Yahoo has plans to add an instant messaging service to their Yahoo Mail. It will be following the model of Google's Gmail which added IM several months a go. Yahoo Mail has an estimated 250 million users and is currently more widely used then Gmail.

Google Gmail offers almost 3Gb of space. Yahoo Mail has around 10 times the amount of users than Gmail. The advantages for Yahoo to add the IM feature will be retaining their current users while possibly attracting new users as well.

Brad Garlinghouse, vice president of communications at Yahoo, said the reason for the change was to improve the overall user experience. The instant messaging feature should definitely improve user experience.

Yahoo and Microsoft currently have plans to make their IM features interoperable. This will allow for users of MSN and Yahoo mail to keep track of who is online. This may also be legitimate competition for AOL Instant Messenger. AOL remains the leader.

Will there be a day when all IM services will be interoperable so one can chat with whomever they want from whatever service they choose? As the race to be the leader continues maybe there will be no clear winner. Hopefully we will all enjoy the advantage and freedom that interoperability could allow sometime in the future.

Tag: Yahoo Mail

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Google's Drop Spots has much grander plans for their online gift sharing community as I was told in an exclusive interview by the creators of the site.

Earlier in the week I did some research and wrote an article on a new Google site called Drop Spots, which is an online gift sharing community. The more I read about it, the more fascinated I became with the fact that in an age of anonymity, strangers wanted commit random acts of kindness.

For those who don't know, Drop Spots is an online gift sharing project that is featured on Google maps. The map has spots in spots in different cities across the country marked where a user of the site has placed a gift for another use to find. There is no catch here; just a scavenger hunt and gift exchange of any present you so choose.

So what made the creators of this community want to undertake a project in a time when it seems that no one knows or care about his or her neighbors? When I inquired to the creator Ed Purver, he responded that, "early on we decided we'd like to make a project that encouraged acts of generosity, and we knew that we wanted to use the web as a facilitator, but have the actual interaction be with physical places and with real objects."

The first actual Drop Spots were started in New York, when the creators asked friends for participation in a trial run of their concept to see if it would catch on. It did in fact catch on and so the creators started the actual website using Google maps. Now there are Drop Spots in hundreds of cities across the country, and the number can only increase because anyone can create spots in their city.

Now that the site has gained a following, the creators of have upgraded the website and made a, "more accessible version of geo-caching, one that makes it as easy as possible to find things, and that doesn't require people to buy a GPS device."

The changes to the site will not end there, say the creators. "We're talking about incorporating Google Earth into the site as well as Google Maps. But it's a community-driven project, so the site's development will be driven by user feedback." Google Earth would show aerial photos of the general area in which the Drop Spot is located, and would give participants a sense of where exactly to look for their gift.

One of the only complaints that the creators have had to face is the fact that some of the Drop Spots are not real or is empty when someone arrives. To address this issue they will, "add functionality for people to report spots that are not real."

But what I really wanted to know was what gift Ed Purver, on of the creators, had found that really intrigued him. "Someone recently left me a color slide, that was made in 1969, and I've become fascinated with this picture."

"The possibilities for social transformation on a personal and community level are quite exciting", says Brijetta Hall, another creator. I could not have put it any better myself.

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MySpace has some claws and they want to sink them into YouTube. The question is, can the place for friends "broadcast itself" to a higher number of visitors than YouTube?

Since "most of their traffic comes from us," MySpace's COO said of YouTube in September, "we ought to be able to match them if not exceed them" with MySpace's own video tool. MySpace, for some reason, seems to think that they have contributed to the success of YouTube via linking them on their website. Those are boastful words, considering the fact that they are overlooking an important question. If YouTube receives major traffic from MySpace, how much does MySpace get from YouTube?

Since YouTube's inception and release to the public in July of 2005, its number of viewers has skyrocketed and is nearing the 50 million mark. MySpace has already reached the 50 million-viewer mark, but it has taken them over four years to reach that milestone. In fact, the growth trajectory of YouTube over MySpace is so quick that it outpaced MySpace in their early years in almost every aspect.

Take for example the number of visitors both sites had in the first 16 months of their existence. In it's first 16 months MySpace's number of visitors crept at a snail's pace to just 5 million. On the other hand YouTube's viewer number soared to 25 million in the same amount of time as MySpace.

MySpace would have the public believe that this boom in viewing activity on the part of YouTube, is because of the link referring YouTube on MySpace's homepage. But in a recent study, it was concluded that based strictly on volume both sites receive the same amount of referrals from each other's sites.

As a matter of fact, YouTube only receives 10% of its traffic from MySpace according to Compete, which conducted the study. Such a small percentage should hardly be considered "most of their traffic".

While 10% percentage is not a huge number, it is a contributing to the number of YouTube viewers and will most likely increase as time goes by. It is in both parties best interest to keep egos at bay and links referring both YouTube and MySpace viewers to each other's sites.

MySpace also offers a service similar to YouTube on its site, which allows users to contribute their videos for members of the community to view. However, it is clearly no competition to YouTube's site because of the fact that it's number of viewers seems to be in the express lane to becoming the fastest growing website ever. So for now, both sites can amicably refer the other until MySpace attempts to branch out and compete with YouTube.

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Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have thrived on the concept of providing a completely autonomous virtual world. With the prospect of such a captive audience plugged in to a digital community, marketers are looking for new, more socially relevant ways to showcase their products

The mutual exclusivity of the real world and virtual worlds appears to be diminishing like sand on a riverbank -- methodically eroding away over time by the ever-present drag of marketing currents and the undertow of e-commerce.

Residents of Second Life in particular are beginning to see the turning of the tide in their virtual society. Companies such as Scion, Coca-Cola, Fox and Time Warner are slowly but surely making their presence felt in in the community.

B.L. Ochman notes the attitude of dissent rising within the community concerning some attempts at crossover marketing:

This is not to say that there is no creativity left in any agency or corporation, because clearly Nissan, Wells-Fargo, Adidas, Sun and Reuters are doing some very interesting Second Life marketing. But critics are certainly right that the vast majority of traditional marketers are totally clueless about the Internet in general and social media in particular. Otherwise, how could you explain the fact that so many sites are still full of flashing banner ads and spiders and roaches racing across articles you're trying to read?
So echoes the crux of the virtual marketing quandary. How does a company market its products to a virtual audience in a way that is both relevant and effective?

That's the question that Crayon is trying to help companies answer.

Crayon describes itself as a "new marketing" company, but its approach to relevancy within the virtual community of Second Life is what seems to be generating the most buzz.

Neville Hobson, VP of New Marketing for Second Life, outlines the company's infrastructure, "We're real, in the sense that all of us involved are physical, real human beings based in real locations, on the US east and west coasts plus me here in Europe."

"We're virtual, in the sense that our primary presence as a company is the three-dimensional online digital world of Second Life where we will conduct our business, our presentations, our brainstorms and our pitches."

I had the opportunity to visit Crayonville Island and check out the company's facilities.

The Crayon campus itself consists of a one-story building, which would seem to serve as a central traffic hub, with two multi-level office towers to the rear.

After all that walking, I was parched. Conveniently, there were Coke machines strategically placed to quench my thirst. The Coca-Cola Company, not suprisingly, is one of Crayon's clients.

A little later, I decided to relax a little bit and take in a flick. At first, the choice of Rocky Horror Picture Show and A Clockwork Orange seemed daunting, but then I came to my senses. I mean, who can turn down anything featuring the directing stylings of Stanley Kubrick and an androgynous Malcom McDowell? But I digress...

The company's marketing strategy seems to be one of total immersion. Crayon aspires to serve as a marketing portal connecting real world clients with virtual consumers.

"By maintaining real-time operations in the Second Life community, Crayon hopes to bring a sense of relevancy and legitimacy to virtual marketing that has, thus far, eluded companies looking to offer products and services to MMORPGers at large.

Second Life symbolizes the thinning line between the real and virtual worlds," says Joseph Jaffe, President of Crayon.

Of course, immersion isn't the only driving factor for the company's approach of maintaining operations exclusively within the virtual world.

Jaffe elaborates, "With our team located in Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, California and England, Second Life emerged as the perfect way for us to complement our dispersed geographic presence to meet and interact, not only with each other but also with our clients, vendors, and partners."

Second Life, however, isn't the only MMORPG community experiencing an influx of real world marketing. Sony Online Entertainment has been partnering with Massive Interactive to market products to players of both The Matrix Online and Planetside for some time now.

The concept of direct marking to a plugged-in, virtual audience is not new. Crayon has merely taken an innovative approach, attempting to become a conduit between real world products and virtual world consumers.

Will the venture prove successful? I can't really say.

However, I'd be a liar if I said that checking out this Scion in front of the Crayonville Diner didn't illicit the urge within me to go take one for a test drive.

Tags: Crayon, Second Life, MMORPG, Marketing

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Cyber Monday is rapidly approaching and the online retailers are preparing themselves for what they hope will be lucrative holiday season.

The term Cyber Monday refers to the first Monday after Thanksgiving. The term will be only a year old this holiday season.

The term cyber Monday originates from the National Retail Federation's Shop.org division.

The analogy would be a comparison to Black Friday the first Friday after Thanksgiving. A big shopping day for the brick and mortar stores.

The concept for the term comes from research in 2004 from Shop.org They found that 77% of online retailers reported an increase in sales following Black Friday.

Take a guess where most of this online shopping is done? The workplace according to a Shop.org/BizRate Research 2005 eHoliday survey.

Sounds like a manager's nightmare.

According to last years survey more than half of young adults the ages 18 to 24 and almost half of those aged 25 to 34 planned to shop online during work hours.

The most popular items last year were jewelry, consumer electronics, gourmet food, furniture and home dГ©cor.

The peak days for online shopping are from December 5 to the 15. The 2005 busiest day for ecommerce was December 12. Cyber Monday seems to mark the beginning of the busy online shopping season.

While the term Cyber Monday was conceived by the folks at Shop.org including Scott Silverman Executive Director it is not in fact the busiest online shopping day of the year.

The term was created to generate excitement for online retailers.

So what will you be doing on this year Cyber Monday? Scouring online sites to look for holiday bargains while on company time or actually performing your job duties?

Tag: Cyber Monday

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Gmail continues moving ahead in the competitive market of free webmail services and has just announced some added new features toits expanding and very popular service.

Information released today by Gmail reveals that there a total of five upgrades. The first is that it's no longer necessary to scroll to the bottom of a long message to find the REPLY link. Now there's a Reply button on top, along with a lot of other options under the little dropdown arrow.

The service also has reduced new message notifications. If someone sends a reply while you're in the middle of reading a conversation (or replying to it), you'll get a notification that a new message has arrived. Click UPDATE CONVERSATION to see what you've missed.

There's also the addition of FORWARD ALL. When viewing a conversation, link on the right if you want to forward the entire conversation instead of just one message.

Now you can chat even when your friends are offline. If you're chatting with a friend who goes offline, your friend will be able to see whatever you were typing the next time he or she goes online.

And lastly, Gmail is right on top of the latest moblogging technology, as this continually evolves and is pushed in the industry. Simply point your phone to gmail.com/app, download it one, and start accessing Gmail on your phone with just a click or two. Heading in the direction of video on your cellphone, you'll be able to have all your regular account capabilities along with viewing attachments such as photos, documents, and .pdf files.

Gmail still comes with built-in Google search technology and over 2,600 megabytes of storage (and growing every day). You can keep all your important messages, files and pictures forever, use search to quickly and easily find anything you're looking for, and make sense of it all with a new way of viewing messages as part of conversations.

There are no pop-ups or untargeted banner ads in Gmail, only small text ads. Ads and related information are relevant to your messages, so instead of being obtrusive, they may even be useful for once.

Gmail also integrates instant messaging right into the email experience, so you can stay in even better touch with your friends when you're online. Easy, efficient and maybe even fun to use. It's a whole new way to think about email. It's Google's approach to email.

And so far, it continues to be a phenomenal success!

Tag: Gmail Free Email Service Providers

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It seems that blogs are trying to make a transition away from the simple person-next-door chronicling their activities, moods, likes, dislikes, and thoughts to the higher profile musings and strategies of business executives who want to communicate quickly to their journalists, investors, analysts and even customers.

In the beginning, the Securities and Exchange Commission forbade companies from providing important information to stock analysts and other Wall Street insiders ahead of the public. The rule required the method or methods used to be "reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution of the information to the public."

After the recent controversy with Sun Microsystems' CEO and avid blogger Jonathan Schwartz raised questions in the headlines, the SEC clarified its stance on the issue just a tad, stating that current regulations do allow for blogs -- like news releases, regulatory filings, Web sites and Webcasts -- to be used to disseminate companies' financial information, provided a particular blog reaches a broad audience.

Thirty Fortune 500 companies are now publishing corporate blogs, nearly double the number in December 2005, according to the Fortune 500 Blogging Wiki, a collaborative tracking site. Among the companies with blogging leaders are Amazon.com, General Motors, and Boeing.

Schwartz's blog entries evidently didn't gel right with his company's legal department, so tempers flared up and the SEC got involved to see if what he was documenting in his blogs was within legal guidelines. The SEC is allegedly "still looking into" whether Schwartz's blog reaches enough people to considered "public."

Schwartz penned a letter to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox amidst all the chaos, noting that "the Web site of the Silicon Valley, Calif., server and software maker, which gets an average of nearly a million user hits a day, includes the blog that he writes as CEO, as well as those of thousands of Sun employees."

For now, everyone seems to be generally in agreement with Schwartz on the issue, although he does now put a ‘safe harbor' statement on blog entries that discuss future business strategies and products. This was to pacify his Sun Microsystems legal team.

Part of the controversy seems to stem from the fact that very few CEOs personally write blogs for everyone to read, bypassing PR departments and company lawyers' legal recommendations for what information to release and how to word it.

"My blog is syndicated across the Internet by use of RSS technology," Schwartz wrote in his letter to the SEC. "Thus, its content is 'pushed' to subscribers. This Web site is a tremendous vehicle for the broad delivery of timely and robust information about our company.

Thus far, it doesn't appear that Schwartz or any other CEOs will be restricted in what they write in their blogs. The SEC recently announced that they encourage companies and executives to release information on the Net so investor access is that much more available.

Tag: CEO Blogs SEC

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A couple of legally-tinged topics consider whether Microsoft's pledge not to assert patents against developers as part of its Novell deal actually do what they say, while a British lawyer contends Internet service providers should be liable when a denial of service (DoS) attack takes a website offline.

Free and open source software (FOSS) developers had hoped the agreement would be favorable to the work they do, and keep Microsoft from potentially hammering them with lawsuits. Such a state of affairs would go some way toward healing the perpetually open rift between FOSS developers and the technology giant.

However, Growlaw has cited an opinion from the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) that Microsoft's patent pledge is not all it seems:

They have analyzed in particular Microsoft's Patent Pledge for Non-Compensated Developers and see little value and in fact say it's worse than useless, because it creates an illusion of safety and because it limits severely what that developer is allowed to do with his work:
The patent covenant only applies to software that you develop at home and keep for yourself; the promises don't extend to others when you distribute. You cannot pass the rights to your downstream recipients, even to the maintainers of larger projects on which your contribution is built...
It's worse than useless, as this empty promise can create a false sense of security. Don't be confused by the illusion of a truce; developers are no safer from Microsoft patents now than they were before.
If you want to use Microsoft patents, SFLC chief technology officer Bradley M. Kuhn contended in the statement to the FOSS community, prepare to be "an isolated, uncompensated, unimportant Free Software developer."

Across the pond, a British attorney thinks some liability for a crippling DoS attack should be laid at the doorstep of ISPs. New Scientist Tech noted how the prospect of lawsuits flying like Peter Pan and Wendy to Neverland will be considered:

At a conference called Blocking Denial of Service Attacks on the Internet, to be held in London on 13 November, Lilian Edwards, an internet lawyer based at the University of Southampton, UK, will argue that legal measures must be taken if these attacks are to be stemmed. Edwards notes that ISPs currently have no legal obligation to check data relayed to and from internet users. She thinks, however, that governments could require them to do so.
The idea of requiring ISPs to guard against DoS attacks will be strongly resisted by the companies concerned, says Malcolm Hutty of the London Internet Exchange, an association of London-based internet providers. "That idea is guaranteed to fail," he says. "It's not the ISP's fault that DoS attacks happen - it is the computer's fault for allowing the bots to be planted."
One immediate problem comes to mind. If a website is taken down through the crush of traffic from a link on Digg or Slashdot, sites both known for sending lots of people to a featured site, and the visitors had no malicious intent, could the site publishers sue the ISP over the downtime?

Privacy advocates will have a field day with the notion that ISPs should be actively inspecting every packet crossing their network.

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Tags: Microsoft, ISP, DoS, Legal Issues

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The British Medical Journal published a research paper on the benefits of using Google for researching medical conditions, but anyone who has been reading Dilbert creator Scott Adams' blog since March already knew this.

I wonder how much time and expense the Australian researchers who discovered a search on Google could benefit doctors would have been saved had they simply added the thoughts of a cartoonist to their RSS feed readers earlier in 2006. More importantly, will the British Medical Journal receive the kind of nastygrams that journalists receive for using the term Googling in an article?

Probably not, since it's clear Hangwi Tang and Jennifer Hwee Kwoon Ng of Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane meant the Google search engine. They set out to determine if Google could lead doctors to a correct diagnosis, given a set of symptoms.

Out of 26 cases they selected from the 2005 New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers found that Google could have led doctors to the correct diagnosis in 15 of those cases. That was good enough for a 58 percent rate of success.

"The use of web based searching may help doctors to diagnose difficult cases," the researchers noted in conclusion. But if they had been following along with Adams' voice problems and how Google saved him, they would know this already.

Adams posted in 2006 how a baffling voice problem left him unable to speak above a whisper in one on one conversations. He also suffered from an equally strange hand problem when trying to draw on paper.

A string of doctors were unable to help him until Google came to the rescue:

I dried off and Googled "dystonia" - the name for my hand problem, plus "voice." Bingo. There's a rare neurological condition called a spasmodic dysphonia with voice symptoms identical to mine....There's even a propensity for this condition to pair with another dystonia, like the one in my hand.
Eventually, as the medical protocol worked its way out, I found my way to a neurologist who specializes in my alleged rare neurological disorder. She listened to me for about 30 seconds and said essentially "Yup. That's it." Google was right. The good news is that I wasn't nuts. The better news is that there is a well-established treatment. The bad news is that the treatment is not fun.
I'll spare our readers who may be lingering over this article while enjoying one for the road, Pop Tarts, or afternoon tea depending on your time zone the details about the treatment. Just follow the link above to the Dilbert Blog to learn more.

Now all we have to worry about is if Google will start charging us a co-pay if we start using it regularly for researching illnesses. (We're going to guess 'no' here.)

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Tag: Google

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People use print and online classifieds about evenly, but when it comes to finding a new cubicle to occupy, job hunters have been landing more offers from the Internet versions.

The non-partisan non-profit research organization The Conference Board disclosed 70 percent of job seekers use Internet and print classifieds to find employment.

When it comes to the all-important job offer, 38 percent of those surveyed felt their offers came as a result of online job searches. Only 24 percent cited a print ad as something that led to a job offer. Newspapers proved to be the least likely source for employment.

Networking with colleagues, and "other" reasons like employment agencies, both delivered more job offers than newspapers did, at 27 percent and 30 percent respectively.

Ads for management positions stood atop the top ten occupations listed online, the report said. Healthcare followed by business & finance operations placed second and third. Office jobs, computer & mathematical, sales, architecture & engineering, production, transportation, and maintenance positions rounded out the top ten.

CareerBuilder and Monster.com both drew over five million unique visitors for the week ending August 10th, according to a Nielsen//NetRatings report cited by eMarketer. Yahoo's HotJobs picked up 1.36 million visitors during that week.

Also, eMarketer noted US online ad spending for the classifieds category looks like it is on pace to top $4 billion in 2010. In 2007 that spending should pass $3 billion, a close third to display ad spending. Paid search will continue to dominate those spends for years.

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Tag: online classifieds

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