When I was looking over my news feeds yesterday morning, I though I had spied some exciting news. A few sites were reporting about a new Delicious extension for Chrome. Some of them trumpeted its arrival as proof that Chrome extensions were real.

I found that statement a little odd, because AdSweep has been around since early April. Didn't that pretty much prove the "reality" of Chrome extensions?

To make things even less exciting, the Delicious extension is about as un-noteworthy as they come. If you've got the 'Bookmark on Delicious' bookmarklet in Chrome already, guess what? The extension does the exact same thing. All it does is create a Delicious icon at the end of your address bar instead of on your bookmark toolbar.

I don't know about you, but that's nothing to get worked up about. Google's three example extensions? Equally yawn-worthy.

Heck, I'm still waiting for integration with Google services. Anyone else wondering where the support for things like Google Bookmarks is? It is their browser, after all.

Don't get me wrong - I love Chrome's speed and minimal UI, but after this long I thought we'd see some much more interesting extensions. If you know one, please share it in the comments. I'd love to see it!

Yahoo! is shutting down online video editing site Jumpcut next month. This week the company rolled out a few tools allowing users to download their original video files and rendered projects from the site.

The easy part is download your "assets," which includes the original video clips, photos, audio, and other elements you uploaded to the site. Jumpcut is now offering users links for downloading these assets one at a time or in one large ZIP file.

If you want to save the videos that you've already mixed and edited, you'll need to download the JumpOut! movie renderer for Windows. This tool lets you navigate through your saved videos and select a movie that you want to render as a WMV file that you can save on your desktop.

The movie renderer takes a long time to work (about 5 times the length of a video's run time), and it's described as "experimental software" which means that you might run into some glitches. But right now, it's the only tool available that will let you save your edited videos.

You have until June 15th to download your assets and movies from the site.

There's a piece over at The Guardian today about the most searched for terms on Microsoft's Live Search. The top two: Google and Yahoo. They, combined with Google.com and Yahoo.com, account for 2.7% of all searches performed on Live.

The numbers would probably be much different if Live Search was considered a decent search engine. Right now, not so much. People would rather use Live to search for a better place to search than to perform their actual queries.

Does the same thing happen on Google? Not quite. Yahoo appears at #20 on Trends, and it's the only search engine in the top 100 results.

Apart from the fact that Live isn't the first name people think of when it comes to search, I'm willing to bet that a large volume of the searches are coming from Windows users who don't know where to type web addresses in Internet Explorer.

The support call usually goes something like this:

"Do you see the big white bar at the top of your Internet Explorer window?"

"Yes."

"Type Google.com in there, and press your enter key."

"I did that. All it does is show me this Live Search thing with a bunch of writing under it."

"No, type in the wide bar. The not-wide bar is for searching."

"I did. I must have a virus, it just keeps showing me this Live Search thing."

No, that's not a virus. It's just a search engine you never knew about even though you were looking right at it.

Yahoo! is slowly killing off some of its service that I kind of forgot it had. In January, the company announced it would be pulling the plug on Yahoo! Briefcase, an online file storage site that was state of the art 10 years ago when it offered 30MB of web based storage, but which hasn't really been updated since. Today Yahoo! is hammering the nail in the coffin of GeoCities, a web site building service that hasn't been updated in nearly as long.

Yahoo! has already stopped accepting new account registrations, but existing GeoCities pages won't be pulled down until later this year.

The company hasn't offered a simple path for migrating your data yet, but Yahoo! is suggesting users upgrades to paid Yahoo! web hosting accounts. There are no plans to offer a free web hosting service in the future.

[via Mashable]

Yahoo! has unveiled a new interface for the company's image search engine. The centerpiece is a new image preview bar that opens up when you click on a new image. This preview area lets you continue browsing through thumbnails while viewing the image on its original web page. You can also conduct new searches without navigating back to the Yahoo! image search page.

When you conduct a search, Yahoo! will also now suggest related searches and let you filter images by size, color, and whether they come from Flickr or not.

[via Yahoo! Search Blog]

I might be the only writer at Download Squad who's excited about this, but baseball season is just around the corner. That means fantasy baseball leagues are drafting now. Like a lot of sports dorks, my fantasy site of choice is Yahoo. Although they've improved their web interface over the years -- by adding drag-and-drop roster editing, for example -- it's still not fun trying to manage your team from an iPhone. That's where a third-party app called Y!Fan comes in.

Y!Fan isn't pretty, but it (mostly) gets the job done. Although it's baseball season now, Y!Fan lets you manage your roster in other Yahoo sports, too. It doesn't support trades or add-drops yet, which is a big limitation, but it can save you some points if you're away from your computer and you need to put a pitcher in at the last minute. You can also use it to check player stats, and the all-important league standings. It's not perfect, but so far it's the only one out there.

If it seems like every few days we're checking to see if Microsoft plans to buy Yahoo!, it's because we are. Earlier this year, Microsoft offered to buy the search company for $33 a share, but Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang said that bid undervalued the company. After a little back and forth, Microsoft walked away.

Flash forward half a year, and Yahoo! stock is trading at around the $10 mark, Yang has announced plans to step down as CEO, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the company still isn't interested in buying Yahoo!. Ballmer says Microsoft is still interested in pursuing a deal with Yahoo! to leverage the company's search technology. But that's not too surprising, since Ballmer's been saying that for months.

Does this mean that we won't see two of the largest companies in the software and internet space join forces? No, not really. Ballmer could just be negotiating or waiting for Yahoo! stock to drop low enough that he can pick up the company with nothing but spare change found in his couch cushions. But it is interesting to know that the departure of Yahoo!'s CEO seems to have no bearing on Ballmer's position.

It hasn't exactly been a good year for Yahoo!. Earlier this year, the company rejected Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo! for $33 a share. This week, Yahoo! stock is selling for about $10 a share. Silicon Alley Insider estimates that the search company is out $2 billion dollars because of this misstep.

It's probably not fair to put all of that on CEO Jerry Yang's head. After all, the current economic downturn is taking its toll on everyone. But the Yahoo! board of directors has announced that it is searching for a new CEO. Once a replacement is found, Yang will step down as CEO and resume his role as "Chief Yahoo!," which is a ridiculous job title that's basically a corporate strategy job. He'll also remain on the board of directors.

Yang's resignation raises a lot of questions. Who will replace him as CEO? Will the move bring Microsoft back to the table, or has that ship sailed? Could Yahoo! be looking for a new buyer or a strategic partnership? Who wrote the book of love? Yeah, maybe not that one.

A few seconds after Google kicked Yahoo! to the curb by severing an agreement to place AdSense ads on Yahoo! search pages, folks started speculating that Yahoo! might go crawling back to Microsoft. The two companies had engaged in extensive talks earlier this year. But Yahoo! rejected Microsoft's initial buyout offer and everything went downhill from there.

Now Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a message for Yahoo! "We moved on." Ballmer says Microsoft might be willing to look at a partnership that would allow Micorosft to use Yahoo! Search or other technologies. But the software giant has no plans to purchase the internet portal.

Remember how Yahoo! and Google announced this summer that they would be partnering to place Google AdSense ads next to Yahoo! search results? Yeah, that's not going to happen.

Basically, Google says it's pulling out of the deal because government regulators and "some advertisers" are uncomfortable with the idea. The New York Times puts things a bit more strongly, mentioning that regulators planned to file a lawsuit to block the patnership between two of the largest web search portals.

The deal was first announced back in June, shortly after Microsoft walked away from negotiations to purchase the company. At this point, it's not clear what the future holds for Yahoo!, a company that's clearly looking for ways to revitalize its brand.

Download Squad isn't alone when it comes to awesome redesigns -- today, Weblogs Inc.'s parent company, AOL, launched a totally redesigned AOL.com. It looks pretty great, especially when you compare it to the other portal offerings from Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. The biggest change comes in the form of allowing direct access to outside content -- including e-mail providers like Yahoo and Gmail, social networks like Facebook and MySpace and links to non AOL sites via a new RSS reader built into the site.

I had the opportunity to talk to James Clark, the VP of the AOL.com portal, about the redesign process, both from a business and web development level, as well as ways AOL is hoping to use the newly designed page to help transform the AOL brand.

Redesigning a site of any scale can be a challenge, but redesigning a site that receives over a billion PVs a month opens up an entirely new set of both business and user challenges. Starting in 2007, the AOL team started doing research on how its competitors display the web and more importantly, how end users (not necessarily AOL users, just Internet users) use the Internet. James told me that what they found was that the "one size fits all portal was outdated and outmoded." In this day and age, even traditional AOL users get content from multiple services and expect a level of control that traditional portals just don't give them.

Last month, AOL addressed those needs by implementing the ability to check and view e-mail from other providers -- like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail -- directly from the AOL.com page, the same way AOL users can access AOL mail. Today's redesign continues with that trend, offering access to MySpace, Facebook, and AIM (Twitter and Bebo support will be complete very soon) all from AOL.com. You can even update all profiles simultaneously directly from the toolbar.

Additionally, users can add their own links to pages right at the top of the screen (and you don't even have to register or login to access any of this stuff -- not even Google will let you customize stuff without logging in with a Google account). Probably the coolest feature is at the bottom of the home page. AOL has integrated an RSS reader into the page. It comes preloaded with categories and websites, but you can add your own categories and your own sites. Even more interesting, the sites aren't just AOL properties. In the Tech section, for instance, CNET, TechCrunch, Slashdot and Wired are all listed -- and none of those sites are affiliated with AOL.

Safari users have been enjoying the search-as-you-type extension Inquisitor for a long time, and now Firefox users can, too. Although it was originally developed independently for Safari by David Watanabe (creator of apps like Acquistion and Newsfire), it was acquired by Yahoo! back in May. Apparently, that resulted in a preview of a Firefox version, which seems to work just as well as its Safari counterpart. If you like the idea of instant search results, displayed as you type, give it a try.

Inquisitor for Firefox is still in preview, so you'll have to sign up or log in to download. Once installed, it goes in your list of search engines, and is enabled by default. If you decide you don't like it, just click the Inquisitor icon next to your search bar and switch back to whichever search engine you were using before.

The only drawback of the latest versions of Inquisitor, depending on how you look at it, is that they use Yahoo! Search by default. You don't notice this so much when you're going straight to a webpage from the Inquisitor results, but you definitely do when you perform a full search. (You can choose between Yahoo! and Google in the add-on's preferences, however.)



[Via Cybernetnews]

Yahoo! is rolling out the first major overhaul of its web-based calendar application in 10 years. But while there are 278-million Yahoo! Mail users, only about 8 million people use the calendar.

The new Yahoo! Calendar beta looks pretty nice. It has a slick interface that lets you zoom in on any particular date for a close-up even when you're using the month view. The calendar also features Flickr integration, so that random Creative Commons-licensed images can be pulled in to make the calendar look pretty. Eventually users will be able to add images from their own Flickr accounts.

The updates aren't just cosmetic. You can manage multiple calendars, share calendars with friends, and create to-do lists associated with your calendar. The new calendar also supports iCal and CalDAV protocols, which mean you can import calendars from AOL, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google. At least in theory. I tried importing my Google Calendar with no success. But I was able to import my Yahoo! Calendar into Google, so that's something at least.

Keep in mind, the new Yahoo! Calendar is still in beta. And it shows in a couple of places. There are a bunch of features available in the old Yahoo! Calendar that are absent from the new beta, including the ability to search for events, show sports, ifnacnce, holiday, and weather information, or even add symbols for event types like birthdays and anniversaries. You should also note that if you switch to the beta version of the calendar and then decide to switch back, you will lose any changes made in the beta version.

Long story short, the new Yahoo! Calendar is worth checking out. But you might not want to make the switch just yet. The beta is only available to users in the US, UK, India, Taiwan, and Brazil and the moment, with a worldwide rollout expected within the next few months.

Companies like SeeqPod and Skreemr have made a business model out of letting you search for a song or musician by name and then streaming the MP3s found on the web. The sites don't actually host any of the music - just the tools to locate and play it. But they do rely on the fact that millions of people have already illegally uploaded copyrighted songs to the internet. Now Yahoo! has entered the game with a 100% legal system.

Here's how it works. You go to Yahoo.com and enter the name of a band, musician, or song. If it's among the 10,000 or so songs supported by Yahoo! at the moment, you'll get a box at the top of your search results with some artist information and a few play links. Hit play and a Flash-based player will pop up and start playing the song by streaming music from Real Networks' Rhapsody music service.

There is a catch. You can only listen to 25 songs a month before the Rhapsody player stops working. You'll need to sign up for a paid account if you want to keep going. In other words, if you're looking to create a free streaming audio playlist, you're still better off using SeeqPod or Skreemr. But if you're already a Rhapsody subscriber or if you're willing to pay for a legal service, Yahoo! is offering an alternative. And more importantly, if you're not looking to create a playlist, but just want to figure out the name of that tune you heard on the radio, Yahoo! now has the tools to help.

Yahoo! is staring to roll out a new version of the Yahoo! homepage today. Only selected users in the US and UK will see the new page at first, (pictured on the right). But eventually the new Yahoo! will be available for everyone.

So what's new? First off, the list of links on the left side of the page has been replaced by a customizable menu that gives you quick access to information like email, stocks, and weather. And that email section? You it's not just for Yahoo! Mail. You can also link your Gmail account and in time Yahoo! plans to add other services as well.

Yahoo! also plans to make its homepage more social by adding the ability to keep up on what your friends/contacts are doing. That could include notifications when friends upload new pictures to Yahoo!'s Flickr. Or it could include updates from other non-Yahoo! social networking sites.

All this talk about making the new Yahoo! homepage more social and more useful is all well and good. But you can't fool me. The ultimate goal here is to make sure the Yahoo! homepage looks less like the AOL homepage. You know, until AOL decides to copy Yahoo! again.