Once leading search engine, now “entertainment portal” Lycos has released a new Web 2.0 feature, “Mix”, that lets users create playlists of video clips from video sites including YouTube and Google Video.

In a stunningly innovative move (not) Mix enables users to invite others to watch videos and chat about them online. Yep, scrape the content, serve it up, run ads against it and make a profit, but it’s all ok, it’s a Web 2.0 thing after all :-)

According to Online Media Daily, Lycos COO Brian Kalinowskihe said the goal [of Mix] was to create a product that allows groups of people to pull content from a variety of sources around the Web and yes, Lycos plans to offer banner ad units and sponsorships around the Mix community features.

Originally posted on February 8, 2007 @ 6:15 pm

Lots of noise about Yahoo’s new service Yahoo! Pipes, described as:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Don’t worry, if that doesn’t make any sense, you’re not alone, it’s not going to make any sense to 99.99999% of people, mostly because it’s Web 2.0 gibberish. So what is Pipes?

In laymens terms, it’s Microsoft Access 95 meets Web 2.0, but instead of using your own data, you rip data from other places, such as RSS feeds, and you query that. OK so that’s not much clearer. Everyone knows how a spam blog works, right? They rip data from RSS feeds. Pipes lets you rip data from RSS feeds. But instead of just posting out the data from the feeds, Pipes allows you to do things with the feeds, such as queries (ala Google), say you pulled an ebay feed and only wanted a list of all the hats for sale on ebay, you’d use Pipes to rip the feed, process it and output a new feed with a list of hats on ebay. But it gets better. If you’re really bored and with nothing else to do, you can use the hat data and match it with pictures of similar hats on Flickr, say if a Fedora Hat was for sale on ebay, Pipes lets you create a new feed of the hats for sale on ebay with matching pictures from Flickr of the same sort of hats. Yep, Pipes is good for hats, 100% guaranteed! :-)

For my own personal use, it’s taken me back to 1997, when I was studying Information Systems and did a semester on SQL and databases. Pipes looks and feels just like Access 95 did. I didn’t really like SQL then (I passed, just) and I don’t like query boxes and what not now. Little doubt that people will find a use for this, indeed I can’t help but think of the amazing opportunities the service will provide to spam bloggers world wide, me?, maybe another day.

 

Tags: Yahoo, Yahoo Pipes

Originally posted on February 8, 2007 @ 3:50 am

In case you missed it, Wal-Mart has launched a video download service, the first service to provide content from all 6 major movie studios. Reuters even goes as leading with the headline that the service is a “game changer”. They are right, but for the wrong reason. It’s a game changer because it doesn’t work with Firefox, and one would presume other non IE browsers such as Opera, Safari and Konquerer as well, it only works with Internet Explorer:

Valleywag and Techcrunch have also picked up on this, but questions still remain: why would Wal-Mart launch as service that only works in IE? how could a company as big as Wal-Mart overlook Firefox, particularly given they’ve previously been the leading distributor of the Linux distro Linspire…which doesn’t run IE?

I’ve never believed in accidents. People who crash their cars don’t have accidents, it’s usually driver error, there’s always an equatable cause or reason for the so-called accident, and I find it hard to believe that Wal-Mart accidently forgot standards/ Firefox support with their new offering. Is some sort of tie in with Microsoft behind it? Is it something to do with DRM and the intention to not support open source browsers because of some sort of potential risk? There’s got to be something to it, after all, what web designer worth his grain of salt doesn’t use Firefox, or at least has a copy of Firefox handy for site testing? Food for thought.

Tags: Wal-Mart

Originally posted on February 6, 2007 @ 5:53 pm