News Yahoo Updates Yahoo Mail, Messenger & Search: Still Commited to Improving Search Technology During a press conference today, Yahoo announced a large number of updates to Yahoo Mail, Search, and Messenger. Yahoo Mail, for example, will now feature status updates from a user's friends on its homepage. Yahoo Search will also receive a major redesign in the near future. Even though Yahoo will obviously switch to Microsoft Bing soon, Yahoo… Frederic Lardinois View comments
News So Long, and Thanks for All the Loot: The Pirate Bay Goes Offline (For Now) Black Internet, the Pirate Bay's largest bandwidth supplier, just shut down the notorious BitTorrent tracker after a court ordered it to pay a fine of 500,000 kroner ($70,800). Since about 9:30am PT, the site has been inaccessible. Just a few months ago, the Pirate Bay announced that it had been acquired by Global Gaming Factory (GGF). This sale… Frederic Lardinois View comments
mobile If Apple Allows Competition for iTunes on the iPhone... ... Then This is What We Want. Music subscription service Rhapsody has very publicly submitted an iPhone app to Apple and there's widespread speculation about whether Apple will approve an app that could be seen as competition to its own iTunes store. Like the Google Voice for iPhone fiasco, this is a story about freedom and platforms, about… Mobile Marshall Kirkpatrick View comments
E-Books More Competition for Amazon's Kindle: Barnes & Noble Partners with Irex All the major eBook vendors are currently trying to expand their eBook and eReader line-ups as fast as possible in order to compete with Amazon. Today, Barnes & Noble announced that it has partnered with Irex Technologies, a Dutch eReader manufacturer. B&N will sell Irex's new consumer-focused device in its stores and online later this year… Frederic Lardinois View comments
Features 5 Ways Sentiment Analysis is Ramping Up in 2009 The New York Times has an article today about sentiment analysis, a trend which has been accelerating on the back of the Real-time Web - and Twitter in particular. Sentiment analysis is no short-term hot trend. It will eventually become a key feature of search engines, which will integrate the aggregate sentiment of the crowd into search… Richard MacManus View comments