Google has just added image archives from LIFE Magazine, the storied American photo journal, to its image search. Google Images has launched a special page for the collection, allowing you to browse photos by specific topic like Marilyn Monroe or Winter Olympics. You can also now append “source:life” to any Google Images search to see photos from the magazine.
Most of the photos actually didn’t appear in LIFE, but rather, were gathered from “dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints.” According to Google, there are roughly 10 million photos in total, about 2 million of which have been put online so far. Time Inc, which owns the rights to the LIFE Magazine content, also plans to launch Life.com next year.
For Google, the move marks yet another example of the company working to bring offline content to the Web, as they also recently started digitizing old newspapers to make historic stories like the first moon landing available online. While these projects might seem more nostalgic than they do valuable, as the volume of indexed content grows, they will ultimately translate into better search results.
---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
MySpace Magazine?
Mashable Named One of PC Magazine’s 100 Favorite Blogs
Time Magazine’s Simple Facebook App
Movable Life “Shrinks” Second Life for Browser Use
Second Life: Open-source Grid
Flickr Live Feeds Now Included in Yahoo Image Search
Second Life Adds Voice to Live Grid for All Users
After working flawlessly through the heavy tweeting of the elections, Twitter is apparently having some uptime issues today. The site is rendering a “Currently down for database maintenance” image, which, seems a bit suspect given “database maintenance” sounds like something you’d plan in advance.
Gone is the iconic Fail Whale, in is the new Fail Grasshopper and Ice Cream Cone. The page also says “we’ll be back in about an hour,” but alas, they don’t tell you when the message was originally posted. I sort of miss the whale. Leave your own ideas for fail animals and tell us “what you are doing” while Twitter is down in the comments.
---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
Introducing the Unofficial Facebook Fail Whale
Is Plurk the MySpace of Microblogging?
Revisiting the Twitter 2000 (video)
Twitter Adds Threaded Replies; Complicates Developers’ Lives
Twitter: Tool for Terror?
YouTube Epic Fails
Seven Ways to Get Your Mom on Twitter
Glam, the network of women’s (and now men’s too) content sites, has taken the hood off of its application platform, which debuted in private beta earlier this year. Essentially, it’s like an app store for publishers and advertisers – Glam bloggers can grab widgets for their sites, while marketers can buy ads in the widgets, or use them to distribute content.
At launch, many of the applications come from familiar names: Meebo, PollDaddy, Sphere, and ShareThis, just to name a few. App developers can offer their products under one of several monetization models according to Glam: “ad-enabled with required IAB-standard ad units, sponsored or advertorial widgets, paid for or subscription based applications and free no-ads utilities.”
To get the applications, publishers can browse the categorized app gallery on the Glam Apps site. Once they’ve been added to their sites, they can begin to earn a revenue share on them, with Glam handling the ad sales – as they currently do for traditional online ad campaigns. During the private beta, advertisers on the Glam Apps platform included T-Mobile, Levi’s, and V05.
If this sounds familiar, you’ve clearly been paying attention to the dozens of other platforms that have launched over the past year. Actually, Glam Apps seems most like one of the big widget platforms like Clearspring or Widgetbox, except it’s for-use by a single, highly-targeted content network, with an ad sales team focused on selling to that demographic. It’s a good idea, but perhaps a little late to the game – with growth in online advertising slowing, there has to be some concern about how many platforms and ad networks the market can support.
---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
Glam Launches Distributed Media Platform
Glam Reigns over iVillage as the No. 1 Network for Women
Glam Signs Google for Ad Brokerage and Search
Glam Media’s Acquisition of StyleMob Revealed
Glam Launches Wellness Vertical for More Targeted Ads
Glam Media Steals Executive Talent from MySpace
Glam’s New Ad Exchange Connects Marketers, Publishers, & Ad Networks
NewsJunk, Dave Winer’s slightly more than errant weekend project, has been shuttered. I wrote up NewsJunk here at Mashable shortly after it’s launch back in June. From his blog:
Now that the election was almost two weeks ago, we’re winding down newsjunk.com. It was an interesting experiment, but it didn’t achieve the biggest goal I had for it, not very many people used it. Not enough to justify continuing to do it.
He also mentioned that the tech.NewsJunk variant had ceased operation, mainly because his “heart wasn’t in it,” and he just doesn’t “care much these days about tech news.”
I felt there was a vacuum in the flow of political news, one site whose mission was to be a “briefing book” on a single topic for people who wanted to be more or less completely informed. I feel we accomplished that much for the election, and as one of the editors of the site (there were three others) — just reading all the news also had tremendous value for me. On this one topic, I was pretty close to fully informed, or as fully informed as you could be through news and blogging.
As I noted in that write-up, the launch was probably a bit stilted for a number of reasons relating to partisan politics. Chiefly, the project was architected and executed by Dave himself, and Dave has never made any secret of his partisanship. That combined with the fact that in the early first few days the site was making the rounds, all the articles were very liberally slanted may have turned off a lot of folks who were looking for an aggregator or news-at-a-glance, rather than yet another biased view of the news.
For that matter, while the bias situation certainly improved, the spartan design of the site never seemed to. The site seemed to bill itself as something more than an aggregator, but never rose to that occasion. Disscussion capabilities (powered by Disqus, at one point) were stripped from the site, and it wound up looking like a slightly less flashy version of the Drudge report.
All this begs the question, then: is there a market for a linkblog anymore? I recently launched a public-facing linkblog of my own, and recent news from Matt Drudge suggests that the activity is as popular now as it has ever been, with 30 million unique visitors on election day alone. For that matter, what is Boing-Boing (one of the most popular blogs on the Internet) but a very pretty linkblog?
I suspect that a linkblog has the potential to still do quite well, even in the face of tools like FriendFeed and Twitter rising in popularity. The key is representing it as such. Most of us, when we were pitched on NewsJunk, expected an alternative to Memeorandum, not Dave Winer’s linkblog. In fact, I imagine that something pitched as “Dave Winer’s Linkblog” would have been a lot more successful than NewsJunk ended up.
---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
NewsJunk: Fast-Breaking Political News (for Obama-maniacs)
Jangl Calls the Whole Thing Off; JaJah Reaps the Benefits
Yahoo! Mash Has Been Quashed
Muxtape to Stop Being a Mixtape
Old Media Deathrace: Newspapers Nose Ahead
Rumors of the Death of Jangl were Greatly Exaggerated
WhitePages to Acquire Snapvine, After Turning Down Jangl
The iPhone’s accelerometer technology has already lead to a number of very cool and very popular games. But tonight, SGN is taking it to a whole different level, allowing you to utilize the Nintendo Wii-like functionality to turn your iPhone (or iPod Touch) into a computer game controller that can be used on your desktop machine.
Called iFun, the new features are an extension of SGN’s existing gaming lineup (iBowl, iBaseball, iGolf, etc.). iGolf is the first game to get the iFun treatment, and while you’ll look utterly ridiculous playing it, it’s incredibly cool and shows where iPhone games could be headed.
To get started, you create an account on the new iFun website and download the application to your phone. Then, you login on both, take a golf swing with phone in-hand, and watch the ball fly on the computer screen. This is exactly how iGolf works on your phone, except now, it’s on your big screen monitor. It’s essentially like playing a real computer or console game, but using your iPhone or iPod touch as the controller.
The other game options are fairly rudimentary at the moment – like being able to change clubs and adjust your shot direction based on the wind – but the concept is very exciting, and one I imagine we’ll see applied to a lot of future iPhone games – especially those that want to charge money for playing them.
Check out the video demo below to see how it’s done:
Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo and its CEO since June 2007, is stepping down from the Chief Executive spot as soon as a yet-to-be-named successor is appointed. Yang will be staying with the company in the role of “Chief Yahoo” and maintaining a seat on the company’s board of directors.
In a statement released this evening, company Chairman Roy Bostock says: “Jerry and the Board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level. We are deeply grateful to Jerry for his many contributions as CEO over the past 18 months, and we are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo! as a key executive and member of the Board.”
This news shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone – since rejecting Microsoft’s offer to acquire the company for $31/share earlier this year, Yahoo has slipped all the way to a recent low of $10.32 amidst its own internal problems and the broader economic slowdown.
As for who might replace Yang, Kara Swisher, who first reported the news, speculates that former eBay CEO Meg Whitman or News Corp COO are likely candidates, among others.
---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
Icahn Wants Yang Fired, Microsoft Chuckles Evilly
Terry Semel Resigns as Yahoo CEO, Finally
Jerry Yang to Testify Over Yahoo’s Role in Chinese Human Rights Case
Yahoo Exec Apologizes to Congress
Breaking: Yahoo Announces Earnings, Updates on Progress
China’s Alibaba Wants a Voice in Microsoft-Yahoo Discussion
Could Yahoo “Keep Things In the Family” By Selling to Yahoo Japan?
If your Facebook application has vanished off the face of the earth (or at least from users’ news feeds) since the redesign, the social network has just launched a new program to help you get your swagger back. The Application Verification Program, announced earlier this year at the Facebook developer conference, is now live, allowing developers to submit their applications for review.
Applications meeting Facebook’s standards will be marked with a verification badge, and more importantly, “users will see more information from verified applications as we increase their allocations for communication channels such as requests and notifications, and increase visibility of their stories in News Feed.” Those are of course the same viral channels that helped many applications grow rapidly when the platform first launched, but also caused users to feel the platform was spammy as opportunistic developers bombarded them with requests.
So what does it take to get your application verified? Facebook has published 10 “Guiding Principles,” with the central themes being that apps should be “Meaningful,” “Trustworthy,” and “Well-Designed.” It also takes $375 – the application fee that Facebook is charging to developers seeking to get their apps verified. Facebook will begin granting apps the benefits of Verified status early next year.
Essentially, coupled with the current fbFund finalists, Facebook is resurrecting the platform, which has been largely hidden to passive users (folks who ignore the apps completely) since the social network rolled out its redesign. It’s all been very methodical – first, bury the applications under a special tab on user profiles, then, dole out funding to the best app developers, and finally, offer everyone else a way to get their apps back in the game. Ultimately, it might get Facebook where they want to be – a platform offering several hundred high quality apps, as opposed to tens of thousands of useless ones.
---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
Facebook Announces Great Apps Program and FBFund Winners
Australia to Apply Film Ratings on All Commercial Web Content
Facebook’s New Sugar Mama: Virgin Mobile
AdBrite Serves Ads For Facebook Apps
Is Scrabulous Officially Dead?
Age Verification For Downloads Coming To The UK
Last.fm Releases Upgraded Facebook App
Founded by two early PayPal employees, Mogees is looking to be a middleman between mobile application developers and the app stores being offered by Apple, Google, and BlackBerry. While it might seem like a middleman isn’t needed here, the idea is to facilitate payment options that the app stores are not yet offering – like free trials.
Is this enough of a value-add to lure developers to give up a few extra percentage points in transaction costs on app sales? Maybe. On the Web, free trials have proven to be an effective way to get paid subscribers (see Typepad for a great example).
Mogees also provides a lot of flexibility, allowing you to offer trials that are based either on a certain number of days or a specific level of usage. Once a trial expires, Mogees will then prompt the user to pay either by credit card or PayPal, from the device. Mogees also provides tracking and stats so you can measure how your various offers are performing.
Of course, the potential problem that Mogees could run into is the app stores offering their developers similar functionality. Already, some applications are offering both a free and paid version, like the PhotoArtist app we reviewed last week. That said, if Mogees is able to prove itself as a way to improve conversions of free users into paid users, it could be an attractive option for managing payments across all platforms, all under one roof.
For the moment, Mogees only has a payment SDK available for Android, but expects to launch SDKs for iPhone and BlackBerry soon. The company is waving the first $1 million in transaction fees for the first 1,000 developers who sign up, while standard fees will be 10% of an application’s cost plus a $0.30 flat fee.
The explosion of Flash content like widgets has created several complex problems, like how to index it in search engines, how to make it work on mobile, and how to track it. The latter is being addressed today at Adobe Max, where Google is announcing Analytics Tracking for Flash, which will let publishers track metrics for their flash applications from within Google’s popular stats package.
Aside from the unique file format, one of the major differences between tracking Flash and tracking webpages is that Flash can be embedded anywhere – meaning that analytics software needs to be able to measure interactions from not just a single location, but from within an application, regardless of where it’s placed.
To demonstrate how Google Analytics now does this, the company has teamed up with web-based Flash creation tool Sprout. Now, users who publish widgets and other Flash apps using Sprout can track metrics such as time spent, what links and objects users click within an app, and goal tracking – all from within the same Google Analytics account as their website.
Google and Sprout demonstrate how this works in the video below:
While Analytics for Flash is an interesting breakthrough in its own right, it also could be the dawn of a new era in marketing and how companies pay for advertising. As opposed to paying simply for clicks and for views, advertisers can now (in theory) pay for actual engagement, because it can be accurately measured.
Sprout is currently charging clients based on a “pay per publish model,” meaning the client pays each time someone actually does something with an app – like customize it (with Sprout’s “remix” feature) or republish it to a social networking profile. Sprout is marketing this new approach through a product they are calling SproutMixer.
Although most of the widget platforms like Clearspring and Gigya offer their own tracking solutions, Google Analytics adding its own support for Flash tracking is a big deal – it’s a solution that any Flash developer can implement into their applications – without the need for a middleman. As such, it could have significant implications on how online advertising is paid for, and how the widget companies evolve their business models.
---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
New Google Analytics Plagued with Problems
Google Analytics Announces New Features, Urchin Upgrade
Google Voluntarily Taking Your Analytics Data
Google Analytics Now Compares Different Data Points
This Post is Being Tracked by Google Analytics!
Google Analytics Gets a Beautiful New Interface
It’s Official…Google Buys MeasureMap
What’s the easiest and cheapest way to launch a web-based VoIP solution? It might just be Ribbit and British Telecom’s new VoIP platform, which enables developers to create and deploy a web based VoIP application.
The platform, which has been undergoing beta testing for a year (BT acquired Ribbit four months ago), will be presented at Adobe MAX, together with a range of applications in areas such as social networking, marketing and business productivity. We’ve discussed the benefits of a web-based VoIP platform before; now developers will be further encouraged to build for the platform through Ribbit’s $100k “Killer App” contest that will award prizes for the most innovative Ribbit applications across five categories.
BT claims that this “has never been done before;” an important part of their solution is openness to everyone, even other carriers. Under the motto “Bring Your Own Network,” Ribbit’s platform enables other carriers to use the platform, design new apps, or generate revenue from the applications that currently exist for the platform. Whether or not other carriers be willing to take this opportunity remains to be seen.
Check out Ribbit’s presentation of the platform below:
---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
Ribbit to Launch Flex Developer Tools for Voice & Contact Management
Where Does Ribbit Fit in the Web-Based VoIP Universe?
Jajah Telephony Lands Yahoo as First Client
Ribbit in Salesforce: Taking Telephony to the Next Level?
Jaxtr Raises $10M in Series A Round: Reaches 1 Million Users
Why BT Acquired Internet Telephony Platform Ribbit
Jajah Babel Offers English to Mandarin Translations Just in Time for Olympics