Yahoo Overhauls Web Calendar

Yahoo begins beta testing of a major overhaul of its Web calendar on Wednesday, a redesign that brings new Web advertising and Web social-networking possibilities.

The new site brings a more polished Web 2.0 interface, with drag-and-drop abilities, colour-coded entries, Flickr-image backdrops, and a slick 'zoom' feature that expands a single day's schedule to a usefully large size when browsing in the monthly view. Also, like number-two rival Google Calendar, the new design moves beyond the narrow single-user calendar idea of the earlier design.

For example, people can subscribe to others' calendars, such as schedules for sports teams or college courses, and share calendars publicly or with others who've been invited, said Scott Dietzen, who took over Yahoo's mail and communications business in June.

And through a later upgrade, Yahoo will build in access to the company's Upcoming service to share and find events, he added. This sidebar will show popular local events and - through the 'vitality' information Yahoo users can share as part of the Yahoo Open Strategy - the events on the calendars of a person's top social contacts, Dietzen said.

Yahoo Mail is used by about 278 million people each month, but Yahoo Calendar is relatively unknown with eight million users, according to ComScore's August statistics. If the company is successful with its calendar push, the calendar will narrow that usage gap, making scheduling a more active and useful part of people's online lives.

Usage has been "relatively flat", Dietzen said, but added: "We think we're going to see some very nice growth... I think it's poised to go mainstream. It's the combination of mobile devices and collaborative authoring in terms of publish and subscribe."

Of course, Yahoo's goal is not just to be useful to people: the company is under financial pressure, and calendars provide - at least in theory - a better way to make money. Today's calendar shows ordinary banner advertisements, but the new design offers space on the lower left for advertising promotions. Clicking the link can add an event to the user's calendar, and the advertiser will be able to gauge more precisely how successful the ad campaign is.

"With sponsored events in the calendar, you can do very, very narrow targeting," Dietzen said. "We're trying to strive for ways that help Yahoo monetise, but that enhance the user experience as opposed to detract."

The new beta will be available to a gradually larger subset of subscribers in the US, UK, India, Taiwan and Brazil, though users can sign up at the Yahoo Calendar switch site. The company plans to have the beta version in use globally by the end of the year, but Dietzen wouldn't share when it expects to release the final version.

The new Yahoo Calendar is based on the calendar technology of Zimbra, the open-source email, contacts and calendar start-up Yahoo acquired in 2007. "This is the first wide-scale deployment of Zimbra technology for Yahoo consumer technology. It won't be the last," Dietzen said.

One benefit of the Zimbra technology is the ability to synchronise with calendars stored with Microsoft's Outlook software, though that won't come until a future version, he added. Also coming is iPhone synchronisation, he said.

Web Search Engine Ask.Com Launches Major Update to its Website

Web search engine Ask.com launches a major update on Monday.

The biggest change is that Ask is parsing more data from various Web sources and displaying that in its Web search results. If you ask Ask a question, the algorithms will try to give you an answer in the result pages, not just a link to a relevant website.

Ask.com president Scott Garrell confirmed that this is the premise that Ask was founded on in 1996 when it was Ask Jeeves, but back then the answers were hand-crafted. Today they're created by the engine.

The company is also mining the web for 'Q&A pairs', and displaying answers from any site where people ask questions and others answer them. The site will also display questions related to the one the user asks, as well as the answers to their question, to help them do further research on a topic.

The service is also displaying more structured data in its results, such as TV listings and events.

Garrell claims that Ask 11 is 30 percent faster than Ask 10, as well as more accurate in its results. It's also a bit more cleanly organized, but you'd have to put the old and new version side-by-side to see the difference.

Web Search-Ad Revenues Defy Economic Downturn

Despite an economic downturn, Web advertising — and search in particular — is managing to keep its market intact, according to reports on Tuesday by an industry trade group and Wall Street analyst.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, internet advertising revenues rose 15.2 percent, to $11.5bn during the first six months of the year, compared with the same period last year. And search advertising grabbed a larger piece of the share, accounting for 44 percent of the market — up three percentage points.

Search advertising generated nearly $5.1bn during the first half of the year, up 24 percent from a year ago. Display advertising, meanwhile, also grew at a double-digit pace of 19 percent to $3.8bn over the course of the first half of the year.

As for the third quarter and the market meltdown during the early days of the fourth quarter, two players in Web advertising say conditions are remaining stable, according to a Tuesday report by JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan.

Search-engine marketing (SEM) companies such as Didit and Reprise Media report that third-quarter search budgets were up, mainly due to a shift from more traditional marketing to search advertising.

Didit.com, which manages 100 accounts, with an annual advertising budget of $150m to $200m, and Reprise Media, which has 80 clients, with a minimum ad spend of $100,000, report that their respective customer bases increased their search advertising budgets by anywhere from three percent to seven percent in the third quarter, compared to the previous quarter.

And these advertising companies noted that one of the contributors was the emergence of new categories for search advertising, such as pharmaceuticals and entertainment.

Khan, in his research report, noted: "We feel comfortable with our US search-advertising revenue estimates. As we are seeing our thesis of increased performance-based Web ad spend play out, we are comfortable with our 2008 US search-advertising revenue growth estimate of 27 percent year over year. We also feel that our [third quarter] estimate for low-single-digit sequential US revenue growth at Google is achievable."

Latest Web Design & Technology News - Saturday October 18, 2008

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