Yahoo! Voice launched today Web 2.0

Yahoo! launched today Yahoo! Voice, its VoIP service, which comes bundled with the new version of Yahoo! Messenger (still beta, but that's a thing we are completely used to these days). Yahoo! voice allows you to phone from your PC to any country in the world (see rates). UK, France and USA users can also receive calls and have a free voicemail service. By the way, it's only available for Windows.. [...] Read More


Yahoo! Bookmarks launched Web 2.0

Yesterday I talked about Pocket, comparing it to del.icio.us, and tried it out. Today there's a new competitor : Yahoo! Boorkmarks. I can't emphasize the usefulness of online bookmarking tools. I move around a lot, so I need as much as I can online. If you choose to use Yahoo! for your mail, documents, webpages and such, it seem logical to use Yahoo! Bookmarks for your bookmarks. That way, you only [...] Read More


Yahoo 360 shuts down Web 2.0

Sometimes I cannot help but smile. yahoo's 360 has always been a bit different - part blog, part tagging software and personal sharing "my first homepage" -like. I hated it from the beginning as it had too many options and yet too many limitations. Yahoo 360 disappears from our radar today - it has been shut down without anyone noticing, Yahoo claims that the company is transitioning 360 into a [...] Read More


AT&T and Yahoo Launch Co-Branded Version of Yahoo Messenger with Voice The VoIP Weblog

AT & T and Yahoo have come up with a co branded version of Yahoo Messenger with Voice for AT&T Yahoo High Speed Internet subscribers and Yahoo users in AT&T's traditional thirteen state local service area in America. The companies have also expanded their long term association with an agreement that AT&T companies globally would be Yahoo's preferred network termination provider for the PC based calling services in the Yahoo [...] Read More


New Custom Plug-Ins with Yahoo Messenger with Voice The VoIP Weblog

Today Yahoo! Messenger with Voice would be introducing customer plug in features and would allow developers to custom made applications. Plug-in applications would be there for Yahoo! 360, Amazon.com and eBay. One might also see integration with Flickr and other popular community sites as well as through developer created plug-ins. The new soundboard feature enables people to add short sound effects into their conversations along with birds chirping and audience [...] Read More

Virtual worlds are no longer hot news items. They've been replaced by Twitter and Facebook - in the news at least. But they haven't gone away.

Inc.com recently pointed out that prototyping products and having virtual meetings or trade fairs are popular applications for businesses in virtual worlds like Second Life.

It's a great place to do business, too. After all, we just pionted out a few days ago that the economy of Second Life grew by 65% last year. Virtual worlds are still a great place to build brand recognition and market products.

Let's hope that Second Life is an economic indicator for the real world.

VentureBeat says that the economy of Second Life (the leading virtual world in cyberspace) grew a whopping 65% in 2009. Compare that to the hottest economy in the real word, China, where economic growth at the moment is not quite 11 percent.

The total size of the Second Life economy grew 65 percent in 2009 to $567 million. By the company's own estimate, that amounts to about 25 percent of the entire U.S. virtual goods market.

Second LIfe has an impact on the real world because its money can be converted into US dollars (and other currencies). Second Lifers moved $55 million from the virtual world back into real money last year.

Can you strike it rich in Second Life? Acording to VentureBeat, the top 25 residents of Second Life together earned about $12 million last year. That's an average of about half a million each.

Mashable has a great piece at the moment if you've ever thought about adding captions to your YouTube videos.

Evidently there are two easy options at the moment. You can use Google's CaptionTube app or you can upload a transcript and have Google's speech recognition software put it into the video automatically. CaptionTube is especially useful if you want to translate your video into another language and create subtitle.

The Mashable article has a good step-by-step walk through on how to use CaptionTube.

For many geeks, the logical extension of blogging is vlogging - video weblogging. Personally, I don't agree. But then, I'm more of a word smith than a techno geek. And I'm not saying there's something wrong with having a vlog. I'm just not that in to videos.

MeFeedia recently published a report on the state of the Vlogosphere, according to TechCrunch - it's first such report since 2007.

The main take-away: video blogs have exploded since the last update, but most vloggers stick to the best known video hosting sites for distribution and promotion purposes.

No surprises there, but since MeFeedia's video search engine self-reportedly tracks over 30,000 video sources across the Web, the company slapped some interesting numbers on the most apparent trends.

The Vlogosphere has grown more than 500% since 2007 - from about 20,000 vlogs to 110,000 vlogs. And Spanish language vlogs are growing faster than English language vlogs.

You can read the report here.