from the official beta page at features.mail.yahoo.com. Logged in users can instantly work with the new interface and features. Users who are logged into the old interface need to log out and in again in that tab to see the Yahoo Mail Beta interface.

The design has changed quite a bit, which is likely the first thing that users will notice. Yahoo Mail Beta feels very responsive, which is likely because of the speed improvements. Especially the search is now a lot faster, with additional options to narrow down search results by sender, date, folder or unread and flagged.

Introducing Your New Inbox

Another interesting new feature is the ability to display message previews right in the main folders. A click on Show preview splits the email pane to make room for a preview of the selected email on the same page.

See Who Else Is Online

With an improved Search design, it’s easier to find emails quickly.

• Click on a name to start an instant message.
• Right-click to see more options.

Search Your Inbox

• The Search box now appears at the top of the page.
• Narrow your results by clicking on one or more filters on the left of the Search Results view.

Multitasking

• You can work on an email and check your inbox mid-thought–just click back and forth on the tabs.
• Instant message or even text someone while you’re emailing, without ever losing work.

There is also a demonstration video showcasing some of the new features.

Have you placed around with the new beta interface? What’s your opinion so far?

Their aim is to make Yahoo! services more personal for their 600 million users in an effort not to lose more customers to Google and Mincrosoft.  Chief Products Officer Blake Irving said in a statement this week “Yahoo in three years is a global series of web experiences across a variety of different devices that gives people what they want; the content, the folks that they care about.  There is a bunch of bringing cool back to Yahoo saying a lot of the things that you want to do on the web are here.”

New features, services and upgrades the company have announced include…

The company’s focus will be on connected devices such as smartphones, tablets and set-top boxes.  It’s a smart move for the company which has struggled in recent years to stay relevant and maintain market share.  Recent moves to use the Bing search engine on Yahoo! began recently and there has been extensive talk about takeovers by Microsoft.

It will be interesting to see how Yahoo! maintains its customer base and market share when they have slipped behind so much in recent years.  It will bea struggle but Yahoo!’s services are still some of the very best around.

What if there was a way to customize the login page so that it becomes possible to verify the website on first glance?

That’s what Yahoo decided to do. The Yahoo sign-in seal is a custom text or image seal that is displayed on the Yahoo login page.

yahoo sign-in seal

The custom text or image is displayed on the sign in page, and users know directly that a website is fake if it is missing or different.

Yahoo users can visit the settings page in their Yahoo account to configure the sign-in seal.

yahoo login protection

Here it is possible to add a total of 21 characters divided into three groups as a text seal, or upload an image from the local computer to use the image as the verification seal.

Finally, it is possible to select a specific color for the seal, to make identification even easier.

Yahoo users should make sure not to use their ID or password as part of the sign in seal. Yahoo suggests to use something that every user on the computer understands, a street address or name for instance.

Yahoo’s Sign-In Seal is an excellent addition that improves the account security a lot.

What’s your opinion? Let us know in the comments.

Yahoo!’s Japanese search engine will now use Google’s technology rather than stick with fellow partner Microsoft and their Bing search engine as reported by NeoWin.

Yahoo! will also use Google’s advertising system and pass search data back to Google.

Masahiro Inoue, Yahoo Japan President, said that after a thorough investigation they found that Microsoft’s search technology was not properly suited for its needs. One of the reasons cited was the sub-part Japanese language search capabilities.

Yahoo Inc owns one third of Yahoo Japan and supports its decision to work with Google.  The deal, according to Yahoo Japan, won’t violate any anti-trust regulations but Microsoft are not so happy.

In a statement the Redmond giant said ”This agreement is even more anti-competitive than Google’s deal with Yahoo in the United States and Canada that the Department of Justice found to be illegal. (The) deal would have locked up 90 percent of paid search advertising. This deal gives Google virtually 100 percent of all searches in Japan, both paid and unpaid. It means there will be no search competition in Japan and that Google will end up controlling all personal search information for all Japanese consumers and businesses.“

During that period part of Yahoo’s Live search results will be powered by Bing, “with paid search volume in particular kept low enough to help minimize any potential impact” to Yahoo advertiser accounts.

Yahoo aims for a transition in the August / September timeframe for Bing powered organic search results if the “testing continues to yield high quality results”.

What does that mean for the search engine market? It means that Microsoft’s Bing will increase its search volume closing the gap to Google, which is dominating search.

The total market share depends on how the data is accumulated. Google is usually listed with a market share between 65% and 85%, Bing with 3% to 10% and Yahoo between 6% and 15%. In best case, Bing will increase its search engine reach to 25% of the total market share, Barry Schwartz at the Search Engine Land website even sees Bing powering 30% of paid and organic search queries globally after the transition finishes.

What does it mean for search engine visitors? The search results will ultimately be the same on Bing and Yahoo Search. The only differences are the additional features that are offered on the two search engine websites.

It is likely that Yahoo users will continue to use Yahoo for their searches, considering that they are likely using other Yahoo features such as Yahoo Mail as well, some might switch to Bing if they do not use any Yahoo services, others might switch to Google because of search result differences.

Microsoft Bing, with the additional data provided by Yahoo Search, may be able to improve the quality of the search results which could improve the search engine’s market share in the long run.

Read Write Web is reporting a study that shows Facebook is way ahead of the competition with almost half of all third-party logins.

The result leaves search giant Google languishing in second place and only just ahead of Twitter and Yahoo!.

Third-party logins have become a useful way for smaller websites and businesses to be able to manage site user logins without the headache (and developments costs) that go with such a feature.  It also helps users who know they can visit a whole host of different websites without needing to sign up with each and every one.  It’s a win/win.

When it comes to commenting on news sites it’s a slightly different story but let’s not forget facebook is still the winner overall.

Read Write Web reported…

The numbers switch around when we start breaking them down into different categories. Facebook becomes even more dominant, increasing to 52% when we look at entertainment websites, with Twitter and Myspace jumping into second and third place. For B2B websites, the distribution is a bit more even overall, with Facebook taking 37% of the pie and Google, Yahoo and Twitter all coming in with around 18%.

It will be interesting to see how this trend developes over the next year and if Microsoft will ever throw their virtual hat into the ring.

Flickr in a recent blog posting announced that they have created an improved way of sharing Flickr photos with friends on Facebook.

All that it takes now is to connect the Facebook and Flickr account to automatically post information about new photos and videos uploaded to the Flickr photo hosting site on Facebook.

facebook flickr

Only public images that are rated safe will be posted on Facebook after they have been uploaded to Flickr. Images marked as Friends/Family or Private won’t be sent. There is a ten minute delay to give the user enough time to edit the photo before it gets shared.

To connect Flickr and Facebook go to this page and follow the instructions. You are asked to log into your Yahoo account first. The following page is then loaded automatically.

flickr facebook connect

A click on the connect button loads the Facebook page with the Facebook account login prompt. A confirmation message is displayed in the end notifying the user that the two accounts have been linked.

link facebook yahoo

Information about new public photos that are uploaded to Flickr are from that moment on shared on Facebook. The only option to avoid that uploaded photos are shared is to set them to private or friends and family during upload.

Several features have been added or improved in the latest Yahoo instant messenger including support for high-quality, full screen video and voice calling, a new updates feature that lists what friends are doing on Twitter, Last.fm, Yahoo, Flickr and other sites and services and improved language support to change the interface language of the messenger with just one click of the mouse button.

Yahoo has created a video that outlines the most important changes in Yahoo Messenger 10.

Additional features

1. Instant message with one friend, or conference in a bunch
2. All-new Insider with Yahoo! Mail, news, weather, search and more
3. Easily find or invite friends from other services to come chat with you
4. Send text messages (SMS) to friends’ mobile phones for free*
5. Make free PC-to-PC calls and PC-to-phone calls for as low as 1¢ a minute (plus free voicemail!)
6. Use the built-in media player to watch web videos and view photos with friends
7. Show your style with emoticons, Avatars, audibles and IMVironments

The Yahoo Messenger 10 Download is offered at the official website for all support operating systems and devices.

This question might have become insignificant in recent years as all three email providers have started to follow suite if one of them raised a limit or introduced a new service. But not everything is equal and some email users might be surprised if they take a look at the differences between these email providers.

Did you for instance know that a free Yahoo Mail account expires after four months of inactivity but is the only one to offer free unlimited storage space?

Gmail on the other hand is the only email service that is not expiring the account after a certain time of inactivity. It is on the other hand the email service that is offering the least amount of free storage space if you take Microsoft by the word that they increase the Windows Live Hotmail storage space automatically if the limit of 5000 Megabytes is reached.

Take a look at the following chart to see how the three email providers compare.

The chart should be up to date. If you spot an error let me know and I fix it asap.

Back to the original question: Which email provider are you using primarily and why? Here is my answer..

I mainly use email accounts that have been created for my web projects. I also use a Gmail account; Primarily because it is linked to other Google services that I need to use. I do have a Yahoo Mail and Microsoft Live Hotmail account but I barely use them. Mostly for services that require such an account.

Several new and improved features have been added to Yahoo Messenger 10. The following list contains some of these features. It has been directly taken from the blog post that announced the final version of Yahoo Messenger 10:

High-quality video calls
We’ve completely redesigned our 1:1 webcam feature (under the hood too). Now you can make a high-quality video call to a friend with synched audio, right in the IM window. Features include the ability to swap video windows, position the video windows side-by-side, mute the call or place it on hold. You can even go full-screen with your video call. To get started, click the new “Video Call” button in the IM window (your friend also needs to be on Yahoo! Messenger 10).

New “Y! Updates” view of your contact list
People are busy these days, doing all sorts of interesting things online. To help you keep up with your friends, we added an alternate view of your contact list that shows a real-time stream of their updates, including Messenger status message changes. If they’ve opted-in to share their updates via Yahoo!, you’ll be able to see what they’re saying on Twitter, reading on Yahoo! Buzz, listening to on last.fm, and more.

We also added additional features for how and when you see your friends’ updates. When a new update comes in, a “toast” alert will pop up in the lower right corner of your screen. If you want to disable these, go to Messenger > Preferences > Yahoo! Updates. You can turn alerts on and off and even update preferences by contact or by type of update.

Find more to chat about
Within the new “Yahoo! Updates” view, you’re sure to find more to talk about with your friends. To make it easy, we added a hover menu that lets you quickly IM a friend about their update. When you do, the update appears inline in the conversation window, so when you start your IM with “I can’t believe you like this song!”, your friend will know what you’re talking about. Note that your friend needs to also be on Yahoo! Messenger 10 to see the update inline.

Change your language easily
If you use the U.S. version but wish it could be in your local language, you’re in luck. When you start up Yahoo! Messenger 10, you’ll notice a new language menu on the sign-in screen. Choose from 16 different languages and the buttons, menus and various parts of the interface will change to that language. If you’re already signed in, you can also change your language under Messenger > Preferences > Language (you’ll have to restart Yahoo! Messenger for it to take effect).

The default Yahoo Messenger 10 download will download a so called web installer which is a small setup file that will try to download the remaining data from the Internet during installation. This requires an active Internet connection. Users who prefer a direct download can download the Yahoo Messenger 10 Windows offline installer here. It is either way recommended to do a custom installation in the instant messenger itself to avoid installing components like the Yahoo Toolbar to the computer system.

Geocities users can still use the day to backup their files from the web hosting service before these get deleted. Yahoo is suggesting to move to Yahoo web hosting but there are other free options available which might appeal more to Geocities users.

If you search for Geocities in major search engines you still find millions of websites and files that are hosted at the free web hosting service. It will be interesting to see how the search engines cope with the sudden termination of those pages and files.

Here at Ghacks we had ten pages with links to Geocities. Some to great software programs such as Iso Puzzle which will from today on only be available on third party download portals.

What’s your opinion on the termination of the Geocities service? Good move by Yahoo to get rid of another slow and ad infected free web hosting service or bad move as some treasures of the past decade will be lost in the process?