Bookmarking service Delicious has just rolled out a Google Chrome browser extension.

Like other Chrome extensions we love to play with, this one is lightweight, fast and useful. There’s no bulky sidebar here. Bookmarks can be created and saved with a miniscule “TAG” button and they can be searched from Chrome’s excellent omnibar. So, do you think this will prompt loyal Delicious users – many of whom had been holding out on Chrome in favor of Firefox – to switch to Google Chrome entirely?

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This is what the button and simple form for bookmarking a page look like:

<img src="http://www.search-internetmarketing.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/abe7a_1"

While this extension doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of some of Delicious’ other browser add-ons, the team noted that the public demand for a Chrome extension prompted them to release a beta earlier than they would have liked.

“It doesn’t have all the API’s needed and it’s missing a good chunk of the functionality we believe it needs, but we’re getting so many requests for the Chrome extension that we’re going to make this available sooner than we originally planned…

“As soon as Chrome is able to support the functionality needed we’ll ensure the features of this extension matches that of our other browser add-ons. There are still some interactions we’re not quite happy with that we’ll address shortly, but we wanted to give you an official Google Chrome extension as soon as possible.”

What do you think? Does the new Delicious extension make you want to use Chrome more? Or if you’re a Chrome fan, does this move give you a renewed interest in Delicious? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Anthony Tjan is a venture capitalist at the Boston-based VC firm Cue Ball, but he also blogs for The Harvard Business Review where last week he posted an article about packaged pricing deals in business. The article, The Pros and Cons of Bundled Pricing, points out the differences between bundles and “à la carte” pricing as well as benefits to both customers and businesses. Most Web startups offering an array of services will often bundle features into tiered pricing plans rather than an “à la carte” selection, and here’s why.

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Using bundled pricing over “à la carte” pricing isn’t just a simple decision of choosing the method that makes more money; bundled pricing can benefit businesses (and their customers) in other ways. While bundled pricing doesn’t always necessarily benefit the customer, it can provide them with a better overall experience with the service being sold.

Tjan’s example is a 5-star hotel that charges $750 per night, but the bottle of water in the room is an extra $10. To most people, $10 is a lot for a bottle of water and they will make sure they don’t crack it open lest they see that extra $10 on their bill. If the hotel chose to instead bundle the cost of the water into the room and charge $760 per night, they could advertise bottled water as a feature. In most cases, someone willing to pay $750 for a hotel room is also willing to pay $760, but they don’t know that they’re being charged $10 for the water, it’s just a hidden cost rolled into the bundle. They get to their room and think, “Wow! Free bottled water!”

The hotel in this example is banking on the percent of people who won’t drink the water that they unknowingly paid for in the bundle. As Tjan points out, the same can be said for Web startups and software services.

“Think also of the fact that while most users of software use only a fraction of the available functionality, it is the basic users who are subsidizing the long-tail product development of features used by a relatively small number of advanced users,” writes Tjan.

Bundled pricing can be a good and bad thing for both customers and businesses. In the case of the hotel, customers are paying a higher price which is an obvious benefit to the hotel, but in the end, the customers are also enjoying a better experience with the perceived “free” water. The opposite is true in Tjan’s alternate example of fast-food restaurant value meals. In this case, the customer benefits from a lower price by bundling a burger with fries and a drink, but the restaurant can also benefit from a more streamlined workflow in preparing the meal.

For customers, there are times when seeing a breakdown of a bundle’s pricing is advantageous, but most businesses are cautious about revealing such information. As Tjan points out, the key for businesses in this case is finding the right blend of these two ideas.

“The answer is simple: you should not confuse transparency with a pricing strategy. If you are the seller, focus on the total value provided which is fair for the customer and you,” writes Tjan. “Show the list of all activities performed for a service without individually valuing them. Providing individual price breakdown can kill any perceived or real synergistic total value.”

Obviously there are exceptions to any rule, and not every bundled pricing situation offers a mutual benefit to both parties. But are there situations when “à la carte” pricing could be beneficial to both customers and businesses? Let us know your thoughts on pricing in the comments.

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Your phone can translate foreign language text just by looking at it through Google Goggles. A South Korean telecom has released a product similar to Google Goggles. The social content Augmented Reality mobile browser junaio will have a new version released at SXSW next month and there’s now an 8 minute video from TED available detailing Microsoft’s plans for Bing, including Augmented Reality.

Augmented Reality (AR), the practice of displaying data on top of our view of the world around us, is hot stuff. Below are the top stories on AR from around the web over the past 24 hours, selected with help from OneSpot. Watch this space: ReadWriteWeb will be releasing a research report on the use of AR for marketing very soon.

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Google Demos New Translation Functionality For Google Goggles
Geek Sugar

“We’ve been able to translate languages with the help of Google Translate for a while now, but this new function within Google Goggles (which I’m already a big fan of) kind of blows my mind.”

metaio @ SXSW 2010
Augmented Reality Blog

Metaio will present a whole new version of its social content mobile AR browser junaio at SXSW this year. The company’s Unifeye Mobile SDK is also among the finalists of the “Accelerator” competition.

A New Augmented Reality (AR) Application in Korea : Ovjet
GIS + AR (Augmented Reality)

“Korean mobile network provider SK Telecom has revealed a new augmented reality application called Ovjet for Android-platform mobile phones. It seems like quite similar to the concept of Google Goggles. “

OllieBray.com: Microsoft Bing Maps augmented reality demo at the TED 2010

Short 8 minute TED Talk from Microsoft’s Blaise Aguera y Arcas on the company’s latest evolution of Bing Maps. Included an Augmented Reality demo. Here’s the video.

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Now that Google Chrome has entered the world of fully-extensible browsers, with its recent addition of extensions and Greasemonkey scripts, you’ve likely found yourself perusing the libraries and tweaking until your heart’s content. With that, however, comes the inevitable – browser crashes.

While Google Chrome doesn’t have a safe mode in the same way the Firefox or Windows does, it does offer another option that provides the same functionality and can save you a whole bunch of trouble.

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The folks over at the Google Operating System blog pointed out this tip today and we thought it was a worthwhile how-to for our readers.

If you’ve found yourself in the terrible position of having a broken version of Chrome and you don’t want to uninstall and start over from scratch, you can instead launch Chrome using “incognito mode”, which disables extensions and allows you to disable your the bad apple extensions.

Setting up a shortcut to launch Chrome in incognito mode is a simple four-step process:

1. We recommend first making a copy of your shortcut, that way you can access the browser normally too, once you’ve fixed whatever problem you’re experiencing.
2. Find your copied Chrome shortcut, right-click on it and select “Properties”.
3. Select the “Target” field and append “–incognito” to the end of the command.
4. Click “Apply” then “Okay” to save your changes.

Now, all you have to do is double-click on the edited shortcut to enter into a “Safe Mode” style Chrome. From here, all you’ll need to do is enter “chrome://extensions/” (minus the quotes) into the browser’s navigation bar to edit the extensions.

If you’re unsure which extension broke Chrome’s back, simply disable them all and switch back and forth between incognito Chrome and regular Chrome until you break it again.

And while we’re speaking of Chrome extensions, we recommend going and getting the ReadWriteWeb extension to keep up to date with everything we post here. After all, if your Chrome shuts down from extension overload, now you know how to fix it.

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If you’ve ever spent any time trying to parse through your list of Twitter followers, than you know how time consuming it can be. “Who’s this guy?” you ask yourself, as you open up their profile in a new tab, just so you can read their little blurb about who they are and what they do and why you care.

Twitter’s latest feature, Hovercards, will offer that contextual information without making you ever open up another tab.

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Twitter announced the feature last night, though for many unfortunate souls, such as myself, it has yet to go live. As with most Twitter features, this one will be rolled out over time.

As you can see above, the hovercard is like a business card that will appear whenever you mouseover another user’s name or avatar. The Twitter announcement says that this will happen in “any timeline” so we can only hope that this means it will work when you’re trying to organize who you follow into lists. We asked Twitter but didn’t receive a response by press.

The Twitter blog also notes that the hovercards will work for its new retweet format, showing you information about the person who is being retweeted. They will also let you direct message the person from within the hovercard. It seems like there could be other basic functionality too, from the looks of it, but its too early to tell.

Of course, this feature only affects those of you that actually still visit Twitter.com instead of using an third-party app, but it surely seems like a great tool for looking through your followers and trying to create lists.

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When the Nexus One was released, comparisons to the iPhone were unavoidable, and a respect in which the Android device came up short was multi-touch.  Now, though, an over-the-air software update should allow Nexus One users to pinch and zoom to their hearts’ content.

Pinch-to-zoom functionality’s will work when people are fiddling with the phone’s browser, its gallery, or the Google Maps application.  That’s bound to come as a pretty huge bonus to folks who thought they would be permanently without the feature.  It’s possible this update will spur a few additional purchases, too.

And the pinch-to-zoom addition doesn’t represent the end of the update, either.  "[W]e will provide a general fix to help improve 3G connectivity on some Nexus One phones," promised an official blog post.  Which is important.

What’s more, Google Goggles "will now be available directly on your device by launching it from your All Apps menu.  Just use your Nexus One camera to start searching the web."

This should all act to make the Nexus One quite a bit more competitive.  It’ll be interesting to see if sales enjoy a boost in the weeks ahead.

Related Articles:

> Google Gets Letter From FCC Over Controversial Fee

> Google Tries To Carve Out Its Place In Mobile

> Nexus One Sales Of 5-6 Million Units Forecast

Google has added some new real estate search features to Google Maps. Earlier this year, Google expanded this functionality by letting you select "real estate" from the "more" menu. Now you can just search for "real estate" or other real estate-related geographical queries and get listings.

"The idea is to make it really easy for you guys – you tell us what you want, and we get it back to you! Of course, we’ll continue to work to return the best results for all your Google Maps queries, whether you’re looking for local businesses, geographic features, or your perfect home," Google says in an announcement on its Australian blog.

Are you familiar with Google’s Place Pages? These are pages for businesses that Google creates for listings in Google Maps. They launched this feature earlier this year also. Now real estate listings have their own place pages as well.

"Now clicking the ‘more info’ link next to a listing takes you to a faster, easier-to-read page that gives you all of the information we have about a listing: photos, inspection times, videos, details, a Street View preview and nearby public transit information if available, allowing you to quickly find the listing you want and click through to the sources of the listing," explains Google.

As Matt McGee at Search Engine Land points out, Google has shown individual property info for a while now, but this provides a much more user-friendly approach. Google Maps may start to be considered the place to go to find real estate online. 

Related Articles:

>  Google Adds Real Estate to Australian Maps

> Google Maps Takes Another Crack At Real Estate

> Will Google Eliminate the Need for Small Business Websites?

Google has scheduled a press event for 10am PST this morning where the company plans to announce more details about its Linux-based Google Chrome OS. According to the information we received from Google, the company plans to launch Chrome OS next year. We don’t expect Google to release an early build of Chrome OS today, but we would be more than happy to be wrong. We do, however, expect to hear more details about the OS and to see a demo of Chrome OS’s functionality.

Read on for our live updates from the event, which will start at 10am PST.

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9:55am: Ahead of the event, Google has already made the Chrome OS source code available.

10:00am: Still waiting for the event to begin. “Some of our attendees are unavoidably delayed in traffic.”

10:05am: Event gets started. No beta, no devices today. But they will give a demo and focus on technical demo.

10:06am: Google Chrome has been open-sourced.

10:07am: Why did we do Chrome? We wanted to push the web forward. Over 40 million users.

Focus on speed. Mostly on the JavaScript engine, but also on other parts of the browser.

Updated Chrome over 20 times in the last year, but users don’t notice this because it happens in the background. User experience should be seamless.

Coming soon for Chrome: Chrome for Mac will be ready this year. Chrome for Linux is coming along “very well.” Extensions are coming soon as well (with automatic updates).

10:10am: HTML5: we want web application to get more access to the hardware. Example: graphics; multiple threads; real-time communication

10:12am: 3 trends in the industry: netbooks, cloud (everything is a web application today), phones getting computing capabilities

Phones are becoming more like laptops and laptops are becoming more like phones.

Chrome OS

10:15am: Chrome OS will be focused on speed, simplicity, security.

Every application on Chrome OS will be a web application.

Simplicity: Chrome OS is just a browser – all your data is in the cloud. Users should be able to log into any Chrome OS machine and be up and running with their apps and data in seconds.

Security: users don’t install binaries on the OS. Keeps the system safe. Everything runs in the browser.

10:18am: Demo time. Booting up on laptop takes seconds.

“Everybody knows how to use a browser and we want Chrome OS to feel that way.

UI will still change until release.

Application Tabs: just like tabs in Chrome, you will be able to set persistent tabs for apps (Gmail etc.).

App menu on the top left to access apps as well (see first screenshot above). These apps will be little widgets that appear in a panel just like Google Chat in Gmail.

10:23am: As netbooks get better, we expect them to become entertainment devices. Shows chess game.

Shows Google Books in full-screen mode.

Chrome OS will feature multiple windows. You can drag and drop tabs from one window to another.

Even the file browser is a Chrome tab. Shows what happens when you click on an excel file. Actually launches Windows Live Office apps to show them.

“Every app you write for the web is a Google Chrome OS app.”

10:29am: Every file opens up in the browser: PDF, Micorsoft Office, etc.

Under the Hood

10:30am: Matthew Papakipos, Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS on stage now.

“We want Chrome OS to feel more like a Television.” Instant on – all flash memeory.

How to make the boot-up faster?

Right now, operating systems still spend a lot of time on unnecessary boot steps (looking for floppy drives etc.)

10:34am: Verified Boot: makes sure all the components are working and haven’t been modified by malware.

System automatically fixes itself and reimages the computer with the last working version – saves all system settings and cache data.

Security: all apps are web apps. The OS does not trust any app.

Other security steps: files system is licked down, every tab runs in a secure sandbox. There is only a small list of known programs (verified and signed).

User data on a Chrome OS machine is ALWAYS encrytped.

All the data is synced to the cloud (on the Google Drive?) – user partition on the machine is basically just a local cache.

10:41am: Back to Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management.

Going to market: Chrome OS – but also working with hardware manufacturers.

Will only support flash drives – not traditional hard drives!

Google will specify reference hardware (specific wifi cards etc.).

Google wants netbooks with a full-size keyboard, larger resolution, better trackpad.

Launch: wants devices to be out by next holiday season.

Chrome OS Open Sourced

Google wants to work with open source community. Will give all of its contributions back to the community.

10:45am: Showing marketing video.

Q&A

Question: What is the target group for a Chrome OS device? Will there be Chrome server solutions? Chrome as a server?

Answer: First we want to get netbooks out – no servers – but this is a paradigm shift in computer. Other questions: time will tell.

Question: Cost of Chrome OS netbooks?>

Answer: We will see larger netbooks – no price point – no price target.Demo ran on Asus EEE PC.

Question: How can manufacturers join the program?

Answer: Documentation on website. Reaching out aggressively to hardware partners. For software developers: there will be a page that shows which devices are compatible already.

Question: Will there be an app store? Will Google certify drivers from OEMs? What about applications to edit photos?

Answer: App store: the web is our app store and we will work hard on making those discoverable. Drivers: working with hardware partners. Want devices to be build on reference devices and with open source drivers. Editing: some apps are not available on the web. Most people who will buy this machine will have another machine in their home. This is not meant to be a primary OS – just a “delightful experience to be on the Web.” This is a companion device

Question: What about video codecs?

Answer: working on that. Trying to use hardware acceleration where possible. Everything that’s available in Chrome will be available in Chrome OS – including the http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ technology.

Sidenote: a lot of what you will see in Chrome OS will also flow back into the Chrome browser.

Question: Silverlight support? Answer: No comment.

Question: Plugins? Other browsers?

Answer: code is available, but we won’t support other browsers to run on Chrome OS.

Question: Do you expect to see this just running on netbooks or other devices as well?

Answer: more info about devices will come next year. Google is currently focused on delivering compelling devices: netbook-like form factors.

Question: How big is the OS?

Answer: nothing specific.

Question: Offline access? Google Gears support?

Answer: you can play media – but device mainly meant to run online but will make use of HTML5 local storage.

Question: can you run it in a virtual machine? Answer: yes.

Question: are you working with partners? Can Android apps run on Chrome OS?

Answer: we focus on making web apps better – mission of Chrome is to push web apps forward. About Android apps: no.

Question: will there be third-party apps?

Answer: no – on phones you need native apps, but not on laptops.

Question: Native Client needs Intel – will you still support ARM?

Answer: we will support X86 and ARM – working on Native Client for ARM.

Question: What’s the business model? Advertising in the browser?

Answer: Right now, we are focused on getting the OS and devices out. Chrome OS is free and open source. As people use the web more, it benefits Google. No specific real-estate in Chrome OS will be devoted to ads.

Question: What does Chrome do that I couldn’t do in Firefox with plugins?

Answer: most of what we do is available in other browser. But not the application tabs etc. We are offering a fundamentally different model of computing (fast, simple, secure). In Chrome OS, Google can offer things others can’t: fast boot, security.

Question: How do you get people to trust the cloud? How do you assure
people that their data is secure?

Answer: most of what you are doing is already in the cloud – so problem is not specific to Chrome OS. Google thinks the cloud is just as secure as local storage. Users have a choice – always in control.

Question: data syncing – will this be open or data just controlled by Google?

Answer: none

Sergey Brin drops in and joins the Q&A.

Question: Support for Java?

Answer: nothing to announce right now – hopefully we can do something interesting with this in the future.

Question: What about instant-on OSes on Dell etc.? Does Google want to do this?

Answer: No – we want to just be able to start super fast. A lean and mean netbook.

Question: Will a Chrome OS machine be able to run printers? Other devices?

Answer: we will support storage devices. Printers: we are taking an innovative approach and share more about that next year.

Question: Open Source.

Answer: we want to upstream what we do and help the community. Want to collaborate with

Question: Real-time notifications.

Answer (Sergey Brin): We need better real-time notifications in the browser. Chrome will use the W3C Notifications API.

Question (for Sergey): How does Chrome OS fit into Google’s strategy.

Answer: we want users to be able to use netbooks easily. Make it easy to manage software on these devices. The web is the right platform for this. Trying to fulfull this need.

Discuss

Google released an early version of the Google Chrome Frame today. This is a plug-in for Internet Explorer, which lets the browser use HTML5 and…Google Wave (starting next week when the product’s preview is extended).

"We’re building Google Chrome Frame to help web developers deliver faster, richer applications like Google Wave. Recent JavaScript performance improvements and the emergence of HTML5 have enabled web applications to do things that could previously only be done by desktop software," Google says on the Chromium blog. "One challenge developers face in using these new technologies is that they are not yet supported by Internet Explorer. Developers can’t afford to ignore IE — most people use some version of IE — so they end up spending lots of time implementing work-arounds or limiting the functionality of their apps."

Google says it will encourage IE users to install Chrome Frame, once the Wave preview is extended, and IE users will see the following message when they login to Google Wave. Then they will be running Wave in a speed that equivalent to that of Google Chrome.

"Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5’s offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance," says Google’s Wave Team. "Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web’s users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology. Compared with other browsers, the JavaScript performance is many times slower and HTML5 support is still far behind. Likewise, the many different versions of IE still in use — each with its own set of CSS quirks and layout limitations — further complicates building rich Web applications."

If you have not yet gotten acquainted with HTML 5, Google has uploaded a 40-minute introduction to the technology to the Google Code YouTube Channel. You can view it below.

A while back, Google began including user photos in Google Maps that could be viewed while a user navigated through street view. On a separate occasion, Google added some new zooming functionalities to Street View.

Now the company has brought these two features together to let users choose which photos they want to view for applicable destinations, and zoom in on those, rather than only being able to zoom in on the default image. This is demonstrated in the following short clip.

When an image is shown in the photo viewer, a small set of "zoom polygons" are shown. This means that there are close-up photos available.

"Subsequently, moving the mouse around in the window highlights the best polygon near the mouse location," explains Daniel Filip, Computer Vision Tech Lead at Google Zürich. "Similar to our new smart navigation feature, double clicking on the shaded rectangle jumps you to the corresponding photo. After one or more jumps, the back button appears next to the photo title to give you the option to move back through the selected sequence of photos."

The addition of this feature might inspire photographers to submit more user photos to Google, because Google surely wants to expand upon this feature greatly. I don’t know how many locations feature this functionality, but I would imagine there is still a lot of ground to cover.

Google has launched a new version of the AdWords API. The company says this version offers more speed, scale, and flexibility to developers at a lower cost.

The AdWords API lets developers build apps that interact with the AdWords platform. With the API, users can:

- Automatically generate keywords, ad text, and destination URLs

-  Integrate AdWords data with their inventory system to manage campaigns based on stock

-  Develop additional tools and applications to help them manage accounts

With AdWordsAPI v2009 comes a revised set of terms and conditions. "This change includes a more comprehensive explanation of our policy regarding the commingling of data, and also redefines the required minimum AdWords functionality for third party developers," explains AdWords API Product Manager Doug Raymond. A list of the required and optional features can be found here.

The new version also comes with a new rate sheet. "We’ve lowered the cost of v2009 for the average developer by approximately 20% through reducing the unit cost of our most commonly called operations — add criteria, add, and set adgroup," says Raymond.

The new version of the API is still in beta, and Google is asking developers to sign up for access. Documentation can be found here.

Raymond says that over the next few months, Google will introduce new features and additional AdWords functionality to the API. Look for things like partial failure acceptance, asynchronous calls, keyword tools, and MCC & reporting functionality.

Earlier in the year, Google gave developers a preview of a new open-source quick search box for Mac outside of the browser. The company has now made this available to everyone.

The Google Quick Search Box comes equipped with search suggestions as you would expect. These suggestions range from apps and local files on your computer to web search and navigational suggestsions, as wel las items from your browser history, and contacts. Google says more types of results will become available in time.

"Once you’ve found the result you want, we wanted you to be able to DO something with it," Product Managers Ryan Tabone and KarenGrünberg explain. "To find out what you can do, select a result and press the tab key or the right arrow on the keyboard. Some examples of actions include instant messaging friends, playing a song, or emailing a URL. Just like the data you can search over, the list of actions you can perform will grow over time!"

To access he Quick Search Box, users simply need to push control+spacebar or Command twice. Shortcuts can be customized in the preferences panel.

"As you use the Google Quick Search Box more, it will learn which results you are likely to want," the product managers say. "The goal here is that we get you to what you’re looking for as quickly as possible. In the above example, if you chose Google Calendar, the next time you search for "cal", Google QSB will reorder the results so that you don’t have to arrow down to your desired choice. Instead, you can just type "cal" and press enter."

The beauty of the Quick Search Box being open source is that plug-ins can be created to improve features and functionality on a potentially massive scale. In fact, there is already a Twitter plug-in, that many users are likely to find helpful.

Google has announced plans it will start selling eBooks by the end of the year.

The move will put Google in direct competition with Amazon.com and it is also part of its strategy to promote an open platform for reading and accessing books.

Unlike Amazon, Google will allow users to read its ebooks on any Web enabled device including a PC, mobile phone and an eBook reader.

"Eventually, we hope to extend this functionality to retailers who embed Google Previews on their website," the company said in a statement.

eBooks purchased from Amazon’s Kindle Store can only be read on its own reader Kindle, and Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch using Kindle software.

Google also is planning to allow publishers to set their own prices for its eBook service. Amazon has angered many publishers by selling ebooks at below cost, hurting sales of hardbacks. New titles from Amazon sell for as little as $9.99, while new hardbacks cost about $26.

Google’s Book Search service is facing regulatory scrutiny in both the U.S. and Europe. The company plans to scan millions of "orphan works" that are still under copyright but have no clear owner. Regulators are investigating the legality of the plan.

Just recently, Yahoo! launched a “Placemaker Service.” This is basically a simple web-based service that has the ability to geo-locate any type of un-structured information like plain text. According to Yahoo!, the Placemaker Service is more of a “geo-enrichment” rather than the more advanced geo-coding. Using this service, you can get results including the location like 53rd County Street as well as the location type like the country or city.

The Yahoo! Placemaker will provide web developers with a platform and a functionality with the help of which they can geo-enrich all their content including that of blog posts, web pages, RSS feeds, status updates, news articles, and various applications that use similar information. The Placemaker is basically an open API and it will now help developers across the world to make aware different types of applications as well as location of data sets.

This web service was released at Where2.0 and will enable the accessibility of GeoPlanet Data to the public with the help of a Creative Commons License. The Placemaker’s geo-enrichment services are being seen as a competition to Google’s Geo-location API. According to the description provided by Yahoo! regarding the Placemaker, “This service will handle any free-from text and “identify places mentioned within the text, disambiguate those places, and return unique identifiers (WOEIDs) for each, as well as information about how many times the place was found within the text, and where in the text it was found. It will provide the geographic developer community with the means to mark-up and index their content geographically in a globally-aware, locally-relevant, and language-neutral manner, and assist with geographic discovery and aggregation across the Internet.”

The Yahoo 360
At the same time, Yahoo will be closing the Yahoo 360 service officially on July 13, 2009 according to their internal blog. According to Yahoo! Blog: “Over the past two years there has been a lot of discussion about the closure of Yahoo! 360° and the transition to our new profiles experience that we’ve had in the works. Today, we’re able to firmly say that on July 13, 2009 Yahoo! 360° will be closing down and you’ll be asked to move into your new profile on Yahoo! by July 12, 2009.”

The Yahoo 360° service was actually launched as a social networking and blogging service in March 2005. But over the years it has not gained popularity as was expected. Several experts and analysts believe that the failure of Yahoo 360 lies entirely with the fact that they were unable to cash on the rising popularity of blogging and social networking over the Internet.

The Yahoo 360° service will follow the footsteps of Yahoo Mash, the social networking site that was shut down in September 2008. In order to keep Yahoo! social networking alive, the group launched Yahoo Profiles with some of the basic social networking functionalities. But the truth is that with the closing down of the Yahoo 360° service, Yahoo! will not have any strong social networking services for the global audience.

News is provided by Joel McLaughlin @ Dataflurry search engine optimization and website marketing team located in Phoenix Arizona and Los Angeles California.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Yahoo: Launching Placemaker Service and Closing Yahoo 36