Web Services

Google today announced the first major change to its understated homepage since its launch. Visitors to the site can now choose to personalize their Google page to create a Web portal uniting many of Google's different services. The traditional Google homepage is still available, now called Google Classic, and users can toggle between a personalized view and the classic search pane.

I'm not sure why this is such a shock since google news has been brewing for so long. Normally more competition is considered good for consumers, but I can see why both Yahoo and even MSN would be a bit uneasy about Google taking aim at more and more what they do. I mostly use Google but my view of Yahoo has changed in a positive direction over the last few years due to what seems to be a newer culture / attitude.

The options are pretty basic so far (especially compared to others like Yahoo!) but the one "cool" feature so far is the ability to drag and drop the content blocks on the fly to re-arrange the layout of the page. Yahoo can also dynamically re-arrange the layout but they choose to use an "edit" button where the user can decide from pre-defined choices on where they want the block moved to.

I will probably use it for a while since I use Gmail as my primary email client and the page lets me view my inbox but I am still going to stick with MyYahoo for the time being since I have more control over things like custom RSS feeds.

Yahoo! has opened their Y! Local Traffic content to allow Apple's Dashboard to create a  Y! Local Traffic widget. For this to work, Yahoo has to expose the data in an easily digestiable format. As it turns out, Yahoo has decided to use RSS to accomplish this.

This is huge since it is now easily consumable by RSS readers, so other people can piggy-back on the feed. There’s already a blog post describing how the widget works and it even provides a little form for making your own URL.

http://maps.yahoo.com/traffic.rss?csz=45202&mag=4&minsev=2

The parameters are:

• csz The location from which you want to do your search - as far as I know only cities are supported at the moment. You can provide both a zipcode, a city or an address - all seem to work.
• mag The level of ‘magnification’. 3 = 4 Miles, 4 = 10 Miles, 5 = 40 Miles
• minserv The minimum severity of the traffic condition. 1 = Minor, 2 = Moderate, 4 = Major, 5 = Critical

I am looking forward to see how many interesting things people can come on ways in which this data can be used..

Yahoo has one-upped Google with the announcement of their API. Google has been doing this for a while now (3 years), but you never hear anything new about it like you do with Amazon's API where new applications seems to appear on a daily basis.

The SDK includes BSD-licensed examples in Perl, Python, PHP, Java and JavaScript (Google's SDK includes Java and .NET examples), and accesses Image, Web, Video, Local, and News searches (last time I looked, Google did Web, Cache, and Spelling)! Yahoo's API uses REST rather than SOAP, which I personally find much easier to work with.