The Stop Online Piracy Act in the US is getting ever more publicity with GoDaddy one of the high profile companies to suffer from supporting it as we wrote a couple of days ago.  In our previous article Martin summed up SOPA very effectively.

If you are living in the United States, you should have heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect-IP, which, when passed, would give companies rights that they should not have. If it passes, IP rightsholders (a term vaguely defined) could send notices to payment processors or ad services like Google Adsense to force them to stop doing business with listed websites, all without legal process.

Site owners have five days to file a counter-notice, but neither payment processors or ad networks have any obligation to respect it. Even worse, they are granted “immunity for choking off a site if they have a “reasonable belief” that some portion of the site enables infringement”.

Now a loose confederation of Internet giants are considering shutting down the entire websites for 24 hours and instead showing a messagew urging their visitors and customers to contact their representative in the US congress the day before the vote goes to the house there.

The coalition is made up of some very big names on the Internet including Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal, AOL, Foursquare, IAC, LinkedIn, Mozilla, OpenDNS and Zynga.  If the plan goes ahead all these services could be taken offline for 24 hours.

In a report by CNet…

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you’ll know they’re finally serious.

True, it would be the political equivalent of a nuclear option–possibly drawing retributions from the the influential politicos backing SOPA and Protect IP–but one that could nevertheless be launched in 2012.

“There have been some serious discussions about that,” says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. “It has never happened before.”

This wouldn’t be the first piece of anti-piracy legislation around the world to face stiff opposition.  France have already passed an Internet copyright law but the Digital Economy Act in the UK stalled in the face of arguments from major Internet Service Providers British Telecom and TalkTalk.

Many reports say that SOPA is still set to pass the US congress and that very few Americans have heard about it.  Shutting down services such as Facebook and Google, and replacing them with anti-SOPA messages for a day would certainly raise awareness, but a question mark remains over whether doing so only one day before the congress vote would be effective enough.

This is the first time ever that major websites have threatened to effectively go on strike to boycott something, and it is completely unprecedented.  It is unclear at this time whether the services would be taken down worldwide or just in the US and also how serious the coalition are about the boycott, which would inevitably lose them all a day’s trade.

Services are commonly targeted for IP addresses anyway and it wouldn’t be difficult for these companies to target messages to their US-based users.  With many millions of visitors every day in the US, companies such as Google and Facebook could achieve this on their own.  Imagine then how much more leverage they would have with Amazon, Yahoo! and others on board.  If this goes ahead it is still possible that other companies could follow suit, effectively crippling the Internet in the US for the day before the vote.

So what do you think of SOPA and your favourite websites being taken offline for a day?

This data will be analysed by Agari to see how phishing attacks can be identified and prevented.  The company has actually been in operation since 2009 and helps protect over 1 billion email accounts from these types of attack.  The company already collects data from around 1.5 billion emails a day, though they don’t collect the actual email messages.

Instead the company just passes on malicious URLs in the messages to the relevant companies who’s name is being used in the phishing message.  Google said it expects the new arrangement to benefit Gmail users as more mail senders will now be authenticating email and implementing common phishing blocking policies.

Cnet reported that Daniel Raskin, the vice-president of marketing for Agari said…

“Facebook can go into the Agari console and see charts and graphs of all the activity going on in their e-mail channel (on their domains and third-party solutions) and see when an attack is going on in a bar chart of spam hitting Yahoo.  They receive a real-time alert and they can construct a policy to push out to carriers (that says) when you see this thing happening don’t deliver it, reject it.”

Phishing emails aren’t just a nuisance, they cost businesses millions every year in credit card insurance payouts, a cost which is inevitably passed on in interest charges.  The sophistication of phishing messages, which purport to be from a bank, business or website asking you to log in to confirm your security details, or offering you a fantastic deal that doesn’t really exist, again to get your personal details including those for your credit card.

The simple rule is that no bank, company or website will EVER email you asking you to log in and confirm your details.  Modern web browsers will highlight the actual domain name for the site you are visiting, for example PayPal.com and you can see if you are being diverted to a different domain.  The best rule is that if you receive an email purporting to be from, say Bank of America, then never click on the link.  Instead manually go to the bank or company’s website and log in yourself.

Agari says they have been operating in “stealth” mode for the last few years to as to try not to attract too much attention to their work.  Currently they analyse 50% of all email traffic in the US.  Cnet say…

The company aggregates and analyzes the data and provides it to about 50 e-commerce, financial services and social network customers, including Facebook and YouSendIt, who can then push out authentication policies to the e-mail providers when they see an attack is happening.

This new alliance forms no guarantee that phishing emails will be eradicated, and it is still up to the end user to use caution when opening any suspicious email.

The current Internet addressing system, IPv4 has almost run out of addresses as its designers never anticipated the explosion of the Internet in the way that it’s happened.  So many websites, Internet connected devices and smartphones have joined the Internet in recent years that the switch to a new addressing system has become critical.

Currently, many Internet systems are using ‘ghost’ IPv4 addresses to help cope with demand.

World IPv6 day is a technical exercise to see how, and how effectively the technology works.  All modern web browsers and operating systems have been ready for IPv6 for a few years, but it’s taken enormous effort on the part of technology companies and Internet Service Providers to roll the system out.

For those users already connected to the web via IPv6 systems, they will be automatically directed to the participating websites through the the new system.

Experts have been at some pains to say that despite the problems facing IPv4 saturation this is not a Y2K moment when planes will fall out of the sky.  “The web will continue to work, but future growth would be stymied. It is just like when we used up the phone numbers in London.”

Assuming todays trial is successful, this will act as a catalyst to encourage other companies to roll-out IPv6 infrastructure during 2012.

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.

There can be absolutely no doubting that the Internet is anything but boring.  There are billions of websites out there and so much fantastic content that it would be impossible to get bored.  Everything from games to videos, interactive websites, chat, education it’s all there and there’s so much of it.

The problem arises when you have to find this content.  How many of you, and feel free to comment below, generally tend to go to the same websites day-in day-out, week-in, week-out?  You’d probably be surprised just how many people don’t experience the broader Internet.

I would include myself in this.  I have a hard-core of about 30 websites I visit on a regular basis and outside of that I tend not to explore too much for fun.

So why is this?  The problem lies in being able to find and access that content.  Back in the early days of the Internet we had services such as Yahoo! and AOL.  These companies aggregated content into portals and delivered us chunks of the Internet that were vetted, relevant to their users and interesting.  There was frequent criticism though of these services, especially AOL, just giving people access to a small walled-garden, and not to the wider world.  Eventually they fell out of favour with the general public and companies like Google stepped up to fill the gap.

Google’s approach made a lot of sense to people, they would place at or near the top of their search results the websites that people used the most, that were the highest rated and linked to.  If you searched for anything on Google in the early days then you could guarantee to get the most popular websites for whatever category you wanted.

But then the Internet exploded in size and became commercialised.  Now for any search you perform you’ll have to wade through a mountain of sales, price comparison, fake search and other services to find the exciting and engaging content you want.

This is where services like Bing stepped in with its decision engine.  With Bing Microsoft attempted to make search smarter by predicting what it was you were really looking for and giving you that.  It is a popular approach and one that’s now often copied.  The problem with this approach though is that these heuristic search engines rarely work properly or effectively.  Whatever you search for you will still be bombarded with fake sites, search sites, price comparison and shopping sites and so on.

What the Internet needs, and needs badly, is a way to be able to aggregate the most fantastic content on the web so that you can find it quickly, efficiently and with the minimum of fuss.

To a certain extent social networking websites have stepped into the mould here and Facebook has been particularly successful at helping people to find and share engaging and interesting content.  Even Facebook now though is beginning to sag under their weight of commercialism and it’s turning people away.  I’ve seen regular Facebookers’ using the service much less than they used to as a result.

So what’s the solution?  One section of society already has it.  Young children have plenty of services tailored for them where not only the most appropriate content but also the most interesting content is aggregated from across the web.  These services aren’t free but they’re an invaluable extra for parents who want to keep their children engaged, entertained and educated, while at the same time keeping them safe from advertising and inappropriate content.

Could a similar service work for adults?  I’d argue that yes it would, and moreover that it would be something that a great many people would be prepared to pay for.

Heuristic technologies exist today that can deliver this.  Companies can use their own computer systems and black/white lists to block inappropriate content.  They can monitor what websites and content we like and enjoy, give us more like that and ask us with questionnaires what subjects we like and what types of experiences we want online.

Is this giving up valuable information to advertisers who can deliver targeted ads to you?  Is this giving up the freedom to experience a truly independent Internet?  The answer to both questions is yes, but I’m not sure how many people would be too concerned.

Another walled garden, or a choice of them, where we could easily find and experience the best on the Internet that’s relevant to us would be a very valuable service indeed.  In fact as social networking has to evolve into something I would argue that this is one distinctly possible future.

The Internet is simply too big to navigate on your own.  We’ll never find all the best stuff out there and the main search engines are all letting us down in this regard.

So bring on the walled garden, make the Internet fun and engaging again and keep us busy and occupied for years to come.  It wouldn’t be our only way to experience the web, just a portal website or browser plug-in that we could use.  We’d also still have Google, Bing and all the traditional ways of find our way around.  It would be an invaluable service for many however an I’d certainly pay something for that!

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)

It’s been widely reported that the Internet is rapidly running out of addresses using the existing addressing system, IPv4.  The estimate is that the current pool of addresses will run dry in November this year.  IPv6 has been around now for a few years but has never been implemented on a global scale.  The new system would give the world enough addresses to last many years to come.

“The good news is that internet users don’t need to do anything special to prepare for World IPv6 Day” said Lorenzo Colitti, a network engineer at Google.  ”Our current measurements suggest that the vast majority (99.95%) of users will be unaffected. However, in rare cases, users may experience connectivity problems, often due to misconfigured or misbehaving home network devices.”

The IPv6 day is being co-ordinated by the Internet Society which is a not-for-profit group that help educate individuals and businesses about Internet issues.

The aim is that all companies that sign up to the test will make all their pages available on the IPv6 system so that tests can be conducted and problems can be ironed out.  Both Google and Facebook already offer IPv6 sites.

“By providing an opportunity for the Internet industry to collaborate to test IPv6 readiness we expect to lay the groundwork for large-scale IPv6 adoption and help make IPv6 ready for prime time.” said Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer at the Internet Society in a statement.

In November 2010 Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, warned that the net faced “turbulent times” if it did not move quickly to adopt IPv6.

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?

There is no comparable Firefox add-on available to view videos that are linked on a page. The closest is GoogleTube, the YouTube Player. GoogleTube is only compatible with the most popular video platform of them all Youtube, and works only on search results pages in Google Search, Bing and Yahoo.

Video viewer, in comparison to that worked with three additional video sites and was not limited to search results pages either.

GoogleTube places visual indicators next to each video link. To be precise, three buttons are placed next to each video linked on a search results page offering to play and download the video as well as to display additional information about it.

That’s superior to Video Viewer, which does not indicate videos it can play at all on the page. A click on the play button opens the video player in a popup on the screen.

The player can be moved freely on the screen, and works independently from the rest of the browser. That’s interesting as it can be used to play videos in a small browser window on the screen while working on other things at the same time.

The add-on displays related videos and such, which means that it can be used to play new movies all the time with minimal interaction. The player can also be minimized, which is handy when listening to music that has been posted as video on Youtube.

The player can be started from any search results page that links to a video, or directly from the icon in the Firefox status bar.

The video player is fully re-sizable to fit any screen requirements.

While it does not offer the flexibility of Video Viewer, GoogleTube offers several interesting options like the ability to download videos directly from the search result pages. Firefox users who want to try the add-on, can download it from the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository. It is only officially compatible with Firefox 3, but can easily be forced to be compatible with Firefox 4. It appears to be working just fine in Firefox 4 as well.

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 could have simply given Monster access to the Hotjobs database, but that would have meant handing user information to a third party.

With privacy in mind, this could have been disastrous. Not only because of the user data, but also the information that may have been added to Monster without the user’s consent.

Yahoo decided to create an opt-in for Hotjobs users. Hotjobs users have the option to give Yahoo permission to transfer the information to Monster in 2011. Giving the permission ensures that Hotjob resumes, employment profiles, job alerts and cover letters will be available at Monster once the transfer completes.

Transfer your HotJobs information to Monster When you choose to transfer your HotJobs information to Monster, you give Yahoo! permission to transfer the information to Monster in early 2011. The transfer ensures that your HotJobs resumes, employment profiles, job alerts, and cover letters will be available to you when the integration is completed in early 2011. Your HotBlocks and Hide Company preferences will not be transferred.

Your HotJobs information will become subject to Monster’s terms of use and privacy policy. When you choose to transfer your HotJobs information to Monster, you will continue to use HotJobs as you have been until early 2011. The site will be called Monster+HotJobs during the transition period.

Users who do not want their data to be transferred do not have to do anything. Hotjobs will simply stop working in the beginning of 2011, and no data will be transferred and thus available at the Monster website.

If you don’t transfer your HotJobs information to Monster In early 2011, when the integration is completed and if you haven’t had us transfer your HotJobs information to Monster, the information will not be available either onHotJobs or Monster. You will not be able to use HotJobs, and if you start to use Monster, you will have to re-create your information, including your resumes, employment profiles, cover letters, and job alerts.

Yahoo’s behavior in this regard is highly ethical, and an example of a company that protects their user’s privacy and data. How many companies would be willing to do the same?

Microsoft’s Bing search engine managed to grow from 9% to 13.6 in the last twelve months, while Yahoo fell sharply from 17.1% to 14.3 and Google Search moderately from 65.2% to 64.2%.

In total percentages, Bing managed to gain 51% in the last twelve months while both Google and Yahoo dropped.

All three search engines combined account for a total of 92.1% of all searches in the US.

us search engine market share

The number of searches confirms that trend even more. The number of searches conducted dropped from 10.5 billion in July 2009 to 8.8 billion one year later. Bing managed to increase the search volume by 28% while both Google Search (17%) and Yahoo Search (30%) lost search volume.

us search volume

Several factors play a role here. First, Microsoft did launch Bing 14 months ago and it is likely that the search engine picked up momentum in the first months after start. And then there is the huge marketing campaign for Bing.

But can it all be attributed to that, or are there other factors that play a role? Yahoo without doubt will continue to decline in the coming months, especially since their US search traffic has been effectively handed over to Bing.

Google has experimented a lot in the last twelve months, and not always for the better. The search engine has added elements to the search results pages, especially the new sidebar, more ads and more links to other services, the majority of which are owned by Google as well.

The search quality seems to have deteriorated in that time, and while not everyone sees it yet, it seems as if it will continue to deteriorate in the next twelve months.

Have you tried out Bing yet? Why do you think that Bing gained market share while Google did not?

Yahoo’s Ad Internet Manager reveals the information that Yahoo has accumulated based on activity on Yahoo sites like Flickr, Delicious or Yahoo Search.

The data consists of factual data, e.g. a user’s IP address, and “educated guesses” based on the usage of Yahoo services.

The information on the Ad Interest Manager page are divided into three groups: Interest Categories, Activities, and Computer and Cookies.

ad interest manager

Interest Categories are set based on the pages that have been visited in the past, ads that have been clicked on and viewed, and searches that have been conducted.

Activities highlight the use of Yahoo network sites by the user. It displays an activity level for each service used.

Computer and Cookies finally displays the user’s IP address and location, operating system, browser, screen resolution, color depth, age range and gender.

The information may differ depending on the web browser used to access the Ad Internet Manager website.

The page offers an opt out option to block interest based ads from being displayed. It the choice is made a cookie is saved to the computer that blocks interest based ads. This still means that ads are shown, but that those ads are not “fine tuned” by other information.

It is interesting to note that some information are guesswork, the age and gender of a user for instance. In our tests, Yahoo thought we were a 26-35 female from Mont-de-Marsan, Aquitaine, or a 56-65 female from New York, depending on the browser used to access the page. It is puzzling that the IP lookup returned locations in two different countries, with both of them being incorrect.

The Ad Interest Manager does not support Google Chrome yet, both the OS and browser information where set to unknown or blank.

Yahoo is not the only company that makes use of interest based ads. Google for instance offers a similar service that they call Ads Preferences, which can, when coupled with the information of the Google Dashboard, reveal lots of information about a particular user.

Opt Out Pages:

Yahoo Opt-Out
Google Opt-Out
Microsoft Advertising Opt-Out
Amazon Opt-Out
Privacy Choice Opt-Out (multiple ad networks)

You may also be interested in the guide “What is a tracking cookie” that not only explains what a tracking cookie is, but also how to disable them in popular web browsers.

How do you handle interest based ads and tracking cookies? 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.