Many people are waiting for the death of Yahoo. Regardless of the impending layoffs and restructuring, Yahoo is still fighting for the future.

The big question for Yahoo is what future does it have? Should they try to get into the social network scene? Well, they already failed once with Mash and have had lackluster results with their other social effort Yahoo 360. Or should they try to go bleeding edge, and instead of just integrating some semantic technologies, go “whole hog” and develop a semantic search engine?

Well, Yahoo has been developing its version of the future for several months. This week we received notice that the future according to Yahoo 1.0 is ready. Yahoo announced the universal profile and version 1.0 of Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS). The components of the “social suite” are:

Social Directory - the new user profile data and user connections.

Contacts/Address Book - the mapping of the user contacts and the inevitable hooks of the social strategy with email.

Updates - the implicit sharing of actions, which sounds more like the aggregation of FriendFeed and Facebook Live Feeds.

Presence - the sharing of simple status text, because no social platform seems to be complete without status text.

More importantly, you will notice that search is not explicitly included. This is because search is now just another part of their platform. BOSS and SearchMonkey are putting search into third party developers’ hands. Based on this, we can assume that Yahoo has admitted it has lost search unless people create tools on top of their search, or they start integrating more social and semantic services into their search.

So, why is all of this important? Yahoo is still one of the most highly visited websites. My Yahoo is still considered to have the largest user base for a personalized homepage. Yahoo Mail is still one of the largest Web mail installations. Yahoo Buzz has been known to drive a million visitors to a highlighted page. Now Yahoo is planning to hook all of this together.

CNET’s Dan Farber has a great nugget from the Yahoo plan:

Over time, properties such as Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Flickr and Yahoo Buzz, will be socially enabled beyond activity feeds, Stoneham said. He gave an example of requesting a review from a user’s connections while perusing a product page in Yahoo Shopping. When a review is posted it shows up in the user’s activity feed. In addition, miniprofiles are available to get information quickly about the reviewer.

If Yahoo can integrate all of their services together with their new profiles, they will instantly become one of the largest social networks, if not the largest social network. Obviously, Yahoo’s target is no longer search. Yahoo is going after Facebook and MySpace. The important thing to note is that the entire Y!OS is API ready. That means that developers will have access to a massive user base and the potential of having their widget in front of more people than a Facebook application can provide. To see how all of this is supposed to work, look at the image below:

As you can see, they are planning on having Mail, the Front Page, Search, Media and other partner sites integrated with the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP). By having a widget or application that can also use the Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP), a developer has a huge number of possibilities. The additional benefit of using these APIs is that you can have a social widget on your own site much like the initial plans for Google’s Friend Connect and Facebook Connect.

Yahoo may be having problems right now with their leadership, but the developers within Yahoo are still working. Yahoo is now going after third party developers in order to have them create applications on their platform in the easiest way possibly. It may seem like a desperate attempt at retaining relevance, but many businesses have been built this way. One other company built a business based on a platform by making it easy for developers to create applications, Microsoft. We all know how that story turned out. The future of Yahoo is as a platform. The future of Yahoo is social. The future of Yahoo is now in developers’ hands.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Yahoo Opening Up (Kind Of)Yahoo Search Monkey Reveals More Details on Developer PlatformCodase: The Source Code Search EngineBreaking: Yahoo Announces Earnings, Updates on ProgressYahoo-Google Deal Looking Good; Common Sense Packs Up And LeavesIMified Announces Developer Platform. Make Your Own IM Bots.Facebook Offering Data Storage to Developers?

Source:Mashable!

“The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book, you either do it right or you get eliminated.”

- Gordon Gecko, Wall Street

Corporations exist in a continuously changing ecosystem, with behavior strategies, evolution, cooperation, competition, camouflage, mimicry, and yes, extinction. The environment is constantly changing; disequilibrium is the norm.

Similarly, the governments of countries exist in a complex global ecosystem of competition, trade, and war. Some countries are up, some are down, and many are in the middle – and these ranks evolve due to many factors. Even Gecko himself compares the fictional Teldar Paper to “that other malfunctioning corporation, the U.S. of A.”

If the federal government doesn’t want our country to go the way of the dodo, it needs to adapt to changing times – and changing technology, including the many emerging Web 2.0 tools. One Gecko-ish malfunction of government is that it collects a huge amount of data with which it does hardly anything truly useful. Crime statistics, labor trends, pothole locations and many other interesting bits haven’t often been easily accessible, and that strategy doesn’t serve the public well.

Information Innovation

No longer. Innovative people are finding interesting uses for government data. Witness just one example, SpotCrime, a comprehensive private sector mashup of crime reports and real-time interactive maps for not just every state in the U.S., but also many countries around the world.

Using SpotCrime-DC for about 5 minutes, I quickly learned of three recent robberies occurring very close to my home – all between 7:00 and 7:30 am. (Note to self, no morning jogs around the neighborhood.) No one is uninterested in this topic, whether you are protecting your family or just scoping out the competition – but without this simple to use mashup, the information would be overwhelming, confusing, and inaccessible (although technically it is “publicly available.”)

The U.S. government has more than just crime data, though. They have massive storehouses of geographic data, labor statistics, transportation information, census data, genealogies, environmental and ecological trends, economic indicators, and statistics on aging, to name a few. There is literally something for everyone.

Now, a lot of this data is already publicly available; but in what formats? Take this example of the top 100 growing counties in the U.S.. However, you have to download the data in an Excel spreadsheet or as a .CSV file – how many people even know what to do with a .CSV file? And what if you can’t afford Excel, or don’t have it handy when you want to use the public data?

Public Incentives, Private Competition

How can this data best be delivered to people? Here’s

one example. In what can only be described as a very hip initiative, the District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer is collaborating with local interactive content agency iStrategyLabs to launch an innovation challenge called Apps for Democracy (disclosure: Mashable is a media sponsor).

This contest, open to absolutely anyone, aims primarily to visualize DC’s open, public data for the greater good of citizens, visitors, and local businesses. These public service developers will compete for both cash prizes and public recognition.

The District of Columbia is thinking very broadly about the products that will result from the innovation challenge – in play are Web applications, widgets, map mashups, iPhone apps, Facebook apps, and more. Unquestionably, this effort can serve as a model for the federal government to enhance its massive data stores by offering incentives for open-source efforts by outside developers.

Organizations like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) already have public, fun competitions like the Urban Challenge, so why not something similar to build widgets, games, and apps?

Finally, a good reason to hack the country.

Dr. Mark Drapeau is an Associate Research Fellow studying Social Software for Security (S3) at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Washington DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Government.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:MySpace Hacker Found and Punished, Kinda.Netflix Hack for DRM-Free Movie DownloadsFree MySpace Music Downloads?Who Sucks More - GoDaddy or MySpace?Costly Hack Amounts to $825K. Pirate Bay’s Secret Source?MySpace Hack?MediaDefender-Defender Hacker Ethan Speaks Out

New York-based network Familybuilder has been growing quite handily over the past year and a half since it first launched as a Facebook application. As of late June this year, it had grown to encompass users on MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and Orkut, and had reached over 16 million people. Now it claims north of 20 million or more.

And as of October 15, it will do its users one better than simply connecting the profiles of relatives. It will begin to provide DNA tests to users who care for a deeper understanding of their ancestral tree. For just $59.95 per individual.

While genetics startup 23andMe charges you $399 for detailed analysis, and Ancestry.com and FamilyTree run $149 at the least, and Genebase asks $119-238 of its users, Familybuilder is promising a significantly cheaper alternative. As with all other tests, Familybuilder conducts its samplings via mail, and assessments of both paternal and maternal dna (YDNA and mtDNA, respectively), are offered. (Each carries the flat $59.95 fee.)

The YDNA process is said to be a 17-marker test, while the analysis of mtDNA pores over “420 base pairs of the HV1 region.” YDNA readings are for males only, while mtDNA are for both for male and female subjects. Are these figures thorough enough? May the biologists among you steer us right. The education you’ll receive is likely to be less complex than, say, what the 23andMe venture can deliver. But for the social networking classes of Facebook, MySpace and elsewhere, it’s likely to be adequate. Familybuilder notes that it makes available DNA markers, one’s haplogroup, and one’s migration map. It also provides an opt-in measure to have participants made aware of any matches within its database.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Familybuilder Reaches 16 Million Profiles on One Year AnniversaryFamilybuilder Raises $1.5M: New Name, New Money.FamilyBuilder Hits 10M Profiles, Links Trees Across Facebook, MySpace, BeboSneak a Peek at DEMOfall 08

Source:Mashable!

As I mentioned late last night, a lot of us who do this technology punditry for a living are searching for answers on what exactly this mess on Wall Street and inside the beltway means for us in the tech sector. All Americans are in the same boat, having been told to fear for the very existence of the standard of living we all hold so dear, but then given absolutely no tools to help us delve into the issue and find the answers that tell us what we should be angry at, afraid of, or smug over.

I had similar conversations with Adam Ostrow and Sean Aune on Monday - both of them noticed the same thing I did, and that was that almost all news (particularly tech news) that had nothing to do with finance and politics had trickled to a standstill. Coupled with a deluge of financial questions and a drought of understand, I decided to ring up Jim Harper of the CATO Institute. 

Jim is a tech savvy lawyer for the free market-centric think tank CATO, as well as blogger for a number of blogs that tackle both politics and technology. The idea in sitting down with Jim was to get a handle on what all this insane financial lingo actually meant in English, and to help connect the dots to how it would affect us in the tech sector by looking at the effects on venture capital, advertising markets and available consumer dollars.

I could have chosen from a number of think tanks, but I decided on Jim for two reasons. For one, I knew Jim from a panel we were on together at the Tech Politics Summit in DC back in March. The other, and perhaps more germane, is that CATO is one of the few organizations that flatly oppose the bailout proposed by the President. Even though I call myself a Libertarian (and thus a believer in free markets), I didn’t have enough of a handle on the situation to understand how this was a tenable position.

You can sit in on our discussion by playing the embed below or by grabbing the MP4.

Never miss an episode. Subscribe in your podcast player.

A Very Broad Summary

There was a lot of ground covered by the discussion, but most poignant was his general position on the urgency of the matter. Based on the research at the CATO Institute, the effects of the collapse of large investment banks deigned the direct recipients of the bailout money are largely localized to investment banks. More to the point, this means that while there are ripple effects on consumer and business banks, these effects are driven by emotion and consumer behavior and not by what’s happening on Wall Street.

Jim went into some specific cases in which there were “Main Street” bank failures, and how these banks are managing themselves through these failures, but by and large he was of the opinion that our government in general and Congress in particular should take their time in assessing the damage and deciding what to do. He shied away from giving exact timetables, but he indicated that weeks, not days, should be devoted to watching and investigating the effects to both gain an actual understanding of the matter and see what actual economic damage would and would not be mitigated by the system.

Some Suggested Resources for Further Information

Jim ended the show with a number of resources and places to get coverage of the bailout mess - there certainly is no shortage of that anywhere - but if you found interesting the analysis proffered by Jim Harper, you might enjoy the links he gave me after the show.

CATO’s Daily Podcast: Where they’ve been very closely following and providing analysis on the events as the occur as well as the proposed policies in response.

WashingtonWatch/blog: A website and blog that Jim Harper contributes to, designed to track and decipher the bills in front of Congress.

CATO-at-Liberty: The blog of the CATO Institute.

Technology Liberation Front: a team blog (with a cast of writers that almost rivals the number here at Mashable) devoted to following news and policy that intersects the worlds of politics and technology. Jim Harper is also a contributor there.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:New Kid on the Blog(osphere): Grand EffectGrand Effect Blog Network RelaunchesContent is a Commodity and Needs No BailoutO’Reilly Money:Tech Conference - 2 Free Passes and DiscountsAnnouncing TECH Cocktail Event SeriesTech Soup Pays Homage to Pete’s “Hotness”Yahoo Tech - Tech Portal, Web 2.0-Style!

Google’s own example sites seem to work fine, but, but some sites in the forum are pointing to their sites, which clearly aren’t working. A search simply refreshes the original page, with no results.Source:TechCrunch

The collapse of so many major financial institutions in the past year, and over the past few days especially, is hard to fathom in its enormity. Sometimes you need a good visual to put things in perspective. The New York Times has an interactive graphic up on its site that pretty much says it all. It shows that $4 trillion has been wiped off the total market capitalization of the U.S. stock market since last October. Of that, nearly $1 trillion is from the decline in the financial sector alone.

Each box in the graphic is proportional to the size of the market capitalization of the biggest financial firms then and now. As you mouse over the squares, you can see how much each value each company lost between October 9, 2007 and September 12, 2008. Here are some of the individual losses by market cap:

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke made a couple of moves to infuse banks with more cash before the market opened this morning. According to the Wall Street Journal, Bernanke said the Fed would hold auctions to provide funds to banks and establish foreign exchange swap lines with other central banks. The idea was to loosen up the credit market. Maybe expand some of those straitened tech budgets we warned about yesterday. Right. We think. OK, so we don’t know what this move means either. But tech stocks soared on the news, so who cares? Thanks, guy in D.C.! Big movers: HP, IBM, Google, Apple, Intel, Amazon.com and Research In Motion. (Photo by David Prior)

Like one of those brave chimpanzees NASA sent to space before humans, CNET’s Caroline McCarthy today took to the heavens aboard the inaugural flight of “BetaBlue,” JetBlue’s new onboard Wi-Fi service. It’s supposed to allow passengers access to email and IM via their BlackBerrys and Yahoo accounts.

But, according to McCarthy’s account — “It all reminded me of an ultra-low-end mobile browser” — the service failed to meet even our modest expectations for it, crashing at least twice during the intrepid reporter’s journey.

Source:Valleywag

Larry Page and Lucy Southworth weren’t the only Silicon Valley denizens to get hitched over the weekend. Former Photobucket marketer MJ Kim married Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman in a ceremony on Saturday before a large contingent of the Ritual Roaster crowd. The thing that makes these nuptials among the geekiest ever, aside from the whole thing Flickr’d and Twittered to an absurd degree? Kim proposed to Hoffman through an Outlook meeting request. Screenshot of the proposal after the jump.

(Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Source:Valleywag

Wall Street analysts and Sand Hill Road’s moneymen have pitched tech stocks as a safe haven amidst the credit crisis. Perhaps not. While tech spending continues to outpace inflation, which is running around 2.1 percent, growth may have peaked this year at 6.9 percent. Next year may see growth fall by a percentage point or more. Here’s the chart, as well as more anecdotal evidence compiled by the Wall Street Journal.

• A Goldman Sach survey of CIOs found indications of “decelerating spending growth.”
  
• ChangeWave Research said 24 percent of IT departments will increase their budgets in 2008 compared to the fourth quarter.
  
• Cisco CEO John Chambers said he expects 2008 to be “lumpy.”
  
• The CTO of Sony Pictures says annual eight-figure capital expenditures in tech will remain flat.

(Photo by )

Did you think, after Google announced its YouTube Video Identification tool, that Viacom would drop its $1 billion lawsuit? Don’t count on it. Though he told me Viacom general counsel Michael Fricklas was “delighted” with the tool, Viacom spokesperson Jeremy Zweig is saying the tool changes nothing. “It doesn’t have any impact,” Zweig said. “Or at least it’s very premature to try and figure out the impact it could have on the litigation.” (Photo by AP)

Source:Valleywag

So everyone but Congress is lovey-dovey with Yahoo now that it beat third-quarter earnings expectations, right? Not so fast. Wall Street analysts still have their doubts, PaidContent reports. Bernstein analyst Jeff Lindsay doesn’t expect ad revenue gains to carry over into the fourth quarter. He also doesn’t believe Panama’s improvements to search marketing will continue to grow quite so fast. Deutsche Bank, RBC Capital and American Technology Research weighed in too.

Deutsche Bank analyst Jeetil Patel told clients, “One quarter does not make a trend.” He’s also disappointed Yahoo didn’t adjust its expectations for the last few months of 2007, even after acquiring BlueLithium, an online-advertising startup, and Zimbra, a Web-based software company.

Rob Sanderson, an analyst with American Technology Research, said he’s waiting for Yahoo to do more with the Right Media Exchange, as Yahoo president Sue Decker has been promising since Yahoo acquired the company in the spring.

Jordan Rohan, analyst with RBC Capital, was more optimistic. “We think the worst is behind Yahoo for now.”

But remember, this is also the guy who valued me-too platform-maker MySpace at $15 billion late in 2006.

(Photo by r.s.m.b. Sees)

365 Main, the troubled datacenter operator, has finished its investigation into the failure at its San Francisco facility that knocked some of the Internet’s most well-known websites, from Craigslist to LiveJournal to Technorati, offline back in July. Ridiculously, the company first tried to blame PG&E for the failure, knowing full well that its clients pay it for reliable power even in a blackout. (Equally ridiculously, I ran a suspect tip that a drunk employee had wreaked havoc in the datacenter.) Now, the company has completely exonerated itself, pinning the blame on a component in its generators. Here’s why you still shouldn’t believe a word the company says. My analysis, and the company’s press release, after the jump.

Of course, 365 Main’s generators failed. The company blames a memory chip in a piece of electronics used to start the generators automatically. But aren’t these generators tested monthly? 365 Main notes that the component in question is only used in two of its datacenters. No word on whether the faulty testing procedures are also common to all of its facilities, or just present in San Francisco.

And the kicker? 365 Main brags about the fact that it has “delivered 99.9942 percent uptime to customers,” which sounds impressive until you do the math and realize that means the 365/7/24 facility is actually out of service, routinely, for nearly half an hour every year. Last month’s outage, in other words, was all in a day’s work for 365 Main. On top of that, consider this: It’s a failure rate six times as high as the “five nines” standard 365 Main promised when it launched. 365? More like 364.98.

Here’s the press release. I recommend you trust it as much as you do the “365″ in 365 Main’s name.

365 MAIN REPORTS ON ROOT CAUSE OF GENERATOR FAILURE

Company Implements Fix for All Affected Generators and Makes Information
about the Fix Available to Data Center Industry

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Aug. 1, 2007 - Data center developer and operator 365
Main Inc. is issuing information today that details the root cause behind
why back-up power generators in the company’s San Francisco facility failed
to start during a PG&E power outage last week, resulting in approximately 40
percent of customers in the facility losing power to their equipment for up
to 45 minutes.

The Problem

At 1:47 p.m. on Tuesday, July 24, 365 Main’s San Francisco data center was
impacted by a power surge caused when transformer breakers at a local PG&E
power station unexpectedly opened. PG&E has still not determined what caused
the breakers to open.

Typically when a power outage occurs, the outage triggers 365 Main’s
rigorously maintained and tested back-up diesel generators to start-up and
take over providing power supply to customers. 365 Main’s San Francisco
facility has ten 2.1 megawatt back-up generators to be used in the event of
a loss of utility power. Eight primary generators can successfully power the
building, with two generators available on stand-by in case there are any
failures with the primary eight.

However, following the power outage last week, three of 365 Main’s 10
back-up power generators, manufactured by Hitec, failed to complete their
start sequence. A complete investigation of the incident began immediately.

Within hours of the incident, an international team of specialists was
deployed to 365 Main’s San Francisco data center facility to join on-site
technicians and begin systematically testing the generators in search of a
root cause. After days of thorough testing around the clock, the team
discovered a weakness in an essential component of the back-up generator
system known as a DDEC (Detroit Diesel Electronic Controller).

The team discovered a setting in the DDEC that was not allowing the
component to correctly reset its memory. Erroneous data left in the DDEC’s
memory subsequently caused misfiring or engine start failures when the
generators were called on to start during the power outage on July 24.

The Fix

The investigation team discovered DDEC issues on each of the failed Hitec
units and were able to successfully simulate failure. A fix was introduced
by altering the timing of a command to the DDEC component, allowing more
time between the engine shut-down command and the DDEC reset command. Once
this fix was introduced, the Hitec generators successfully passed more than
50 consecutive start-up sequence tests without incident.

The testing methodology was performed by Hitec specialists along with 365
Main’s chief technician and staff. Specialists from Cupertino Electric were
present during all testing, and EYP Mission Critical Facilities will provide
independent verification of the findings the week of 8/6/07.

365 Main has implemented the DDEC fix in its San Francisco and El Segundo
facilities. Of the five data centers in 365 Main’s portfolio, the San
Francisco and El Segundo facilities are the only ones with Hitec generators
containing DDECs. All other facilities feature other brands of generators
or have different models of Hitecs.

365 Main is sharing the discoveries of its investigation with other Hitec
customers. In addition, Hitec has expanded its preventative maintenance
procedures as a direct result of discoveries made during the 365 Main
investigation.

In the wake of the outage, 365 Main published an apology to customers and
daily updates directly from the investigation team meeting minutes, allowing
customers and the public at large to track progress. A complete archive of
these updates and more details about today’s update are available at:
http://www.365main.com/status_update.html

Chris Dolan, president and CEO of 365 Main, said, “365 Main has a track
record of providing customers with data centers that are considered to be
among the world’s finest. We extend our sincere apologies to customers who
were impacted by this incident. Addressing customer concerns is our top
priority. In the days since the incident occurred, we have identified and
corrected the root source of the problem and are taking steps to prevent
this type of problem from happening again. We are also making our
comprehensive findings available to other data centers to try to prevent the
same problem from recurring elsewhere.”

Glenn Ellis, president and CEO of Hitec USA, also commented: “Our top
priority is taking steps to prevent this type of unforeseen incident from
occurring again. We sincerely apologize to 365 Main and its customers that
our generators failed to deliver the continuous power as designed.”

365 Main’s Track Record

Since its inception over five years ago, 365 Main has delivered 99.9967
percent power uptime to customers across its five-data-center portfolio.
This includes the outage experienced in San Francisco last week. 365 Main’s
San Francisco facility has delivered 99.9942 percent uptime to customers
during the last five years, inclusive of last week’s outage.

As part of their service level agreements with 365 Main, 365 Main customers
receive rent abatements (refunds) in the event that electrical power is
dropped in the section(s) of the data center where their servers are
located. 365 Main is honoring all service level agreements with affected
customers.

Source:Valleywag

The stock market seems inexplicable. In June, when Engadget posted a memo, later proved fake, about delays in the iPhone launch that later proved false, Apple shares sank but instantly recovered. Yesterday, when TheStreet.com ran a story based on a supposed Wall Street report on iPhone production cutbacks, shares dropped 7 percent — and dropped further today, despite a thorough debunking by CNBC’s Jim Goldman and Business 2.0’s Phil Elmer-DeWitt. Why the difference?

First, a caveat: Fortunes have been made and lost trying to suss out the psychology of the stock market, and if I truly understood it, I’d be working on Wall Street. But, like a psychic reading tea leaves, every so often, I might glimpse a pattern that fits the situation.

Apple shares have run past most analysts’ targets and, some believe, past the economic realities of how Apple can perform. The rumors sweeping Wall Street of cutbacks in production of iPhones — from 9 million to 4.5 million — are just a sign that people are looking for a way out of their own overblown expectations. Apple has long said it expects to sell 10 million iPhones next year. Not this year.

What’s ludicrous is that anyone believed that Apple, famous for its lean supply chain and careful inventory management, would have put in firm orders for 9 million iPhones in the first place. If there are any cutbacks being made, it’s in Wall Street traders’ lurid fantasies. And as they rein in their imaginations, they inevitably rein in Apple’s high-flying stock.

(Chart by Yahoo Finance)