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?

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Yahoo Mail accounts are hit by phishing attacks regularly and Yahoo recommends to perform the Yahoo Mail Login only at the official Yahoo website and not at other websites (unless they are also owned by Yahoo).

The official Yahoo Mail login website is https://login.yahoo.com/config/login_verify2?&.src=ym. Another option is to visit the main Yahoo website and open the Yahoo Mail login website from there. The Yahoo Mail login screen should look exactly like the screen above except for the red stars and rectangle around the username and password fields. Those are added by the Last Pass password manager add-on that is available for several web browsers including Firefox and Internet Explorer. Last Pass can automatically fill out the Yahoo Mail login data and perform the login as well. Best of all, it is a very good protection against phishing attempts as the Yahoo user does not need to enter any data in the login form at the Yahoo Mail website.

Yahoo has created a password helper application for Yahoo Mail that can aid users if they cannot login into Yahoo Mail. It can help when users have forgotten their Yahoo Mail username or password.

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Yahoo Meme is still in beta but a recent silent change makes it possible to anyone to register an account without invites. That’s a big change to before and it remains to be seen if the developers have opened registrations just for a short time or permanently.

Users who want to try out Yahoo Meme can visit the main page of the service to sign in with a Yahoo account or create a new Yahoo account for that purpose. The process does not take longer than a few minutes the most.

Yahoo Meme offers many advantages over Twitter like the aforementioned ones. The only thing that it currently lacks is popularity. This could change if the service is promoted in the right way by Yahoo. You can follow Ghacks at Yahoo Meme by visiting the official Ghacks page at Yahoo Meme.

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Yahoo and Xoopit have now announced that they will discontinue the Xoopit services for Gmail, Facebook and basically any other service except for Yahoo Mail. Xoopit for Gmail and the Xoopit web service will be closing down on November 13. The Xoopit team has created a faq for Gmail and Xoopit users that is trying to address the most common questions.

Xoopit itself has been rebranded as the My Photos application in Yahoo Mail where it allows Yahoo Mail users to quickly look at all pictures that have been send to them. Additional features include photo uploading and sharing capabilities. The following video outlines the features that My Photos is offering to Yahoo Mail users.

The official reason for discontinuing support for Gmail is the following:

We’re sad to say goodbye to our users on Gmail but we know that we will not be able to keep investing in our Xoopit for Gmail product, and don’t want you to end up with a lousy experience.

Many users on the other hand suspect that it has more to do with the competition between Yahoo Mail and Gmail that the service is discontinued.

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Another interesting aspect of Yahoo Meme is that there does not seem to be a character limit for post. Some might like the limitation that Twitter is imposing on users but it sometimes limits how something is said due to the character limit.

Most users who currently use Yahoo Meme seem to be using it for multimedia content, especially images which seem to be the most popular memes right now. Photos can be uploaded from the local computer system or by pasting a link into the upload form directly.

Videos are currently only accepted from Youtube and Vimeo and music can be pasted as a link that needs to point to an mp3 file on the Internet.

The usual options to follow other users are provided. The updates posted by followed users will then be displayed in the dashboard. There are several themes to choose from to change the layout. It is not as sophisticated as Twitter yet which becomes obvious when looking at the popular posts or users to follow. That might need some work. The concept on the other hand is user friendly and removes several of those dreaded limitations that Twitter imposes on its users.

Invites

Every new Yahoo Meme account currently gets seven friend invites. I want to hand out these invites to Ghacks users. What I would like to do is to give these to users who are willing to invite at least four other Ghacks members who would like to join (that’s three for them then and four for Ghacks members) so that everyone gets an invite in the end. If you want an invite reply with a comment. No need to add your email address in the text. You do need to add it in the email field (which is only visible to admins) to receive the invitations.

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Yahoo Mail now comes with a redesigned mobile version that is available at http://m.yahoo.com/ that now offers one click access to important functions, attachment downloads like pdf or Microsoft Word documents and access to personal folders. The attachment size was raised from 10 Megabytes to 25 which is the exact same size that Gmail is offering it’s users. The inbox of Yahoo Mail is expanded with an application box that is bringing third party apps like Picnik, ZumoDirve or PayPal to the inbox with more (Evite was mentioned) to come in future updates.

Yahoo Mail Contacts are improved as well as they can now be automatically updated whenever a contact changes their name, e-mail address or phone number.

Yahoo Messenger 10 Beta is now available for download. It introduces HD video calling and social improvements that keep users informed about their contacts including status updates. Other additions include Flickr uploads, Yahoo! Buzz stories, Tweets and more that are all available from the messenger’s interface.

Yahoo Search was upgraded as well. It does however seem that only search engine users from the United States will be able to access the new functionality that allows them to explore related concepts, filter results by popular websites only or narrow down search results by type.

Yahoo is adding more social elements to their products. They also started to add features that were introduced by Google and Microsoft services like the email attachment size of 25 Megabytes.

via Ycorpblog

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Under the new deal however, both companies will remain separate and each will carry on their normal lives without the corporate wedding thing. But for the next ten years, both Yahoo and Microsoft will team up efforts to take on Google and their huge market dominance. Both companies combined will control 30% of the search engine market.

Yahoo, who has been bleeding fiscally for the past few years, will gain control of the ad revenue of both companies, which they claim will boost annual revenue of the company by half a billion dollars. It will also cut capital expenditure by a whopping $200 million while increasing operating cash flow by $275 million. Yahoo will be allowed to keep 88% of their ad sales during the first 5 years and Microsoft will guarantee a certain level of search revenue for Yahoo.

On the other side of the spectrum, Microsoft will control the actual technology used to serve the web results. Microsoft will roll out its “new” Bing search platform onto both companies search engines while incorporating some of Yahoo’s existing technologies such as Panama-ad-selling tool.

All in all the deal is expected to go into full effect within the next 2 years, once it passes regulatory checks that is. As it stands, it seems like the FCC won’t be bothered by such a partnership as both companies do seem to be taking quite a beating from the big “G.” And more importantly, both companies will remain separate during the entire love affair.

Of course its too early to tell if this will work out for both companies in the long run, but as it stands, Microsoft and Yahoo are bleeding in the SE department and something like this looks more promising then ever before. I’m not expecting Yahoo and Microsoft to snap up an extra 20% of the search engine market within the next few years, but with Google’s hands in everything other then improving their search results I think it is possible for a small dent to be made in Google’s dominance.

In the end, it will be Microsoft and Yahoo who will have to prove to customers that their search engines are on par with Google. At least for now no one can complain about Bing’s image and video search, hopefully they bring up their website results to par.

So what are your thoughts? Should Google be frightened or is Microsoft and Yahoo just another failed attempt to unseat the undisputed king? Let me know in the comments below.

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You will notice quite a few changes if you open the old and new Yahoo homepage side by side.

The header area has been redone and is now much smaller than the standard Yahoo header. That makes it possible to display more items above the fold which is the most precious area of every website.

Probably the biggest change is the possibility to add custom websites and services to the Yahoo homepage. It is for example possible to add a blog like Ghacks to the left menu on the Yahoo homepage. Hovering the mouse over the link will display a description, link, search form and latest feed entries.

Popular services like Facebook or MySpace have been added to the page with the option to add additional services such as AOL Mail, eBay, Flickr, Gmail or the New York Times to the menu as well. It is also possible to remove most of the default links that are displayed in the menu.

This gives Yahoo users a comfortable way of checking out other web services without leaving the Yahoo page.

Several changes have been made to the elements on the page. Some have been moved up (today’s top searches for example are now displayed prominently in the top right corner while others have been moved down into a new footer area. All in all a pretty decent redesign of the homepage to provide users with more functionality (and them with even more pageviews).

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One option is offered by Dexrex, a company that is providing the means to backup these messages and SMS online. Support are a wide variety of clients and networks including Skype, Windows Live, AOL, Yahoo, Jabber, ICQ, Blackberry and Google Talk. It is possible to sign in with the network accounts at the Dexrex website to initiate the backup of the data. Some users might be concerned about security and privacy.

There is obviously always a risk when entering data in third party websites. Dexrex uses the https protocol to transfer data between the client computer and the server. Backups can either be started using the Conversation Importer, a Java program that can import old conversations, or so called Extensions which run in the background and import messages in realtime.

The conversations are available online after transferring them to the server. It is for example possible to search the conversations, use filters to filter by contact or date or to share conversations with trusted users. It is even possible to edit conversations online. SMS archiving is currently only supported for Blackberry cell phones. Users need to download an application to their Blackberry to backup the SMS.

Dexrex provides an easy way of backing up conversations and SMS from Blackberry devices. It can be a a useful services for users who work with multiple computer systems and messengers.

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Blind Search allows you to compare the results of Google, Bing and Yahoo. You search for a term in it, and it brings up all 3 results side-by-side, but you are not told which site is which. You then say which you think is better, and the names are then revealed!

After using the site a dozen or so times, a clear image of what is the best search engine for you forms.

I was surprised that Google was only best for me in about a third of searches; I found Bing’s results much more relevant. (The creator of the site works for Microsoft though; although it isn’t affiliated to them!)

They also offer an OpenSearch plug-in (so it can be added to Firefox’s search bar, for example) and a plugin IE8. It also works for image search. Unfortunately, the site currently only works in US localisations, so one can’t use it to search google.co.uk etc.

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This functionality is available to all users. Registered users on the other hand can add the social bookmarking component to the mix. A Facebook or Worio account is needed for this. Once the account has been created it is possible to start saving bookmarks which will shape the profile over time meaning that Worio will use that data to display recommendations. If a user tags a lot of operating system, backup software or networking topics then that is what will be recommended primarily to him.

The account creation is a breeze for Facebook users as most data will be imported from there. Another interesting feature is the ability to import bookmarks from Delicious which also works incredibly well. Every page can be added to the bookmarks. If a user chooses to do so a new overlay image appears that displays tag recommendations and options to add or remove tags before saving the site.

A bookmarklet is provided that can be used to tag and add active websites to the Worio profile. The site can also be added to the list of available search engines.

The verdict:

The developers have created an easily accessible bookmarking site that adds to the search experience with its recommendation engine. It does well as a bookmarking site alone but excels when the search is used as well.

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Enter Truemark by Iconix. Truemark uses authentication techniques to identify more than 1500 different company email addresses including the three companies in the example above. It is backed by some of the most popular shopping and financial websites on the Internet which makes it attractive for many users. Even better is the fact that the software is free to use and compatible to several popular email providers like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or Aol Webmail but also Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007.

Another advantage of Truemark is that is it working in both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox which should cover more almost 90% of the web browser market. The installation of the software will install a Browser Helper Object in Internet Explorer and an add-on in Firefox.

Truemark will automatically scan the emails in the mail inbox if the user opens a supported email client or web email client. It will display a verification icon next to the email to notify the user that the email is legit.

Moving the mouse over the icon will show an overlay with additional information about the sender and if the sender passed both identification and authentication.

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It usually means that he can perform all actions to some of his contacts, like talking to them, while the rest thinks that he is not at his computer.

Buddy Spy is a software program for Yahoo! Messenger. It can detect if a buddy is indeed offline or invisible. The software can also check if the user is currently broadcasting with his webcam, if he is in any chat room and if he is on an alias profile or default profile.

Buddy Spy requires the creation of a new Yahoo! Messenger account, usage of the default account would interfere with Yahoo! Messenger and cause errors. After the account has been created the user can use various scans to detect if a buddy is online but invisible.

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Flickr Video Browser is an external tool that provides access to public Flickr Videos in an easy to use interface. It displays thumbnails of 100 Flickr videos on each page which get updated regularly from public Flickr video listings.

A click on a thumbnails opens the video on the exact same page in an overlay providing options to view the video or explore the tags of it. A click on a tag loads all videos tagged the same way on the Flickr Video Browser homepage.

Overall the controls currently offered are pretty basic. There is no search option and no way to browser tags which are two of the features that should be implemented as soon as possible to make the process user friendly.

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The only requirement for using Yahoo Pipes is a Yahoo account which can be obtained freely if needed. I’m going to walk you through the customization of the Softpedia Windows RSS News Feed which lists freeware, demos, adware, trial and shareware software programs in its feed. Since I’m only interested in the free software I decided to use Yahoo Pipes to filter out all the other items.

You can use the same technique for your favorite website. Say you own a Windows PC and are subscribed to the Lifehacker RSS News Feed. You might want to filter out any item that describes software for an Apple Macintosh computer.

The Yahoo Pipes interface is divided into three panes. The left side contains the different elements that can be dragged and dropped into the main canvas area. You can use them to load RSS News Feeds and filter data among many other things. The last is the debugger which displays the data of the selected element.

We want to fetch an RSS News Feed and drag the Fetch Feed element into the canvas area. This element requires at least one RSS News Feed url so copy and paste on into the box. If you click on that box you will notice that the debugger has loaded the titles of the RSS News Feed at the bottom. You can click on the titles to see variables like descriptions or titles of the items.

You can click on the + icon next to URL to display another form to paste another RSS News Feed URL.

Click on the Operators entry in the left menu and drag the Filter element to the main window. Connect the Fetch Feed and Filter elements by pressing the mouse button over one of the nodes and (while holding the mouse button) moving it to the other node.

The elements are now connected. The process begins by fetching the RSS News Feed, sending it to the filters where they are customized and then to the output which is already available at the end. All that remains to be done is to create the filters.

You can block or permit items that match the filters. To do that you need to find differences or similarities. Softpedia uses classifications in their item titles. To find out about them you can head to the debugger area and click on a RSS News Feed item. You will notice that there is an entry called y:title which contains the title of the news item. You find the classification at the end of each title, for instance freeware, adware or shareware.

I decided to block all unwanted classifications from the news feed by selecting item.y:title > Contains > Classification, for example item.y:title > contains > Shareware. This will block all items with the Shareware classification in the title. I create three additional rules for Trial, Demo and Adware.

It would have been possible to do it the other way round. To allow only RSS News Feeds with titles like freeware or gpl. A click on the Filter element should update the debugger. It should only display freeware and gpl news items. Now connect the Filter element with the Pipe Output element.

The Pipe Output Element should display the same content in the debugger as the Filter element because nothing is changed in between.

A click on Save saves the pipe and enables a Run Pipe option in the header area. A click on that opens the Pipe profile with a preview area and options to use it as an RSS Feed or embed it on websites.

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I got nothing wrong with people making money, lots of money. In fact I wish I could. However I do resent billionaires constantly bitching about the evils of corporate America and why it’s difficult for them to gain control of any company the want.

“The poison pill prevents any shareholder, or a group of shareholders acting in concert, from owning more than a certain percentage of a company by allowing all other shareholders to purchase shares at a lower price in the event one chooses to cross the ownership line (typically 15%) without prior permission from the company. This effectively kills the value of their investment – hence the name, "poison pill". Public companies refer to a poison pill as a "shareholder rights plan". Does anyone else find that amusing? If anything, it undermines shareholder rights rather than supporting them.”

Sure, CEO’s and businessmen making multi-million dollar salaries while their companies go down the pooper is pretty lame, but wresting control of companies and forcing your ego on them to make yourself a quick buck is equally so. Considering how Ichan has reacted in this whole situation, can you blame any company for wanting to prevent it also happening to them?

I think the thing which annoys me the most is that Ichan seemingly never gives a crap about the actual future of a company beyond making a quick buck for himself and other shareholders. Yes, I guess that’s the whole point of the stock market but there has to be more to it than that.

A Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition would have been a disaster, and I respect the Yahoo board for not simply selling out. However their management of the whole process was a joke. Their statements concerning Ichan not having Yahoo’s best interest in mind where correct, but unfortunately the had trouble articulating what their own future plans where.

Jerry Yang also can never seem to make the hard decisions necessary for a CEO, such as perhaps cutting Yahoo’s products down to make themselves far more profitable and manageable. The classic example is of course Steve Jobs, how gave advice to both Yang and the rest of the Yahoo executives. Yang never followed through on the suggestions, instead preferring to spend millions on investment.

It’s not all bad, hopefully Yahoo can pull itself out of this hole, after all the company is still a multi-million dollar Internet giant and has been introducing some fantastic initiatives such as promoting their open social networking development plans and introducing things like the Yahoo Music API for developers as reported by Mashable.

We can only wait and see.

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Last week, Martin posted about how Yahoo was planning to shut down its Yahoo! Music store on 30^th September, 2008. The store would take its DRM servers offline on this date, in effect stranding all those people who had paid money for DRM-labeled music.

Apparently, Yahoo have realized the foolishness of their decision and the impact it will have on present and future customers of their services. They are now offering refunds to the people who bought music from the store. Another option being considered is to replace customers’ music with DRM-free MP3 versions of those same songs.

In addition, Yahoo! will transfer customers to the RealNetwork’s-owned Rhapsody service. This is for those people who have a subscription to the service. All these are far better than Yahoo!’s original suggestion that consumers burn the tracks to a CD and then rip that CD to get DRM-free versions of their tracks.

Yet again, problems have cropped up because of DRM. If the music from the store was DRM-free, shutting down the servers wouldn’t have affected anyone. Thanks to DRM, not only is Yahoo! going to lose a lot of its revenue but also lots of people are going to be inconvenienced.

I for one am waiting to see just how much Yahoo! will have to refund its customers. And whether Microsoft is going to follow its example. The real winner in all this is probably Rhapsody, who’s subscriber base will increase just like that. Let’s see what’s next on the DRM agenda, which seems to be falling apart. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

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Frankly del.icio.us was one of the founding Web 2.0 services, along with Wikipedia, Amazon and Ebay. It’s the most popular social bookmarking service, even though the social aspects are ignored by many of the users.

For better or for worse it also popularized the web 2.0 URL… full stops are no harder to type then forwards slashes, but it sure feels like it.

Anyway it looks like the new Delicious service will be launching VERY soon. That’s right, del.ico.us has now officially become Delicious, although they’ve had the URL for years now.

Tech Crunch posted some screenshots a while ago which showed the new service to be pretty impressive, a complete code re-write, a cool new theme and interface and a stack of new features.

Apparently scalability was an issue which has held up the release for a year now. Ironically it was also the initial reason for the complete re-write.

Anyway, with the official blog providing assurance that “After months of work, the new Delicious is almost ready to come out of the oven” it may very well be true this time.

When it launches you’ll be automatically logged out of your account. I hope you guys will be able to handle this…

Personally, while an update will be nice, I never use del.icio.us through the web interface. I use it purely as a way to store my bookmarks online, no friend sharing, no visiting the homepage nothing. Flock 2.0 has awesome integration with del.cio.us and that’s how I use it.

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There might be a use for it though especially if you are among friends in a private channel. Y!Status Revolution brings that to Yahoo Messenger though. Users can select a custom status that includes information like song names and length among others. (A total of seven parameters are available to chose from)

Winamp and AIMP are currently supported to deliver those information and Y!Status Revolution acts as a proxy that changes the status message as soon as a new song begins to play.

There is no information available about supported operating systems or Yahoo Messenger versions. It runs fine on my English Windows XP Service Pack 3 system.

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The Pidgin Encryption plugin adds encryption to Pidgin by generating a public and private key during activation. Let me give you a short rundown on that encryption scheme. The public keys are accessible by all of your contacts which can use them to encrypt their messages. The only person who can decrypt those messages is the one with the private key that builds a pair with that public key. It comes down to swapping the public keys so that messages can be encrypted and decrypted on the fly.

Thankfully Pidgin does most of that automatically. There is no need, like in other applications, to transfer the public key on a different way to the other users. The keys are automatically created and the public key is automatically transferred to all contacts. There is however the possibility to exchange the keys using different way to increase the security. Meet your friend at a secret location and hand him the self destructing disk with your public key..

You obviously need Pidgin for that and the Pidgin Encryption Plugin. You can regenerate your key in the preferences and change the default size of 1024 bits to a value between 512 and 4096 bits. Make sure that both “Automatically Encrypt” boxes are checked. A list of the public keys of your buddies is also available in the preferences.

By default the conversations take place unencrypted. A user needs to press the TX button to encrypt the messages. If the user on the other end is not using the plugin he will see a notification that the message is encrypted and that he needs the plugin. If that is the case the TX button will show to be secure while the RX button will be plain. (I guess TX stands for Transmit while RX for Receive)

To always use encryption when chatting with a specific user you need to right-click that user and select Turn Auto-Encrypt On. To avoid man in the middle attacks you need to compare keys with your buddy. This can be done in the Pidgin preferences. I suggest another way of communication to compare the keys. (phone, irc, voip)

A last tip. If you use multiple computers you probably want to make sure that all use the same keys. You can do that by moving the keys from .pidgin directory in *nix or in the application data directory in Windows to the new computer. The keys are stored in the three files:

• id.priv (private keys)
• id (public keys)
• known_keys

Each line of the files represents one key which means that you can also copy only selected keys to the other machine.

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