Yoono Releases Onslaught of New Features, Finds an Interesting Business Model

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:35:26 +0000

Those anti-monopoly laws are serious business. When Microsoft complained that Google selling ads on Yahoo’s ad space was akin to a search monopoly, they obviously consulted their army of lawyers who said that the deal has a big probability of failing.

According to WSJ (link behind a paywall), this probability is very high right now, and the companies might walk away from the deal by the middle of next week. You can’t really go around the fact that Google and Yahoo own over 80 percent of the web search market, and it seems that Google and Yahoo can’t convince the U.S. Department of Justice that it’s not a monopoly.

Yahoo spokesman Tracy Schmaler has given Reuters the usual PR drizzle; Yahoo, as she says, believes strongly “that this agreement will strengthen Yahoo’s competitive position in online advertising and will help to drive a more robust, higher quality Yahoo marketplace for their advertisers, publishers and users.”

Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said even less: “We are confident that the arrangement is beneficial to competition, but we are not going to discuss the details of the process.”

Therefore, the deal may not yet be completely dead yet, but the Wall Street Journal claims that the talks both companies had with the Department of Justice on Thursday weren’t going too well.

If the deal doesn’t go through, it will only be a minor nuisance for Google. As far as Yahoo goes, the company is still nowhere: they’re looking at the possibility of merging with Time-Warner; this search deal with Google was part of the tactic to scare Microsoft away from trying a hostile takeover, so it’s doubtful that it’s a good idea in the first place, and their stock has been pretty much free falling ever since Microsoft said that the takeover offer is off the table. Things aren’t looking too bright for Yahoo shareholders.

Source:Mashable!

A while ago I laid down a theory that a significant number of users are using YouTube to share data that isn’t videos. Most often, it’s music, and therefore there are a lot of videos on YouTube that consist of a music track and some images slapped together just to make them videos. In a way, it’s untapped potential, because YouTube isn’t doing much to make it easier for users to share music that doesn’t necessarily have an (official) video attached to it.

Enter StreamDrag, a simple music search engine that draws its collection from YouTube’s massive database, although it’s not really transparent - or important - to the end user, who doesn’t see the video at all, he just listens to the song. Titles of songs such as “Tool - Sober (HQ Fullscreen)” can be a bit misleading, but it’s a minor point as long as you’re in it just to hear the music.

A nice option is the playlist; stack a bunch of tracks together and you’ve got yourself a party. This can be done in YouTube and other third party tools, but it’s extremely simple in StreamDrag; click on the “+” icon next to the song and it’s added to the playlist (to return to the search results, just click on “playlist” again). Everything else on the site is very straightforward: you’ve got play/pause, stop, rwd and ffwd buttons, as well as a repeat and sound on/off switches. I like it: by removing everything else and focusing on the music, StreamDrag is actually much more enjoyable (and faster) to use than many other similar services (including YouTube itself).

StreamDrag is a direct competitor to services such as Songza. The developer behind StreamDrag, David Lorenz, claims that the simplicity of his application is the key difference here, as well as some features that enhance the user experience such as looping a single track. I’m not convinced that this is enough to beat the competition, but I do admit that using StreamDrag could not be simpler, which is always a good thing.

Source:Mashable!

Yoono, the browser-based social aggregator, has announced a new release that includes features such as support for Internet Explorer, MySpace and imeem integration, and the biggest news of all, a shopping widget.

This new shopping widget for social aggregation will generate product recommendations and pricing comparisons based on the products displayed during a browsing session. The widget will work with some of the largest ecommerce sites such as eBay, Buy.com, Amazon.com and Shopping.com. While you search for products, Yoono will make recommendations for similar items with better pricing. These products can be bookmarked and shared with friends and purchased. The widget is scheduled to be released around Thanksgiving, just in time for the holiday season.

“This is a major change in the way the industry thinks about social aggregation,” said Pascal Josselin, CEO of Yoono. “We listened to our users and they want to do more than just watch and occasionally contribute to social networks. They want to have two-way interaction in a way that matches the things they are doing on the Web. With this launch we achieve more than watching the stream. We give users a way to get what they want, whether that is a conversation, a video, music or a new product.”

Yoono’s 1.8 millon users will now be able to connect to their friends on imeem and MySpace, in addition to those on Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, Twitter, Gmail, Piczo and several IM clients, all through a single sidebar. Yoono has also enhanced their User Interface to improve functionality.

The social aggregation space is extremely crowded with players like Friendfeed, Plaxo Pulse, Profilactic, socialthing and many more. By incorporating shopping cart technology and an intelligent recommendation system, Yoono might start a new trend. We might see others following suit if they are successful in their efforts to monetize social aggregation. In the long run, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing because everyone wins if this experiment works. We the users benefit from improved shopping experience, the vendors selling merchandise benefit from the sales as does the mediator, the social aggregator, in this case, Yoono. We shall soon find out.