Core Dump

This is huge, and I hadn't ignored it, just didn't get the time to blog it sooner. Alexa, the search company owned by Amazon has decided to open its API and make its index available for anyone to query. It is available as a set of web services through the Alexa Web Search Platform and integrated with Amazon Web Services. The first 10,000 requests per month are free. As John Battekke notes, their databases have about 5 billion documents in its index - about 100 terabytes of data. This will allow creation of all kinds of new vertical search engines.

Also covered on Techcrunch and Wired, and discussed on Slashdot.

Posted by rishabh at 01:49 PM | Permalink

Navigate through the streets of New York while viewing thousands of pictures, visiting hundreds of stores and reading the city’s famous history.

That's Virtual NYC Tour, a Google Maps mashup that was recently launched by a good friend of mine. The virtual trails (17 as of now) were painstakingly created by taking thousands of pictures on the streets of New York (a dangerous proposition as every New Yorker would know) and compiling information on hundreds of city stores and landmarks.

There's a lot coming where this came from, so stay tuned and take a virtual hike. Also covered on Google Maps Mania and Programmable Web.

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Ruby on Rails 1.0 has finally been released. From the article, Rails 1.0 is mostly about making all the work we've been doing solid. So no new features in this release. The website has a brand new look though.

Discussed here on Slashdot. More about RoR on their wiki.

Posted by rishabh at 10:39 AM | Permalink

Google announced on their blog, a new Google Homepage API for their personalized home pages that allows users to create custom widgets. Some of their own, and 3rd party widgets can be found in the gallery.

Yahoo had recently announced an upgraded widget engine built on Konfabulator that Yahoo had acquired earlier. Unlike Google's and Microsoft's live.com (covered earlier), Yahoo's widget engine runs on the desktop rather than in a browser .. exactly like Mac OS X dashboard widgets. Yahoo incidentally is also offering a Mac version of their widget engine.

Google's widgets discussed on Slashdot here, Yahoo's here.

UPDATE: Google widgets also covered on Techcrunch. 

Posted by rishabh at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

MSN Virtual Earth service was relaunched as Windows Live Local. New features include birds eye view which are arial photographs taken at an angle and make more sense in identifying landmarks.

Michael at Techcrunch has a review, as does Charlene at Forrester.

Posted by rishabh at 11:56 AM | Permalink

This is my favourite news from last week. Yahoo! has acquired the kick ass Del.icio.us.

The above logo borrowed from Pete Cashmore's Mashable. Also covered on Techcrunch.

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GTalkr, a web based flash powered IM client that communicates with Google Talk was launched yesterday. What's cool is that it can interface with other flash based services, the new beta Yahoo Maps (reviewed earlier) being one of them and also allow developers to create new extensions.

Whether AJAX is the new Flash, or AJAX competes with Flash, they're both increasingly turning up in cool apps. TechCrunch also discusses GTalkr.

Posted by rishabh at 06:35 PM | Permalink

I absolutely love exposé on my Mac. This firefox extension does something similar with all the tabs on your browser. Very cool, check it out.

They also have other cool firefox extensions on their website. 

Posted by rishabh at 05:54 PM | Permalink

Skype is finally catching up with other IMs (Yahoo, MSN and AOL) in terms of features with it's new version that includes video. Version 2.0 beta, reviewed here at Techworld is currenty only available for Windows however.

Mentioned at TechCrunch here and also discussed at Slashdot.

Posted by rishabh at 05:00 PM | Permalink