Latest Posts from Download Squad

The last time Flickr tried this there was such a backlash that they supported both the old Flickr IDs and corporate overlord ones. But that was then, and this is now...
The Flickr News blog just announced that as of March 15th, the only access to your Flickr account will be via a Yahoo! ID. So, the last holdouts in denial of the acquisition will either have to quit the service or link to a Yahoo! ID. This official thread has been created to voice your concerns \ questions to the Flickr staff and community.

We're told that this change is in preparation for some large projects later this year (ohhh - anyone have any ideas??). We've seen this requirement already with the recent updates to Flickr Mobile and Yahoo! Go that only allow Yahoo! accounts.

The same post also mentions the addition of a couple of limits:

• Maximum number of Contacts will be 3000
• Maximum number of Tags per picture will be 75

These changes are pitched to improve system performance. Flickr has started an official thread for any comments about the limit changes.

After the recent acquisition from Yahoo!, I only just got around to checking out MyBlogLog (My profile shows me registering on 1/26/2007).

These days, most social services integrate with the Flickr API, so I thought nothing of it when I saw that I could set that up. However, according to a post on Mashable!, it looks like this is a shiny new feature (we love those here).

Further investigation finds a post on the MyBlogLog blog where the developers announce this new way of adding pictures to your profile.

The Mashable post gets into additional thoughts for Yahoo! property integration - Yahoo! IDs is a given, and del.icio.us makes sense also. I'd also like to add Yahoo! 360 - for those of us that use it, it'd be nice to incorporate the MyBlogLog tracking into the 'official' blogging service from 'Big Daddy'.

If you already use MyBlogLog, we'd love to see you in our Community.

I could have sworn that Yahoo! Messenger already did this, but according to this post from the Yahoo! Messenger blog, you can call any 800 (or other typical free - 877 / 866 / 888 / etc. call) and not use any minutes from your Yahoo! Voice account.

This announcement coincides with the upcoming Yahoo! promo for the movie "The Messengers", something to do with a 'click-to-call' (whatever that is) campaign they will be running. Hopefully, this isn't the start of getting ads played before you make a call.

In addition, the post mentions a new minor upgrade to v8.1.239. We're told that changes include voice quality improvements and minor fixes for it running in MS Vista (but why not just run the Vista version instead??)

The voice quality continues to be decent, certainly good enough that I've dropped long distance and international calling from my landline - preferring a combination of my cell & Y! IM to call around the world.

Go get it from the official download page.

If you're looking to move your family to a new abode, an important consideration is often the quality of the schools in the areas you are looking for.

To help with the decision, Yahoo! Real Estate has added a nationwide school search feature to it's service. The schools are displayed on the embedded Y! Map, so you get all the zoom \ pan \ images that you'd expect.

Each school is linked to more information such as Student \ Teacher Ratio and even Parent Reviews. The data it uses comes from a partnership with GreatSchools.net and gives you the ability to search on District \ Level or Grade. Also, a neighborhood map of the school is displayed with easy access to local amenities - Grocery stores \ Parks \ Gas Stations, etc.

Combine this with the Zillow data that's available from the same service, you have a powerful way to research your next home.

For all you corporate users that want to connect to the outside world, the Yahoo! Messenger blog just announced that Y! Messenger can now connect to users on MS Live Communications Server and IBM \ Lotus Sametime. This is in addition to the previously released support for MSN Messenger (now called Windows Live Messenger).

I'm not sure how this functionality can be found - I pulled the current version of Y! Messenger from the official website, and it doesn't yet have Sametime or LCS listed - maybe I'm just a little impatient...

[Update: I just booted my PC and the options appeared auto-magically...]

The Yahoo! Music Blog has a post that informs us of an update to the Yahoo! Music Jukebox, bringing it to v2.0.2

While there are no new features, there are several performance and stability fixes:

• Better management of memory
• Crossfade works for everyone
• Fatal Exceptions are (mostly) history
• Proper shutdown of the executable
• Improved CPU performance when starting
• and 80+ other bug fixes

The AutoUpdate isn't working yet - but if you want the new release you can download it from here.

From the Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day blog: Yahoo! Research continues working to merge several of it's social properties in interesting ways - this time with the upcoming release of Tagmaps. Tagmaps aim to integrate tags with Yahoo! Maps - with the tags overlaid on top of the map. As you Zoom/Pan the map, relevent tags get place on the display.

Yahoo! has created 3 demo apps:

• World Explorer - integrates Flickr Photos as well as tags to the map
• Night Explorer - similar to Worl Explorer, but the pictures are from nighttime
• Trip Explorer - instead of using Flickr Tags, this app pulls in from Y! Trip Planner

As well as these, you can also put the Flash component on your own page - pulling from your own data sources.

I'm a huge fan of tagging, and its great to see Yahoo! starting to pull all this together into some cool demos. Hopefully we'll see this rolled out at some time. For more information, here's the FAQ

Along with the release of the new Bookmarks service, Yahoo has also let out an update to its Toolbar for IE bringing it to Version 7.0.

From the Y! Search blog post, this version adds:

• Toolbar integration with the new Yahoo! Bookmarks
  
• Type-ahead bookmark suggestions from the toolbar search box
  
• The ability to create and use new buttons, even when you aren't signed in

It appears that the IE & Firefox teams are playing leapfrog - FF just got the Type-ahead feature.

The post doesn't note some of the constraints of this beta - from the Beta Download page:

• Don't install on IE7 Beta - the official release (from MS and Yahoo) works fine
• Don't install on Windows Vista
• Buttons from older versions not carried over (Note: The Import feature isn't ready yet)

Finally, Yahoo admits that it's venerable Bookmark service is in need of an update and is about to unveil a new beta version.

To compete with the other big guys (Google Bookmarks & Windows Live Favorites), this release will bring the following:

• Advanced search functionality
  
• Thumbnails for quickly recognizing sites
  
• Convenient drag-and-drop management
  
• Organize bookmarks with folders and tags
  
• Ability to save page content along with the URL
  
• Editing abilities when saving
  
• An end to the 1000 bookmark limit

For those of us that are regular users of MyWeb, this list will look awfully familiar - it reads like a decent enhancement of the 'social bookmarking for the masses' service that's been out for a while now.

However, the post from the team mentions this:

"Yahoo! Bookmarks will focus on personal saving, organization, and recovery while our comrades at del.icio.us will concentrate on meeting your social bookmarking and sharing needs. For users of MyWeb, your bookmarks are safe, and in a few months you'll be able to roll over to either Yahoo! Bookmarks or del.icio.us."

I'm not sure how I feel about this - I use both MyWeb and del.icio.us, and MyWeb is clearly the easier of the 2 (especially with the integration of Yahoo 360). That said, I am happy that they have thrown their support over the acquisition as it matures.

More details and screenshots can be found on Techcrunch. If you want to try it yourself, it's available here...

This morning, I opened up Firefox as usual and was greeted to a new button on my Yahoo! Toolbar: "Upgrade Now!"

Hitting the button takes you to the Yahoo! Toolbar page and the download starts automatically. Before installing, I checked the Add-Ons dialog (in Firefox 2.0 RC3) and didn't see it listed as a possible upgrade - I'm guessing that Yahoo! hasn't hooked this version into the Mozilla upgrade process yet (Note to Devs: please do this - so that you work like all the other add-ons).

This version (now v1.3.0.20060829) doesn't have the integration with Symantec like it is with the IE toolbar and no new buttons were shown on the 'Add \ Edit Buttons' option. However, the Search field now uses Suggest functionality that's been on the Y! Search page for a while, and there are links on the Y! button to some of the newer Yahoo! properties (Yahoo! Current TV, Yodel Anecdotal)

If anyone has any insight as to other changes in this new version, I'd love to know.

If you don't have the Upgrade Now button, you can download the latest version from the Y! Toolbar site.