Webware

In an attempt to boost its search-ad business, Yahoo has begun a project that lets anyone build a customized search engine atop the Internet company's technology.

The service, which enters public beta testing Wednesday night, is called BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service). With it, someone can build an independent Web site with a search box, pass users' queries to BOSS, process the results returned by Yahoo's search engines in any manner, and display the results.

Essentially, BOSS is a bid to enable others' search innovation then share profits from the results. It's also the most significant example to date of Yahoo Open Strategy, the company's effort to expose its own technology for outside developers in an effort to become a more indispensible part of the Internet.

The BOSS API (application programming interface) to Yahoo's search is free to use, but BOSS partners that succeed will be required to show search ads, said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search.

"We fully expect it to expand the footprint of Yahoo search advertising on the Web," Raghavan said. "There is no payment of any kind we expect from partners, but we do say in the terms of service up front that over time we will require them as they build and grow out to use our search advertising."

That's a strong statement, given Google's rapid ascent and strength in that very market. Even Yahoo, faced with intense shareholder pressure and a hostile takeover attempt by Microsoft, has tried to hitch itself to the Google star through a search-ad deal with its rival.

But BOSS is an interesting idea nonetheless. Yahoo hopes to attract both entrepreneurs and researchers--it has formal BOSS partnership with Stanford University, the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other educational sites--and it's got more in-depth with some business partnerships the company plans to announce later.

Yahoo already has launched a program called SearchMonkey that lets programmers augment Yahoo's search results with richer displays of information--for example by adding starred reviews or addresses to restaurants listed in search results. That's a skin-deep change compared to what BOSS permits, though, where outside sites can completely alter the order of search results, filter out particular results, display results only of a particular variety, and combine the Yahoo data with internal data.

Yahoo offered some examples of what could be done with BOSS. One idea is a visual search presentation that shows miniature versions of the Web pages atop the textual results. Another, social search, could be used to spotlight results relevant to attributes drawn from a person's social network.

Among those who are trying out BOSS are social search site Me.dium and natural language processing site Hakia.

Setting up a competitive search requires prohibitively large financial resources, Raghavan said. Yahoo estimates roughly $300 million to cover expenses such as staff and the hardware to constantly index new Web pages, analyze the index, and handle queries.

Indeed, search start-up PowerSet, acquired last week by Microsoft, said the difficulty of building a full-scale search business led it to its acquisition by Microsoft last week. "Building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine," said PowerSet product manager Mark Johnson in a blog posting.

With BOSS, Yahoo offers use of its own hardware in exchange for search-ad revenue. It might well be that no single company becomes as dominant as the top three search engines--Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft--but that collectively the smaller players offer more alternatives, Raghavan said.

Monetization of BOSS through search ads is "a few months away," he said.

Programmers may use the BOSS interface for free and, if they get to the stage where search ads are displayed, will share in the revenue. Yahoo doesn't reveal what fraction of search-ad revenue those outside partners would receive.

Yahoo is being careful with the BOSS branding. "You cannot put in any Yahoo attribution. This is not indicative of the Yahoo search product," said Bill Michaels, senior director of Yahoo's search platform.

It's not clear yet what the implications are for BOSS advertising. "Vertical" search sites that cater to a particular audience sometimes could in theory charge premium advertising rates, because they link advertisers to a targeted audience, but it's also possible that visitors aren't as desirable to advertisers than the broad cross section that visits general-purpose search sites.

"There are a bunch of unknowns," Raghavan said. "You might have more focused audiences, which could potentially be enhanced by proprietary data. But on the other hand, it's unclear when you fragment traffic what happens to the overall quality of traffic. You have factors that could weigh in either direction. It's premature to make a clear conclusion on the revenue per search metric."

In-browser social network Me.dium is expanding its services Wednesday night with the launch of a new social search tool. It pulls in regular old Yahoo results as part of the company's freshly announced BOSS platform (see news story here), while combining them with social results from other Me.dium users.

Me.dium founder David Mandell is calling the new system "Crowd Rank" and says it's not about how content links with other content, but how it links up with other users who are visiting these sites. Based on the data from people with the Me.dium sidebar or toolbar installed, the engine will get its own community-specific results that Mandell thinks will be more valuable than something merely indexed by machines.

That's not to say it's completely nixing those machined results. The social layer comes secondary to the service's main search, which will simply pull up Yahoo results. The extra value here is in the Me.dium community metadata that's wrapped around each link. Included is rank, velocity (how fast it's moved up in the results), crowd level, the last time a Me.dium user visited the site, along with how long most are spending there. It will be getting this data from two sources, both the social sidebar as well as a toolbar, which is launching as part of the service. Privacy will be the same for both products--as you can turn off tracking of sites you're visiting with two clicks.

Users looking for deeper integration with their in-browser search will have to use the toolbar or sidebar for the time being. Mandell says an option to use it in the top corner of compatible browsers like Firefox should be coming in the near future.

Related: Wikia Search launches the hackable search engine

Note: Yoono is in private beta. We've got invites set aside for Webware readers. To get yours see the link at the end of the post.

Tonight Yoono, a browser add-on for discovering and sharing Web content is launching several new features designed to help you track what your friends are up to online.

The tool now integrates with several popular social networks and microblogging services including Twitter, letting you access and interact with the communities of all of them in one place. Previously users were limited to sending links to friends via e-mail, or interacting more easily with in-network users (called "Yoosiers") than friends from outside social networks.

The company is calling its plug-in a "remote control," but I'd argue to say that it's more a set of highly customized widgets that are interconnected and can share the same piece of content in different ways. Starting today there are just a few that cover different things like photos, videos, and music, but the company hopes to expand, adding more tools and services while letting people pick what they want to avoid an overload both in information and desktop real estate.

The pile on of services that are trying to do this is almost as fatiguing as the goal they're attempting to fix, however Yoono's newest offering is inherently stickier because of where it resides. It's not in your taskbar, it's not a separate application--it remains in your browser where you'll be hopping around from site to site.

As a recent user of Digsby, I've come to enjoy this kind of do-it-all functionality, but having one less thing running on my machine is an attractive proposition. If you're ever used Flock you'll know what I'm talking about, and in many ways Yoono now gives you some of Flock's best features without needing to hop over to a new browser.

While the new access to social and chat networks is nice, one of the newer features that lets you view photos off Flickr as an overlay of whatever page you're looking at is far cooler. You can casually search for any photos on the service using keywords, or you can click one button and have it parse whatever page you're looking at for related shots. Is this useful? Not really, but it's addictive and will have you browsing shots for hours. To see it in action, click on the screen shot on the left.

Other small additions include a scaling back of the "buzz it" feature I wrote about last year, a really slick bookmarking tool that lets you grab anything off a page and blog about it while bookmarking it in a set of personalized feeds. The team has made it considerably easier to use in the hopes that more people will take advantage of it. Users will also soon be getting access to their friends and information updates on Bebo, MySpace, Imeem, and Friendster.

I'm impressed with what Yoono is doing, but it's in a crowded market. Recent releases from Me.dium, Digsby and Adobe AIR apps like Alert Thingy are offering some compelling, and most importantly, simple solutions to trying to sort out the influx of information. However, I really do appreciate a service that's trying to add this type of functionality to an already useful do-it-all tool.

Yoono is still in private beta and currently the new functionality only works in Firefox. Internet Explorer users will be getting an updated version in about three weeks. We've got 200 invites for Webware readers. To get yours, just go here.

Browser side-bar chat and friend app extraordinare Me.dium has just released a new version this afternoon. I met up with founder David Mandell at last week's Web 2.0 Expo to chat about the new functionality, which he says is a very early version of Me.dium's next big thing. This big thing is actually a small change--your friends and their presence in the app, which is now taking the focus.

Previously Me.dium's claim to fame was meeting random people at sites you visited. Now it's all about your friends and improving the ways you can interact with them. Mandell compared his app with world travel, and that coming to a new city with people you don't know isn't nearly as fun as interacting with those you know and trust.

The functionality in question is the outright removal of the "everyone" tab, which would let you see the entire world of activity for other Me.dium users, and limit it to just your friends. Mandell says the tab will be added later on down the line, but he wants people to start focusing on their friends list, and expanding the ways you'll be able to interact with them in real time or asynchronously.

Part of that expansion uses the Facebook API to let you share links. If you find something you're interested in you can simply drag it over to your list of Facebook friends and it will set up a Facebook share for them right away. When they get it, it's the entire piece of content with a small note that says you shared it via Me.dium, but doesn't require your recipient to sign up read what you've sent their way.

Maybe a more important new feature is the similar pages button that will pop up with a list of sites related to the one you're looking at. In my testing it didn't do a whole lot of good, like when it likened Webware to CNN.com, but the concept is insanely great if it lets you discover new sites in a similar fashion to that of StumbleUpon.

Also on the list of things that are new is a skinning tool that lets you retheme the side bar. Mandell says they'll be opening up a way for people to design their own themes, as well as provide a place to parse through them and track what's hot. Users of Twhirl and other AIR-based communication apps will feel right at home.

As I told Mandell last week, I'm not too keen on apps that take over a big chunk of your browser. With that said I think anyone who's used to the Flock browser will be the happiest to adopt since so much of the browser's social features hang out in the same general area.

Social Web surfing tool Me.dium is one of the first apps ready for Internet Explorer 8 beta, which Microsoft unveiled at Mix '08 in Las Vegas Wednesday.

The browser add-on enables users to chat with each other and see which Web pages they're visiting. This release takes advantage of new WebSlices and Activities features within IE 8.

With WebSlices, users can subscribe to dynamic updates of specific parts of Web pages they visit, with new content displaying within the Me.dium sidebar.

Activities capabilities enable users to bring up maps or Web searches of highlighted text on a page. The Discovery activity offers real-time content recommendations related to the pages users are browsing. The feature maps and ranks the popularity of users' ongoing activities.

Upon Microsoft's request, the Me.dium (more here) team reportedly built the tool for IE 8 within a week.

For the sake of security, Me.dium allows stealth settings so users can hide from each other, and it shuts off at bank sites.

roundup
Mixing it up with Microsoft

Click here for full Mix '08 coverage.

Users testing IE 8 can download Me.dium here. Some rival social browsing tools, however, don't require installation.

The extension, also available for Firefox, added support for IE 7 in September.

RockMe. has got to the be the only five-day music festival where you won't pay for tickets. It is social-networking site Me.dium's attempt to rock your world, and the only thing you need to get in is your Web browser. (Of course, you still have to bring your own drinks.)

RockMe., which runs from September 18 through September 22, 2007, will feature bands, music video competitions, and the world's safest mosh pit--it's virtual. More important to Me.dium, the RockMe. festival will provide plenty of opportunities for band members and music lovers to swap fond memories of choice lyrics and drum solos using Me.dium's service.... Read more

(Credit: Me.dium)

Surfing the Web doesn't have to be a solitary experience, at least according to Me.dium, a browser add-on that uses real-time data to share information with your friends and the Me.dium community. Today, Me.dium added support for Internet Explorer 7, opening up the "social surfing" experience to a huge new audience.

In essence, Me.dium lets you share as much of your browsing information as you like with either a select set of friends, Me.dium users who are visiting a specific Web page, or the Me.dium community at large. The extension presents itself in a browser sidebar and displays your Me.dium universe, or "your online world." The map is based on your current Web location, your friends' current browsing spots, and your recent Web activity. ... Read more

coComment, the universal comment community, is opening up its doors to everyone today on Monday, along with a fresh new look and a handful of tweaks and new features. I originally took a look at the comment service in early May, and came away impressed. The basic idea is that comments for things like blog posts, YouTube videos, and Web sites become centralized and available to everyone. Once users buy into the system by registering and installing an extension in their browser, they're able to comment on any page they'd like and keep track of what others are commenting on. If you've read up on Me.dium [Me.dium review here], the idea is somewhat similar.

Among some of the tweaks to the user interface is a new sidebar that lets you browse what your friends have commented on, viewed through a two-pane interface. It feels a little bit like browsing through your e-mail in-box (if you're familiar with Outlook). coComment is also throwing its hat in as a social bookmarking service of sorts, letting users share pages they're visiting, regardless of whether they have started or become engaged in conversations. Users can share in one of three ways, either to individuals, groups, or what coComment calls the "social Web"--a listing of over a dozen social bookmarking and sharing sites including Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Twitter.

coComment is working on a Facebook app that should be ready in the next couple of months. When I asked coComment's CEO Matt Colebourne about any future plans of adding instant messaging to the service, he noted that the asynchronous nature of commenting works well without the need for instantaneous response, and that coComment's speed is more than enough for two or more users to converse quite quickly.

Update: We just got word the launch is being pushed to Monday, due to an issue with Internet Explorer.

Related: Zpeech, co.mments, myComments.

Meebo, which makes a multinetwork IM Web service, is launching a chat-room service called Rooms tonight. Like the company's other embeddable component, MeeboMe (review), it's simple to embed a Rooms viewer in a blog post or Web page. But Rooms is a full-on, multiparty chat room, which makes it a lot more interesting. MeeboMe, in contrast, allows only one-to-one communication between a Web site visitor and the Meebo user who created it--useful, but not as fun.

I've embedded a Rooms widget further down in this post. As you can see, there's more to it than just chat. Rooms makes it easy for users to share media and Web sites. All you have to do to embed a YouTube video or a Flickr photo (or media from Metacafe, Google Video, PhotoBucket, or MySpace) is paste the URL into the chat window, then other users will be able to play media directly, without leaving the chat session.

Room owners can make their forums open to everyone or by invitation only, and they can separately lock down the posting of media and links if they want (I didn't, so please keep your links clean). The media feature of Meebo Rooms reminds me of Kyte.tv (review) and of YouTube's Active Sharing experiment.

Meebo Rooms is not the only embeddable group chat. We've covered several competing products: Weezu, Me.dium, Dai.sy, Chatsum, Yakalike, Planet Minibox, Yackpack, Yaplet, and Zpeech, for example. Meebo Rooms does take advantage of Meebo's slick, Web-based instant message service, though. You can easily invite people into a room by just dragging their name from your buddy list into the room. But Meebo doesn't force the chat/IM integration on you: If you want to invite people via e-mail, that's cool. And people who chat on the service's embeddable widgets don't have to be Meebo users at all.

Meebo Rooms users can also private-message the room's owner, who can then respond back to them in kind. This is a common feature in chat widgets, but I found Rooms' implementation of it exceptionally clear and intuitive.

... Read more