Dr. Dobb’s Journal reviews 5 AJAX frameworks: Dojo 0.3.1, Prototype and Scriptaculous 1.4, Direct Web Reporting 1.0, Yahoo! User Interface Library 0.11.1 and Google Web Toolkit 1.0. Each framework was tested in two basic scenarios - writing a “hub” (titled collapsible link list frequently seen on sidebars of many Web sites) and a “tab panel” (horizontal tabbed navigation bar). During the process, Dr. Dobb’s Journal reviewers noted that “Dojo provides more features and HTML widgets than YUI and Prototype” but eventually “settled on the Yahoo! User Interface Library”.
Oracle’s decision to download copies of Red Hat Linux and sell support for it at consistently lower prices than Red Hat seems to be paying off, as the company announced Yahoo! as one of its prominent customers buying support for Red Hat Linux. What CNET article doesn’t mention is that Yahoo!’s core infrastructure runs FreeBSD, so both Oracle and Red Hat are now competing for Yahoo! accounts that are unlikely to list thousands and thousands of servers.
CNET now offers REST-based API for CNET Product Catalog, CNET Reviews and Download.com. You can get stuff like product name, product rating by CNET editors, some specs, a review URL and an image URL linked to CNET’s i.i.com.com server. You do not get the price range, but you can link to CNET Shopper for price searches.
CNET’s library of tech and software products is huge, and the software catalog includes everything uploaded to their Download.com site. If you’re on the market for other product catalogues, there’s also Yahoo! Shopping API (we used this one for building Yahoo! Tech when I was with Yahoo!) and Google Base API that’s a bit harder to use for tech-related searches and does not provide any reviews.
Combine that with specialized search engines like Retrevo and review aggregators like Wize, and you can build extensive research sites for millions of products that people shop for on a daily basis.
USA Today points out that by acquiring YouTube with its unique audience Google is bound to cement itself as #2 Web company in the world. The company actually reached that point last month, according to comScore data, but next year both comScore and NetRatings plan to consider both YouTube and Google traffic belonging to the same company. #1 in unique visits is still Microsoft with its variety of microsoft.com, msn.com, live.com and passport.net domains. So is more or less permanent #2 position a big deal for Google?
Google taking the No. 2 spot in worldwide traffic “is a big deal,” Sullivan says. “Google’s critics say the company is a one-trick pony, and is focused too much on just search. This just shows how powerful search is.”
MIT Technology Review runs a real-world test of top question and answer sites - AnswerBag, Amazon Askville, MSN Live Q&A, Wondir, Yahoo! Answers and Yedda. The sites are rated on the features and originality as well as availability of answers to the journalist’s three questions:
First, I searched each site’s archive for existing answers to the question “Is there any truth to the five-second rule?” (I meant the rule about not eating food after it’s been on the floor for more than five seconds, not the basketball rule about holding.) Second, I posted the same two original questions at each site: “Why did the Mormons settle in Utah?” and “What is the best way to make a grilled cheese sandwich?” The first question called for factual, historical answers, while the second simply invited people to share their favorite sandwich-making methods and recipes.
The results might be surprising to some readers. While it’s generally believed that small startups are better at building efficient solutions, the leaders of the MIT Technology Review are all sites built by Internet giants - Yahoo! Answers, MSN Live Q&A and Amazon Askville all ranked above the competing sites.
Wired magazine has coined a new term for the massive data centers built in Pacific Northwest by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Cloudware is, ironically, a return of the centralized data and bandwidth power houses caused by decentralized and distributed nature of the Internet. George Gilder thinks we’re witnessing something monumental:
According to Bell’s law, every decade a new class of computer emerges from a hundredfold drop in the price of processing power. As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born? How will we feed it? How will it be tamed? And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?
Nicholas Carr published a lengthy entry contemplating the consequences of this turn in computing:
In arguing that computing is “almost free,” while at the same time describing how costly it actually is, Gilder overlooks the paradox of abundance: that providing a resource in the quantities required to make it seem “free” can be a very expensive undertaking.
Now on to my feelings about this:
The fascination with the large data centers seems to come and go away every few years. You can just look at the Level 3 Communications chart to differentiate the period of enamourment with the technology followed by the period of disappointment. Server farms and giant data centers are cool to talk about, but in reality they provide only marginal advantage - you save on new server racks, when the data center companies are charging extra due to the boom times. With enough capital and commitment anyone can replicate a large data center, and if the business required, it wouldn’t take too much for someone decidedly uncool like Time Warner or News Corp. to invest another billion in a data center of their own, where “thousands and thousands” of servers would provide for a great background for executive photo shoots.
The argument on owning the vital piece of the architecture is important, as your growth shouldn’t be potentially bound by what Hurricane Electric or Equinox decide to charge. However, such architecture, as the aforementioned Level 3 stock chart displays, can be a liability at times when the market is undergoing a downturn, and a Web company finds itself in the business of renting out the server racks to justify the costs of building a data center.
Glider’s Wired article seems to glorify the fact that Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are all building in Pacific Northwest. That’s Dalles, OR, Wenatchee, WA and Quincy, WA. All located relatively closely to one another and in proximity to major dams, which allow for cheap electricity. So the “cloudware” will work great when I launch a YouTube clone, which will happen to hit big in broadband-wealthy Korea, right? Eeh, so that’s a problem as well. International traffic accounts for huge portions of growth at Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. In fact, when you look at Comscore numbers for US traffic in September 2006 and Comscore numbers for August 2006 in the United States, you will notice an interesting trend as far as total Internet users - the number of unique US Internet users fell from August 2006 to September 2006. Granted, there’re a few statistical issues here and there, and who knows how ComScore arrives at the exact numbers, so the US traffic might have even grown, but the fact is - US Internet usage growth is pretty much at its plateau right now. The growth for Internet’s top tier is going to come from China, India, Brazil and other emerging markets, and surprisingly the ping times to those places are not too great from either one of Pacific Northwest data centers.
Today is the first day of my officially being unemployed. For today and tomorrow I have no full-time job, as I left Yahoo! Tech team yesterday.
Starting Monday I will be an engineer at Facebook in Palo Alto.
I was browsing my subscriptions on Google Groups today and noted an interesting module:
The little side module was tracking my signed-in activity, and the tracking didn’t amount to just Google Groups browsing. See that link to CNET Networks? That was the link to Google Finance, and indeed, a few days ago, I checked out the latest blog postings on CNET on Google’s Finance property.
That tracking is near and dear to me, since the same type of tracking is enabled on Yahoo! Tech site. Whenever you browse or search for a product, the information stays on your log, and both Google Groups and Yahoo! Tech allow you to clear it, if you don’t feel comfortable with that info being on the screen. 
If you use Yahoo! Local a lot to find reviews of good restaurants or dentists, you will notice a similar looking module on Local as well. The idea is that a few days later you might want to come back to the item in the database you visited.
Here’s however, the crucial difference - clearing the cookies (or alternatively, closing the browser and letting the cookie expire) erases the traces of your activity from Yahoo! sites. Even if you never bother to hit Clear, sooner or later you will close the browser, and on the next visit to Yahoo! get a totally different set of cookies, so there’s never really a decent log of what you’ve done and visited. It doesn’t seem to be the case with Google, which ties up the activity to the user id, and hence messing with the cookies would produce no visible effect on tracking.
Moreover, Yahoo! chooses the model, which separates tracking on per-site basis. Your recent activity on Local is never shared with Tech, and won’t appear on other Yahoo! sites, as far as I know. Google’s tracking is network-wide from the start, as my recent tracks in the system include read Google Groups and a page on Google Finance. Not sure which approach is best for the user, as in cases like this you trade convenience for privacy, but this is one of the interesting facts that’s just useful to know.
We changed the face of Yahoo! Tech front page today in an attempts to get the visitors to the right content faster. The previous Flash-based menu required some user interaction, but seemingly too many were dismissing the original front page navigation as another ad, and therefore not getting to the right places on the site. Now the featured blog posts, new products and latest episodes from the Hook Me Up show are featured on the front page. The content will continue to change daily, as it did before.
Another notable addition visible to the outside world is the little changes in the blog pages - they are now (hopefully) easier to navigate and browse around.
Posted in Yahoo! at September 7th, 2006. No Comments.