The popular social bookmarking service Del.icio.us launched a complete redesign of its service today. Ever since it was bought by Yahoo in 2005, the company added very few new features and the redesign had been rumored to be in the works for almost a year now. The new design and features are mostly focused on enhancing the speed of the service and improving its search capabilities. Del.icio.us can also now be reached at delicious.com and will start using this as its standard URL.

New Features

The new features include selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks. Delicious also says that it has made strides in improving its speed and making the site more responsive. Based on our short tests here, we would definitely have to agree with that.

Delicious has also worked an enhancing its search. Users can now search within their own tags, another user’s bookmarks, and, maybe most interestingly, within their own social network on Delicious.

In our short tests of the new design so far, we have come away quite impressed. The new interface, which highlights the tags a lot more, feels a lot cleaner and snappier. It’s also now a lot easier to edit items you have already bookmarked.

Delicious now also puts a lot more emphasis on the social aspects of its service. We especially noticed that it now prompts its users to fill out their profile information more persistently. Before, few users ever bothered to do so. While before, the focus was on subscriptions and ‘your network,’ the new interface emphasizes more of ‘friending’ paradigm.

No Recommendations Yet

One area where Delicious can still improve is in giving its users recommendation based on their bookmarking behavior. Currently, Delicious neither recommends potentially interesting links, nor fellow users who bookmark similar items.

Easier, Prettier, Faster

Overall, while some of its competitors soared past Delicious in the last few months in terms of features, this update puts Delicious at the top of the pack again. We have come away highly impressed with the new interface and while all the new and enhanced features are definitely a boon to the service, the real advantage of this new design is that it makes using a lot of the old features a lot easier, especially for novice users.

comScore found that over 28 million people in India ages 15 and up accessed the Internet from home and work in May 2008, a 27% increase over the previous year. What is most striking about that figure is that Internet users in India currently account for only 3% of the population, which leaves a lot of room for growth.

The average Internet user in India went online 25 times during the month for 28 minutes per visit.

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft sites—in that order—led the way as the most popular online destinations for users in India.

The leading local site was Rediff.com, followed by the government site NIC.

Comscore announced the recent Search Engine Market Share report.  Google domination is obvious. Yahoo raise its market share by 0.3% (in comparison with the previous month) but still second and Microsoft Sites are still below 10%. 

comScore Core Search Report* June 2008 vs. May 2008 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
Core Search Entity	Share of Searches (%)
	May-08	Jun-08	Point Change Jun-08 vs. May-08
Total Core Search	100.0%	100.0%	0.0
Google Sites	61.8%	61.5%	-0.3
Yahoo! Sites	20.6%	20.9%	0.3
Microsoft Sites	8.5%	9.2%	0.7
Ask Network	4.5%	4.3%	-0.2
AOL LLC	4.5%	4.1%	-0.4

 

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

 

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer on Thursday defended Microsoft Corp’s need to make heavy investments in its Internet businesses but said the company was “done,” for now, with pursuing Yahoo Inc . “There’s nothing under discussion between the two of us,” Ballmer told investors of how six months of various talks had reached an impasse earlier in July.

“We had a set of principles, we talked about them, it didn’t work out,” he said. “Fine, we’re done. We can move on.”

The message for Microsoft’s annual meeting with Wall Street analysts, an all-day affair at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, was that it had a post-Yahoo plan to turn around its online services division and a strategy to take advantage of future opportunities, even as its Internet chief departs.

“There is this huge, huge, huge new opportunity around the Internet and online and we have to embrace that opportunity and invest in that opportunity,” Ballmer said.

Shares of Microsoft have fallen 8 percent over the last week since the company forecast an outlook below Wall Street estimates and revealed an additional $500 million investment into its online unit, even as it chalked up further losses.

Charles Di Bona, a software research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said Ballmer’s comments did not give enough details about how that additional investment will be spent and how the company arrived at that decision.

“It’s spending $500 million dollars and then it says we’ll tell you later how we’ll spend it,” said Di Bona, who has an “outperform” rating on Microsoft. “The market’s concern is not about how it is running its core business. It’s about decisions about larger chunks of money that people can’t track.”

Ballmer said Microsoft is willing to endure online division operating losses that amount to between 5 percent to 10 percent of the company’s total operating income, which reached $22.5 billion in fiscal year 2008, until the search and advertising business reaches “scale.

MySpace will announce support for the OpenID single sign-on framework sometime this week. This will be the second largest implementation ever and will bring the total number of OpenID-enabled accounts to over half a billion. MySpace’s 200 million user IDs join Yahoo’s 250 million or so accounts, plus accounts from a number of other large providers.

Like most large company integrations, MySpace is at first becoming an OpenID issuer only, and may integrate as a relying party down the road. We’ve argued that becoming an issuer is essentially a land grab for user identities. The integration work on accepting OpenIDs from others is harder, and the payoff is less.

MySpace may also be writing code to extend the OpenID spec and allow easy integration of their Data Availability product to sites that accept MySpace OpenIDs.

Source:Techcrunch.com

Across the globe Google remains the dominant search engine. In two countries, the U.K. and Australia, Google’s market share is huge at almost 90%, found Hitwise. In the U.K. the search engine has increased market share by 10% year on year. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Google’s market share showed a less dramatic rise from June 2007’s 64% creeping up to 69% this year. Other big search engines lost overall market share. Yahoo dropped to 4% from 7.7% a year ago and MSN dropped from 5.7% to 3.7% in the same period. The remaining 42 search engines cited could only muster up a 1.5% market share between them.

Yahoo keyword prices may rise by around 22% as a result of the new deal. This assumes a profit maximization strategy is implemented. SearchIgnite president, Roger Barnette, said that a rise in overall search advertising costs would be experienced by most marketers in the wake of a Google/Yahoo sponsored search partnership, reports Mediaweek.

“The deal is clearly financially beneficial for both Yahoo and Google; however, advertisers need to be aware of the potentially significant impact to their search marketing efforts,” said Barnette. Barnette referenced a recently released study by SearchIgnite into the pricing impact of the proposed Google/Yahoo sponsored search deal.

Marketers will need to “adjust their search strategies accordingly”, advised Barnette.

Online video continues to see an increase in viewership and the amount of time viewers are staying on-site to watch and download videos. According to a new report from comScore, more than 12 billion videos were viewed during the month of May.This is an increase of 1 billion viewed videos over the April reporting period.

The report finds that 74% of the total online population in the US watched a video during the reporting period and that more than 4.1 billion videos were viewed through Google sites, including YouTube, alone. On average, videos lasted 2.7 minutes.

Both MySpace and Fox Interactive saw increases over April. MySpace users viewed more than 700 million videos in May. Meanwhile, Fox Interactive saw their market share increase to reach 6.4%, making them second only to Google Sites. Fox Interactive gained 1.3 share points on the leader. Google sites are firmly in the lead for online video with a 34% market share. Yahoo Sites, meanwhile, are in third place with 2.9% market share.

On average, viewers watched 85 videos each. 83 million unique users logged on to Google Sites while 60.7 million logged on to Fox Interactive sites. Yahoo Sites (40 million uniques), Microsoft Sites (29 million unique) and Time Warner - AOL (24.6 million unique users) rounded out the top five.

Microsoft Live Search has been steadily in the third or fourth place for market share, behind Yahoo and Google, for years. The addition of Powerset’s natural search languages could enhance their profile for searchers because natural search brings additional queries to the table. Last year, Powerset signed an exclusive agreement with Xerox which gave them the ability to utilize their natural language technology; this increased their platform’s power.

Natural search engines return search queries based on the language used in a query. Keyword search is still the top dog in the industry but there are some who say natural language search is actually a better platform because the results are contextually relevant to the query placed. In addition to returning queries based on how often a keyword appears in a piece of content, natural language search returns queries based on meaning. Powerset’s platform also allows users to scan and surf results as their tools from the original query follow users’ progress across the web.

In-game advertising is a fast growing advertising category thanks to the openness of gamers to receive ads while playing games. Studies have shown that gamers feels ads shown during games are preferable to paying for game play; gamers have also indicated that ads in games makes the games feel more realistic. Yahoo Games is currently the most visited online gaming site, ahead of EA Online and Disney Games.

The partnerships will allow online gamers to download the full versions of games from publishers like Big Fish Games, Gogii Games and PopCap. The games will be ad supported.

Ads can be pre, mid and post-roll or CPM based.

DoubleFusion and NeoEdge will serve and track the advertisements; the ads can be purchased directly from Yahoo Games, Double Fusion or NeoEdge.

“This way [advertisers] are free to work with more than one ad serving technology,” said Kyle Laughlin. “If they also want search or display across properties in Yahoo. . .we can facilitate that, too.”