Yahoo has been on a layoff again, only this time it has affected more than just the people in the company. With the people fired, Yahoo will also have to downsize on its products including Delicious, MyBlogLog, Yahoo Buzz and Alta Vista.

There have been rumours of this downsizing for the last few days. However, slowly Yahoo has been confirming the rumours. The product list downsizing was also was discussed in an all hands meeting after the layoffs.

In a statement, Yahoo communicated

Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond.

We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate, it added

Yahoo has been acquiring a few products as part of mergers and acquisition. However, on some of the products it has not been able to work on or better it. Some of these products were added to the list that they are planning to remove support for. Though most of the products in the list were not surprising, Delicious was particularly disappointing for Yahoo users

By now we have seen amazingly huge providers of OpenID including AOL, BBC, Facebook, Google, IBM, MySpace, Orange, PayPal, VeriSign, LiveJournal, Yandex, Ustream ,Yahoo and the new entry is Flickr. Soon after Flickr announced the Facebook integration feature, the site has now announced that Google users will be able to register and login to Flickr using their existing accounts. Of course this is done via the wonderful OpenID application and will further more be extended to other OpenID providers as well.

Denise Leung of Flickr wrote -

Flickr is rolling out a new feature to make it easier than ever for new users to join our community. We’re introducing OpenID on Flickr, a service that makes it faster and easier to sign-up for new accounts by letting you use one identity across multiple websites. So starting today, you’ll be able to use a Google account to sign-up for a new Flickr account. We’re pleased to announce Google as our first partner, but stay tuned as we continue to add even more in the future.

For Yahoo users, signing up for Flickr will become lot more easier even if they don’t have Yahoo account. For Google account holder, signing up will require just few clicks and once registered you’ll be able to log in with just one click, only if you’re already logged into your Google account like how Google accounts usually works. If you buck up with other OpenID provider then kindly wait for some time, Flickr has promised to be expanding the support other OpenID soon.

It seems that Yahoo does not want to give up about it’s non-existence on the social media sphere and desperately wants an entry into the most happening and talked about word on the internet. After unsuccessfully trying and then shutting down Yahoo 360 and another service for the Indians only, it’s trying out on an new concept which is a Twitter + Facebook = Meme.

I recently got an invite and decided to give the new application a try. Yes, a of now, it’s by invite only.

Yahoo Meme is by invite only

Well, if you are a person who wants reads the conclusion first, then my view is it is definitely worth a try. Let’s come to the detailed analysis of Meme.

First and foremost is that anyone can follow anyone, you don’t need permissions and do not necessarily follow back, just like twitter. People can see your tweets or mem’s or whatever it will be called, but only if they view your profile. Unlike twitter or facebook, a meme home page does not list what everyone tweets or shares. It shows only your own mem’s (I’ve decided to call it mem). It has a dashboard (add wordpress to the above equation) which is the page, where you can mem your text, image, audio or video. Yes, you read that right, you can share text, audio, video and pictures – that’s facebook minus the audio.

Yahoo Meme allows 4 things to be shared

What is good or rather best is that it also allows something between a 140 character tweet and a 300 word long blog post. No, there is no restriction on the character length, you can write as much or as little as you want. For me this was the best thing as it allows people to open up again and not try to bump everything in just 140 characters and on the other hand avoid writing long blog articles too.

The other thing good is that from the first day itself it’s supporting 3 languages, English, Espanol and Portugese unlike twitter which, till date (I think it’s been 3 years in existence now), has support for only 2 languages, English and Japanese. Well, the three languages may not be of much use to you as of now but this definitely shows that they will be having multiple language support very soon, signs that they don’t want to target just the English speaking audience, eyeing to cater a much larger base.

Yahoo meme supports 3 languages

Yahoo meme has another cool feature, which is that it allows you to view popular mem’s, something like the trending topics on twitter, but not exactly that. Well, still not very clear what popular will always show, but it definitely had pics and the number of times they were mem’d when I clicked Popular. You can view the result of that here.
And yes, you can REPOST (retweet in twitter lingo) that mem from anyone else.

Last but not the least, there’s something for the marketers as well – Search. Still not extensive as it lists out only profiles containing the search keyword but if they are to survive I guess they will have to work out on it. Of course when they go live, yeah they are still in alpha, there will be hundreds of third party applications that will be developed around it but in order to see a different fate from it’s previous social media experiments, Yahoo must have an inbuilt search engine, at least a comprehensive one if not extensive.

With the kind of features it has as of now, a little better search and a slightly changed home page might definitely put it ahead of twitter, unless twitter adds something new to it’s current features.

Well that’s what my observations are, I may have missed something, do drop in to discuss things or tell me features which I may have missed and more importantly let me hear your take on whether it will overtake twitter or not ?

Flickr is being a popular online image uploading platform.What we all do start uploading our photos (like jpeg, jpg, gif, png etc.) on Flickr easily via the web or use uploading tools for Mac and Windows to make it easy to upload a batch of hi res photos all at once.It enabled Internet users to manage and share digital photos easily as long as there’s an Internet connection.You can send your photos into Flickr with a special upload by email address. When you upload photos by email, use the subject line to give your photo a title, and the body of the email to give it a description.Flickr is a revolution for photo sharing and management plus it has a huge community of photographers who provide great photos there for the world to see.

If your are a Flickr newbie, read How to get the most out of Flickr, Tips for Flickr Beginners and the Official FAQ.
Here are some very interesting tools like uploader,slider,spell check,icon generator etc and some variuos search engine of flickr which might be produce better result when you are searching for image on flickr.As flickr provides the best image suitable to your post or for other commercila or non commercial use.

FlickrFight

FlickrFight is a new Website which helps you to compare the Images. You select the keywords or tags to be contested. The one with the most images on site, wins the fight

Multicolr Search Lab

With the Multicolr Search Lab, you can browse through 10 million of Flickr’s most interesting Creative Commons images, and find ones that share the same colours. Choose up to 10 colours from our palette of 120 different shades.

Flickr Logo Makr

Flickr Logo Makr allows you to make flickr style logo.

Spell With Flickr

Spell with Flickr is a fun little program that invites users to type in whatever they want to, then matches each letter of that word with letter pictures straight from Flickr.

Color Hunter

Color Hunter is a place to find and make color palettes created from images.When you search for color palettes by tag, ColorHunter.com searches Flickr.com via Flickr’s API for images labeled with the tag you entered. The thumbnails of the Flickr images are used to create a color palette.

Flickr Graph

Flickr Graph is an application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com. It makes use of the classic attraction-repulsion algorithm for graphs.

Flickr Slideshow Generator

Flickr Slideshow Generator allows you to generate the HTML necessary to embed a custom Flickr Slideshow in your page or blog.

flickrSLiDR

flickrSLiDR allows you to easily embed the classic flickr slideshows on your website or blog. All you need to do is enter the flickr URL address of the user, photo set or group you would like to embed along with some options. You’ll receive the HTML embed code in return.

FlickrDownloadr

With Downloadr, you can search, browse and batch download multiple Flickr pictures based on image tag (s), Flickr username, Groups Pools, Flickr user sets or even Interesting Flickr pictures of any particular day.

Flickr Importr

Flickr Importr is a tool for Windows that allows you to upload images to Flickr and automatically add them to groups and sets. Additionally it can import tags from a variety of third party image applications.

Gnickr

Gnickr allows you to manage photos on your Flickr site as if they were local files on your Gnome desktop. It does this by creating a Flickr virtual filesystem.

CompFight

Compfight is a great new tool that uses Flickr’s API to search the database of photos and then feeds back the results as live clickable thumbnails.

Flickr Flipper

Flickr Flipper allows you to search for Flickr photos and also search for photos from specific Flickr users. It uses Papervision to display the photos one at a time and even allows you to download the photo to your computer.

Flickerstorm

Flickerstorm is a new way to search through Flickr photos. You can easily search through photos by entering a subject or topic. Flickrstorm will pull up relevant photo thumbnails through which you can scroll.

As we all know that “content is the king” but their are few other things that can boost the presentations of your blog pots. About 80-90% of internet mass is very fluctuating and scans the internet on the basis of keyword and stay for interesting images only.

Power of Images: If i described in more brief than have an example of comic books where we read the images together with the bubble texts. Have you ever read any comic book in unknown language? May be yes, I think you can go through the whole story of the comics without having the raw knowledge of that language, this is the power of images.

Using relevant and customized images in the blogpost always helps users to understand your points. Their are many ways to choose the images from the websites like flickr , google images and other. Note: You may also use the advance powers of the flickr images search.

Options to search creative and legal images out of the flickr search:

1.Creative Commons licensed Images

2.Search by content type have the options to have creative, innovative ,artistic images. Here you can also get the Screenshots and Screencasts for your blogposts.

3.SafeSearch options

4.Search Photos , Videos or both media types.

Apart from these manual ways their are several plugins to automatically including images in the wordpress editor. Few of the plugins are Flickr Post , WordPress Flickr Manager , WP-Flickr ,Photo of the Day – flickr widget ,Scriblio flickr Importer ,Get Flickr Thumbnails ,Simple Flickr Photos ,Flickr Feed Gallery and many more.

Note : Wait for my upcoming posts on designing customized images for the blog posts. Few pots like “Future Trends of Mobile Networking” have light customization over flickr images. You need to note that by giving proper reference of the image source, you are enhancing your own credibility in front of your users. Few other pots like 5 benefits of using Social bookmarking are the beautiful examples of designing fully customized images out of your own creativity. So be patience and soon i’ll cover up those easy posts of designing.

Once in a blue moon I happen to open my yahoo inbox and guess what i found? Yahoo 360, the place where you connect with the people who matter to you most, is shutting down operations.

This is what the mail said :

Dear Yahoo! 360° customer,

We will be officially closing Yahoo! 360° on July 13, 2009, to focus our efforts on making your new profile on Yahoo! the place where you connect with the people who matter to you most. As a result, you will need to move your 360° information to your new profile before this date. After July 12, 2009, your content on Yahoo! 360° will no longer be accessible. Here are some details to guide you through this transition…….

Yahoo360 Shutting Down

As a matter we shouldn’t be surprised to know this. The service, which like gmail, was always accompanied with the “beta” tag has finally decided to call off the service. Though there have been rumours about the service going off air since the past two years, no real decision was taken uptil last week when they quitely made that announcement. A service which even after so many years of existence could not hit the mark and could never prove what is was. Infact last week when inquired about the service by a friend, I couldn’t explain exactly what it is or rather was.

But I must admit that I was a bit surprised also. A giant as big as Yahoo!, launching a sort of social networking application and still being unsuccessful after so many years and that too in an era when social networking is at its peak. So many networking sites coming up and taking the stage in this crowd, Yahoo 360 could never make it big.

Well, all I can say is all the best to Yahoo, I just hope we are not nearing the end of the Yahoo era!

Gmail Labs seems to the most happening place as they are constantly adding new features into Gmail. Today Gmail labs has added another feature for converting emails into Google docs. If you ever wanted to have the email conversations as a document, this is the best feature to do it. Once you have enabled the feature in Gmail labs, you can start creating documents for any email.

Google recently introduced a new feature in Gmail that lets you easily convert an email conversation into a Word document without having to use copy-paste.
Simply click the “Create a Document” link next to any Gmail thread and the entire message gets uploaded as new document in Google Docs

If U don’t have Gmail,no problem!

The good news is that you can enjoy this email-to-doc facility even outside Gmail. Go to “Upload a File” page and grab that secret email address assigned to you by Google Docs. Now open any email message in Yahoo!, Outlook or some other mail program and forward that thread to your “secret” Google Docs email address. Your email message will become available as an editable Word Document in Google Docs within seconds.
This trick could be useful for Gmail users as well who access mail on mobile devices where it is not always possible to add the “create document” gadget from Gmail labs due to browser limitations.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Yes its quite true that Yahoo announced late on Monday that Jerry Yang, would step down from his role as soon as the board finds a replacement with a new CEO.Yahoo has hired executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles for evaluating best candidates for the top post.The most probable reasons for this big change is the shareholders his failure to agree to a deal with Microsoft.

Do you really know that Yahoo decided to step down Jerry Yang as Yahoo CEO?

What is the role of Jerry Yang as a CEO in Yahoo?

Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali in a research note says that

“Jerry’s resignation as CEO reflects failed promises he made while fighting off Microsoft’s offers, and the board’s displeasure with his go-it-alone strategy”