Webware

A month after the launch of BOSS--an application programming interface that lets developers build a customized search engine atop Yahoo's technology--the company is showing off mashups built using the product.

Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service interface allows Web users to build an independent search Web site, send search queries to Yahoo, and process and display the results in various formats, while boosting Yahoo's search-ad business.

So far, the ideas have been related to news and sports search, as well as general search. 4HourSearch, which CNET News touched on briefly last week, took four hours to build with a combination of BOSS and Yahoo User Interface design tools. It spits out Yahoo search results in a style reminiscent of Cuil, and cleverly lists on the front page that it "surfs enough sites."

But some of the more interesting mashups are aiming to aid niche Web users. For sports lovers, the PlayerSearch sports search engine pulls in content from a host of sources, displaying search results in categories such as podcasts, videos, national news and columns, Flickr photos, or stories from The Onion.

The mashup winner, as declared by Yahoo BOSS bloggers, was Dipity, which also showed off its meme timeline Thursday.

The site paired its timeline application with Daylife News, using the BOSS API to make NewsLine. By comparing two topics (John McCain versus Barack Obama) or simply searching for news about one topic, the search results are rendered in timeline form and as a unique perspective.

Yahoo promises that even more mashups, and perhaps new popular search sites, are on the way.

The "shapes" view, an intergalactic tag cloud.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Who says you have to view online stories as lists of headlines or search results? I recently wrote up several different sites that help you visualize search results in new ways. Now there's an interesting experiment to visualize news as well, called Universe.

An art project more than anything else, Universe uses the Daylife news database (and a user-supplied search term) as its source. Then it displays news in a unique and strange formats. The "stars" view, for example, shows a scrolling field of stars and constellations. When you click on one (without any indication of what it is), you go to a screen with your star's term in the center of the screen, surrounded by a roulette wheel of words or stories related to it.

Stories orbit a key term.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Other visualizers pull out quotes from stories, show personalities (the "superstars" view), or display timelines of stories.

In many of the views, you don't know what you're going to get until you click on a link, which adds the "myth" of the news, as designer Jonathan Harris apparently intended (see CNET News.com story).

I'm pretty happy with seeing my news as a list of headlines, but I'm old-fashioned. The mythic Universe of News, like the Digg Swarm that shows what that galaxy of users is looking at, is a very entertaining way to look at content, and it provides a visual context to stories that no table of text ever could.

Often, the companies that present at the NY Tech Meetup are in a fledgling pre-beta phase and haven't received a whole lot of buzz. But one of the featured New York start-ups at Tuesday night's January meetup has gotten a whole lot of coverage among tech blogs since it launched last week: Daylife, a news aggregator that comes up with creative ways to visualize the people, places, organizations, and events that shape today's headlines. You might recognize its technology from the NewsRanker feature on the popular news blog Huffington Post--Daylife is all about using cool graphs, charts, timelines, and connections to make current events something more than just words and photos. And it's automated. This could be just what the Internet needs.

Complaints about some popular sites dependent on user-generated content, namely news site Digg, has made me wonder if whether the user-generated route isn't always going to be the best one. Take the news, for example. The recent buzz about Digg has shown that a news aggregator where headlines are picked out Coliseum-style by the masses with a thumbs up or down--shockingly--might not always showcase the best or most honestly-picked news. Putting Digg and Daylife side by side, I wonder whether the collective masses of the Internet will decide that there are some niches of new media that might be better off powered by automation rather than by "people power."

Top stories appear as large graphics with headlines

(Credit: CNET Networks)

There are already plenty of automated news aggregators out there, most notably the impressively successful Google News. But Google News is, more or less, a collection of headlines. Daylife aims to go several steps farther. For example, when you're reading headlines on Daylife and you click on the name of someone notable--say, David Beckham--you'll be treated to a series of news headlines, a photo slideshow, a quotations section, connections to other news topics, and a timeline that shows how many news stories have mentioned Becks on each day of the past month. (You can even separate the graph into news stories versus blog entries!) News, in the Daylife sense, is something that's quantifiable and dynamic; it's all interconnected, and anywhere you click can bring you to a whole new set of headlines and pictures: at first glance, this is a perfect presentation of the news for today's media-heavy, information saturated world where anyone can be a journalist. And with automation, Daylife avoids the arguably oligarchic nature of Digg.

Besides, the news really is more complex than an up-and-down ranking.

But Daylife is far from perfect. I'm not a huge fan of the site's "cover," as pretty as the photographs on it may be. Aren't splash pages totally 1998? Take me to the content, please. Additionally, I can relate to some of the disappointment that TechCrunch's Michael Arrington expressed when he wrote up Daylife's launch last week. The site is indeed missing several features that are practically must-haves for any rich-media start-up these days: Arrington mentioned RSS feeds and the ability for users to post comments. Sure, I read somewhere that only two percent of Internet users actually use a feed reader, but RSS is pretty much a requirement for the geek elite who are often the first crowd to pull a start-up out of its nest. And as for comments, I'd at least like to see some way for users to contribute to the site. At the NY Tech Meetup presentation, we were all assured that there's plenty more on the way--yes, including widgets, so that you can share Daylife data on your blog.

So, as with so many sites featured on Webware, it's really too early to gauge Daylife's potential for success. But in my opinion, it has a niche to fill. User-generated news sites like Digg are a colorful alternative to the often dry nature of automated aggregators, but there's the strong potential that their content won't actually reflect what's going on in the world. Daylife could find its footing on the Web as an automated news site that's actually interesting.

We'll just have to stay tuned.