TechCrunch reports that Yahoo have released a tool called BBAuth, which allows third-party applications to access Yahoo’s sign in services and will allow third-party apps to gain access to Yahoo user’s data (with prior permission, of course).

This opens Yahoo’s API (read more on APIs here) so that you can login with the user’s Yahoo credentials and access, say, a user’s Yahoo photo information from another application.

This is a big step. Most of the heavyweight login services - MSN/Windows Live, Google etc. - don’t allow this kind of usage of their data and Yahoo are really singling themselves out.

With fierce competition from the likes of Google, but still with some very popular services under their belt such as Flickr, Yahoo are obviously trying to get developers to extend the potential of the Yahoo sign in API and the Yahoo services.

If you do want to build an application (web or otherwise) that uses the API, you do need to get it officially approved by Yahoo in order to receive a secret key that gives you access.

In response to the new range of iPods and the price drop to only $249 in the US for the 30 GB iPod, Ars Technica are reporting that Microsoft will price the Zune at the same price for the US - $249.

They have also announced that songs will available for download from the Zune Marketplace download service at $0.99 each in the US, which incidentally, is the same price as music downloads from the iTunes (Music) Store. However, downloads will also be available in exchange for 79 ‘Microsoft Points’ (which you can buy and then use for Zune music, or Xbox Live Marketplace downloads etc).

Unfortunately there seems to be no word from Microsoft on UK pricing for either the player or the music downloads, although we may be able to guess at the cost of music judging by the UK exchange rate for ‘Microsoft Points’. They are 0.85p per point [source], which means in theory a song would cost 67.2p (slightly lower than iTunes’ 79p per song in the UK).

It seems unlikely there will be much difference in song pricing between the iTunes Store and the Zune Marketplace, as the article points out, as it wouldn’t be in the record labels’ interest.

LimeWire appear to be launching a lawsuit against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), after the RIAA sued them, claiming that they are engaging in anti-competitive behaviour and not giving Limewire a chance to prevent illegal file sharing.

Apparently, LimeWire were planning to use a technology to detect copyrighted content by running it through ‘fingerprint’ testing (essentially, running files through a hash to see if they match or are close to copyrighted content). None of the major record labels gave permission to LimeWire to use the hashes for their content, and LimeWire are alleging that the RIAA somehow boycotted the service.

“this boycott and collusive activity was directed at and intended to injure Lime Wire because it owned and operated a service for the digital distribution of copyrighted works”

Now I don’t particularly like DRM, or the way that the RIAA and other content bodies work and operate, but LimeWire are very unlikely to win this, in my opinion. It certainly would be momentous if they did, especially considering how many file sharing services we have seen being shut down thanks to the RIAA et al.

I find it almost impossible that LimeWire will win this, but it would be an interesting turn of the tables on the associations if they did manage it.

Good luck, LimeWire.

Apple and AMD - a marriage made in heaven?

Reg Hardware is speculating that Apple may be interested in utilising AMD chips in new Macs that are coming in the future. I better reiterate that this is purely speculation, but apparently AMD CEO Hector Ruiz was quoted as saying:

“Why would they [Apple] want to be held hostage [to Intel] like everyone else has been?”

Certainly a move to use AMD processors in their computers would be credible if it happened. One of the features Apple is showcasing about their next operating system release Mac OS X Leopard, is full 64-bit support (at the application level, not just the system level).

While some of the more top-end PowerPC-based Macs had 64-bit chips, only the new Mac Pro has an Intel Xeon 64-bit chip which would be able to fully take advantage of this feature.

But if Apple were to go to AMD, they would have access to the Athlon 64 range, which are considerably cheaper than the Xeon (which has traditionally been used for servers). Apple could choose processors from the Athlon 64 X2 dual core range for the iMac consumer desktop machine and get the 64-bit capabilities in their consumer products, not just their pro products.

On the other hand, Apple may well choose just to stick with the one new processor brand, partly to try and reinforce the difference between a ‘Mac’ and a ‘PC’. Also, they have marketed all the new Macs as Intel-based Macs, which is fair enough, because they are. If they used AMD chips as well, they would end up with PowerPC-based machines and Intel-based and AMD-based machines. This could potentially cause confusion to the vital Windows switcher market, which would not be good news for Apple.

So in my eyes it’s pretty 50/50 here, with both upsides and downsides for both ways to go. With AMD officials talking about it, however, inevitably the Apple rumour mill will start up again following their event a couple of weeks ago.

We live in the age of new media; blogs, podcasts, YouTube. More and more consumers are creating their own media, rather than relying on broadcasting institutions to provide it to them. Despite the hype, most attempts at new media are rubbish, often because of a lack of the right skills to do the job, whether technical or artistic. As a result, many people who have a great idea produce mediochre media.

Chris Van Patten, a friend of mine and Peter’s (and designer of Gizbuzz), has launched YouMakeMedia, a blog about new media, aimed at the people trying to produce it. He’s been posting to it for the past few days, and there’s already some great content there. He dissects the LonelyGirl15 saga, reviews Flixn the new webcam video publishing site, explains how to track viral trends and much more.

Chris really knows what he’s talking about in this field as well - he’s been running Comitar Studios for a while now which has been producing some great short films, one of which (The Bet) you can see in the sidebar of YouMakeMedia.

I really recommend that you go over and have a look, apart from anything so that the quality of new media on the internet improves!

RSS feed

The BBC is reporting that Microsoft are planning to enter the online office suite market and produce offer a free, albeit advertising funded, online office suite.

Now this won’t be a version of Microsoft Office, but a web-based offering of the cheaper, more budget-oriented Works Suite that comes bundled with a lot of OEM-built PCs.

This could spell disaster for the other players in the online office suite market, Zoho, Google and others, as Microsoft will be in a position to advertise this service from within Windows Vista and on high-traffic sites like Hotmail and the Windows Live online services.

As yet there are only sketchy details available and there’s no confirmed date or any other information regarding this move, but still, even the suggestion of a heavyweight such as Microsoft entering this market could be a serious problem for the smaller companies and services offering online office functionality.

Whether this service will be dependent on use of Windows and/or Internet Explorer is still unknown, but it is certainly a possibility that Microsoft may choose to lock out other browsers and platforms by utilising Microsoft-propreitary technologies such as ActiveX to run the service.

The one thing we can be sure about from this move is that Microsoft is feeling threatened by other companies offering free, online alternatives to its office suite and is now obviously seeing it as a very important market.

Having just pushed out QuickRead, which I covered a couple of days ago, online office suite player Zoho have released more features in their suite of products.

Why I am covering this again? Well, Arvind who works at Zoho dropped me an email about the new changes. I decided to take another look because some of these new updates further address the issue of online office integration, the lack of which is one of the major disadvantages to using an online office solution at the moment.

Now while this feature doesn’t directly deal with integrating Zoho’s systems into the desktop, it is still important.

In desktop office suites like Microsoft Office, you can embed data from other applications into other elements of the suite (for example you can embed an Excel spreadsheet in a PowerPoint presentation). Now Zoho Sheet offers this functionality, but you can embed your Sheet spreadsheet on any webpage.

This obviously offers a benefit as if you want to display a spreadsheet on a public webpage; your visitors don’t need to have a copy of any particular spreadsheet software on their desktop. It also means the user doesn’t have to download and view the spreadsheet in a separate window. Without a universal document exchange format like PDF existing for spreadsheets (ODS isn’t widely accepted yet), this is especially important for the spreadsheet medium.

Of course, there are situations where this isn’t appropriate - for example when the spreadsheet contains complex macro stuff, or isn’t a public document but does want to be distributed over an intranet, for example.

You can see an example of an embedded spreadsheet at the Zoho Blogs post on the subject.

I think this is also an important step for Zoho and this feature also appears to work within other Zoho applications. This gives an advantage over a desktop solution, but Zoho have still got an uphill struggle to convince people to use an online office suite. The landscape for applications is inevitably changing, and it could be in the very near future that we will all be using an online solution in place for many of the desktop applications we use now.

There also were a couple of other new features which you can read about on the Zoho Blogs here and here.

VentureBeat has a post about the photosharing site Zooomr, run by Kris Tate. They recently met with Kris, and talk about some more features on the way, including an in-site messaging system, Zmail:

Zmail, an internal messaging system for the site, will let users notify their friends or groups of the photos they have taken — letting users avoid having to jump to an email client like most photo sites require. Zmail may not be a remarkable invention by itself, but is the latest in a series of features that makes Zooomr stand out for the sheer amount it has been able to do over the past year, on the backs of one and a half people.

I very much agree with the line VentureBeat takes. Peter and I have both been using Zooomr since they gave free Pro accounts away to bloggers a little while ago. I have only recently started properly uploading photos, with the launch of the bulk uploader jUploadr, and really like it. On many fronts, Zooomr offers a significantly better feature set than Flickr, and it is continuing to innovate at a fast pace.

There are two downsides to Zooomr at the moment. The first is that it does not yet have the critical number of active users that Flickr has to create a truly active and rewarding community. However, as they continue to recieve positive press user numbers will only increase solving this problem. The second issue is one that I have raised before. It is the time that it takes to enter metadata. Many of Zooomr’s features, such as Geotagging, require one to enter extra information about a photo. When coming back from holiday, I want to enjoy the photos that I have taken, rather than spend hours meticulously placing them on a Google Map, no matter what the rewards of doing this are later. It could just be that I am the exception rather than the rule, and that many people are happy to spend time entering metadata, but that has yet to be seen.

I wish my luck to Zooomr - they deserve success and are certainly going about the right way of achieving it. All they have to do now is find a way to appeal to users outside the Techcrunch subscribers. If they can do that, they will be on to a winner.

[watch out for updates on the Zooomr Blog]

You may remember that in February Google bought the blog tracking service Measure Map off UI gurus. Adaptive Path a little while ago. Since then we haven’t heard much, and since it was already in alpha testing 6 months ago, I wondered what had happened to it, so I did some digging.

I thought the Google’s own blogs might be a good place to start, as if anyone is using it, they probably are. Sure enough, the tracking code was on the site:

<script src="http://tracker.measuremap.com/a/127">

However, they were using it alongside the Google Analytics tracking code. This could mean that Measuremap is unreliable, or just that they like the extra statistics that Analytics gives them.

One possible reason for the delay is that they are integrating Measure Map into Blogger (Google’s own blogging system). This would make sense, as it would add significant value to their product, and would also explain the time they are taking. However, the presence of seperate Measure Map tracker code goes against this.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. I just wish Google got on with it; where’s the ‘release early, release often’ philosophy gone?

[In other Analytics news, you can now track 50 websites with your Google Analytics account].

Zoho have announced several new features in their online office suite set of products.

One of these new features is a browser add-on called Zoho QuickRead. It’s available as both a Firefox extension and an Internet Explorer plugin.

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What’s interesting about this is that it addresses one of the problems involved with online office suites - integration.

Once you’ve installed QuickRead, right-clicking on a link to a Microsoft Office file (Word, Excel and PowerPoint at the moment) offers a new option - Open with Zoho Writer/Sheet/Show. This then opens a new window/tab and loads the document into Zoho Writer/Sheet/Show.

I’ve used this on a few documents I’ve found here and there and the process appears to work flawlessly, loading in the document to Zoho’s online office applications and rendering the document.
This is an absolutely vital step to making the Zoho Office suite a real alternative to Microsoft Office. This functionality is certainly attractive to people who don’t, or can’t run Microsoft Office on their machine.

My only complaints about the add-on (bearing in mind I’ve only tried the Firefox version) is the fact that the extension installs an options dialogue on the Tools menu, but doesn’t list any preferences in the Extensions window. Also, I haven’t been able to get the documents to open in a new tab, despite changing that setting (then restarting Firefox).

Other than that, this extension is a very strong incentive to use Zoho over a desktop office suite solution and has a real benefit to users who don’t have a copy of Microsoft Office. This works well for documents that are stored online, but what I think Zoho should do now is integration with the desktop (Windows Explorer, the Mac Finder and Linux file managers etc.). A piece of software to register the Zoho Office applications as handlers for office documents would really make the difference in terms of convincing people to use the online apps full-time.

Zoho didn’t just release the add-on, however. Zoho Writer now sports a WordPress (and other compatible blog) blog system, so you can post directly from Writer. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but I’ll give it a go soon! Also there are a couple of UI enhancements and fixes for Internet Explorer.

Oh, one more thing - if you’re not on Firefox or IE or don’t want to install add-ons, you can use these URLs to open a document from the web:

http://www.zohowriter.com/publicimport.im?url=[[document url]]

http://www.zohosheet.com/view.do?url=[[spreadsheet url]]

http://www.zohoshow.com/publicimport.im?url=[[presentation url]]

UPDATE: Open in tab seems to be working fine now. I did try restarting Firefox after changing the setting, but it only appears to have updated it a day later. Ah well, it’s working now. Also, I said above that QuickRead only works for Microsoft Office documents. I should really have mentioned it also works for OpenDocument Text, the old OpenOffice.org 1.x formats and .csv for spreadsheets.