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Yahoo will soon launch a service called “Y Connect” with features very similar to those of Facebook Connect  — portable identity management, integrating Yahoo content on third-party websites, and sharing data about what you’re doing and where with your Yahoo contacts.

The service will share info with your contacts through Yahoo Pulse, the Threadsy-like activity stream that Yahoo launched to compete with Google Buzz and other social offerings about four months ago.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news, but it didn’t provide many details. All we know so far is that Y Connect will help advertisers track user activity and interests much like Facebook Connect and Open Graph do.

The article cites a source saying that Y Connect will be “formally announced” later this fall. Yahoo’s been struggling as of late, so additional traffic is critical at this juncture. The web portal recently revamped its search features, but rumor has it that it’s fighting off an acquisition attempt by AOL of all companies.

Will Y Connect help Yahoo revitalize? Time will tell, but feel free to share your thoughts and predictions in the comments.

Source: Mashable

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AOL and several venture capital firms are in talks to buy Yahoo.

Silver Lake Partners and Blackstone Group are rumored to be in on the deal. Currently, AOL’s market value is around one tenth of Yahoo’s.

Rumors that the two companies were in talks to merge have been swirling around for at least a few days, and still others say it’s Yahoo who is looking to buy AOL; but neither company is willing to make an official statement at this time.

Yahoo personnel haven’t yet been involved in these discussions, according to WSJ’s sources. Because of the intricacies involved in such acquisitions, Yahoo may never be formally approached with an offer.

Yahoo itself instituted “poison pill” mechanisms back during its apex in 2001 to prevent the threat of a hostile takeover — which became a very real possibility two years ago when Microsoft issued an unsolicited bid to buy the company.

Nevertheless, these new rumors are interesting ones. What do you think of AOL’s ambitions, especially in light of that company’s recent acquisition spree involving tech blog TechCrunch, app maker Thing Labs and video network 5min?

More importantly, do you think an alliance between these two fading powerhouses from the dotcom era could create a more vital, competitive organization? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Source: Mashable

It’s easy to forget about Yahoo! Mail. Despite having millions of users, it doesn’t receive quite the same level of attention as Gmail or Hotmail. Yahoo’s somewhat-recently released version tailored for the iPad, however, is pretty darn snazzy — and it appears as though that type of look is headed to Yahoo! mailboxes everywhere in the near future.

Cnet is reporting that a “Minty” (the project’s codename) upgrade is coming and will include not only a cleaner, sexier interface but also greatly improved performance. Yahoo! hopes the changes will help stem the tide of users migrating to other services, having lost 7% of their total base since this time last year. In that same period, Gmail grew 22% and Hotmail a modest 3%.

Yahoo has already lost the #1 spot in India to Gmail — anyone want to bet on whether or not they can hold on to top spot elsewhere around the globe?

Source: downloadsquad

It’s been a highly successful year for Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which started off as Live search, and was almost named Kumo. The little search engine that could has grown so much in the last 14 months.

Only months after Bing launched into beta, Microsoft was in talks to acquire Yahoo!’s search technology and take over the falling search giant. In December 2009, the two giants finalized a search deal that would replace Yahoo!’s search engine with Bing for 10 years.

Today marks the beginning of that deal that will see Microsoft begin the organic (algorithmic) transition, which means that Bing will replace the English version of Yahoo!’s organic search results. As posted by Neowin last month, the partnership will see Bing capture as much as 31.6% market share in North America. Bing currently owns 7.07% market share in North America, and 3.44% worldwide.

This will be the first time in years that any search engine has gained any kind of traction on Google, which still dominates with 84.53% in North America.

The organic search take-over should see Bing jump more than 24% next month, as it acquires more than 159 million new users. The organic search change will see 15 million new users from Canada, and 144 million users from the United States.

Source: neowin

Yahoo peps Search, Mail and Messenger

Yahoo has added slew of new features and updates to its three core offerings – Mail, Search and Messenger. Yahoo Mail, one of the top leading email services, gets more social features as one of the key milestone in Yahoo Open Strategy. Along with that, Yahoo Messenger 10 will also bring social tinge like showing status updates, photo sharing, video calls and other notifications.

Yahoo Mail gets the long deserved attachment limit raise to 25MB from 10MB per mail. New Application box combines Calendar, Notepad, and several other third party apps for streamlined single window Inbox. The Application box will contain third party apps like Picnik, ZumoDrive or PayPal along with several others coming in future.

Yahoo Mail’s integration with popular social networks will be a boon to community website lovers. Users will be able to get updates from their contacts on various social networks and interact directly from Yahoo Mail window. Photo sharing would now be fun as users will be able to select several photos and share all of them at same time.

Yahoo has also redesigned its Mail’s mobile version (m.yahoo.com) which can perform important functions including attachment downloads. This mobile version will now have read-write access to phone’s folders. Also, Mail Contacts now will automatically get updated as the contact changes the name.

Yahoo Messenger 10 beta has new HD video calling support and new Y! Updates window that’ll remind you of Facebook. Users will get status updates from their contacts on Yahoo Buzz, Flickr, Twitter and other series. Yahoo Insider now can be localized with pin code to obtain local information. Messages from Yahoo Messengers contacts can be received for different IM apps on iPhone. Basically, because the Yahoo 360 service that was rolled out to compete with MySpace and Facebook didn’t work, Yahoo is lifting interface and adding more features to its Mail and Messenger services.

Yahoo Search will offer a new search results page that connects users directly to web content and new results filtering options. Also, Search Assist, Yahoo’s real-time query suggestion engine, has been added to Yahoo universal header’s search box for search suggestions. Users can also organize, save and share their search results with Search Pad. Check out images of the latest updates here.

Even after the deal with Microsoft, Yahoo Search continues to differentiate itself from Bing. “We are Yahoo and that will continue…We collaborate on the back-end but we are competitors on the front-end”, clarified Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice-president of Yahoo, at a press event held at company’s headquarters.

Yahoo has sent out a clear word regarding its Search – We’re still in competition!

Source: techtree

Tech giants unite against Google

Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google’s attempt to create what could be the world’s largest virtual library.

Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive.

They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works.

“Google is trying to monopolise the library system,” the Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle told BBC News.

“If this deal goes ahead, they’re making a real shot at being ‘the’ library and the only library.”

Back in 2008, the search giant reached an agreement with publishers and authors to settle two lawsuits that charged the company with copyright infringement for the unauthorised scanning of books.

In that settlement, Google agreed to pay $125m (£76m) to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers could register works and receive compensation. Authors and publishers would get 70% from the sale of these books with Google keeping the remaining 30%.

Google would also be given the right to digitise orphan works. These are works whose rights-holders are unknown, and are believed to make up an estimated 50-70% of books published after 1923.

Comments on the deal have to be lodged by 4 September. In early October, a judge in the Southern district of New York will consider whether or not to approve the class-action suit.

In a separate development, the US Department of Justice is conducting an anti-trust investigation into the impact of the agreement.

‘Open access’

Critics have claimed the settlement will transform the future of the book industry and of public access to the cultural heritage of mankind embodied in books.

“The techniques we have built up since the enlightenment of having open access, public support for libraries, lots of different organisational structures, lots of distributed ownership of books that can be exchanged, resold and repackaged in different ways – all of that is being thrown out in this particular approach,” warned Mr Kahle.

The non-profit Internet Archive has long been a vocal opponent of this agreement. It is also in the business of scanning books and has digitised over half a million of them to date. All are available free.

As the 4 September deadline approaches, the number of groups and organisations voicing their opposition is growing. But with three of the world’s best-known technology companies joining the chorus, the Open Book Alliance can expect to make headlines the world over.

Microsoft and Yahoo have confirmed their participation. However, Amazon has so far declined to comment because the alliance has not yet been formally launched.

“All of us in the coalition are oriented to foster a vision for a more competitive marketplace for books,” said Peter Brantley, the Internet Archive’s director of access.

“We feel that if approved, Google would earn a court-sanctioned monopoly and the exploitation of a comprehensive collection of books from the 20th Century.”

‘Trust’

Much of the focus of the proposed settlement has been on anti-trust and anti-competitive concerns, but just as many are worried about privacy.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU of Northern California and the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group wrote to Google to ask the company to “assure Americans that Google will maintain the security and freedom that library patrons have long had: to read and learn about anything… without worrying that someone is looking over their shoulder or could retrace their steps”.

“We simply don’t like the settlement in its current form,” said Consumer Watchdog advocate John Simpson.

“There are serious questions about privacy and Google seems to be taking the view ‘let us put this in place and we will do the right thing down the road’. That is simply not good enough.”

The American Libraries Association (ALA) agrees.

“We do think the product in essence is good but the proposed settlement asks us to trust Google and the other parties a little too much,” the ALA’s associate director Corey Williams told BBC News.

“When it comes to privacy, the agreement is silent on the issue and with regard to what Google intends to do with the data it collects. It’s a great idea but it requires more trust than I think we feel comfortable being able to extend at this point,” said Ms Williams.

‘Brave new world’

In its defence, Google has argued that the deal brings great benefits to authors and will make millions of out-of-print books widely available online and in libraries.

In a statement, the company said: “The Google Books settlement is injecting more competition into the digital books space, so it’s understandable why our competitors might fight hard to prevent more competition.”

Despite the increasing tide of criticism over the settlement, there are some who believe there is not that much to fear.

Michelle Richmond is the author of New York Times best seller The Year of Fog, which is also being turned into a movie starring Rachel Weiss.

“The thing I keep hearing from authors is ‘I don’t know what this settlement really means’. But this is the brave new world and we don’t really know where it is going,” Ms Richmond told BBC News

“Most authors work for so little and start from the point of we are doing this for the love it. But when there is this company that has nothing to do with the creation of the book or its publication, I think a lot of authors are concerned about this being a portal to greater access to their work without compensation for writers.”

Source: BBC News

With all the chatter about Yahoo’s impending roll-out of a completely overhauled brand – see Techmeme for more – this particular tip that landed in our inbox last night definitely caught our attention.

TechCrunch reader Bradley Scott Shoemaker checks in with us to tell us this new Yahoo homepage turned up when visiting the portal using Google’s Chrome browser. All his other installed browsers still showed the classic Yahoo website, which lead him to believe they’re gradually bucket testing the new redesign for now (update: some users reported seeing it for over a month already).

We think so too: the screenshot shows that this design is very close to the redesign we reported on back in September 2008 (embedded below again). They only tested that one for a select few users in a limited amount of countries too, but it was the last we’d actually heard of it.

Update 2: The Business Insider posted a screenshot of a new redesign back in May too, but there are some differences, particularly on the color and navigation level.

For the record: comScore pegs Yahoo’s total traffic at over 550 million unique visitors worldwide (May 2009), of which 150 million located in the U.S. alone.

So, who else has spotted this revamped Yahoo website? Let us know in comments.

Source: TechCrunch