Category “Web 2.0”

This is a follow-up to the article I wrote in March, detailing which browsers are used in each country where Kelkoo operates. I’m publishing the new stats for May (from May 1st to May 29th), as the situation has evolved since March: At the global level, we can observe an important migration of users from [...]

In a previous article, I explained how to better use Google Analytics to track browser usage on a site. Adjusting your browser strategy by looking at stats and trends is great, however when designing a new site, how to decide which browsers to target?  The only reference is the global stats of the browser market [...]

How many people in your company are reading blogs or articles that are related to your industry? Imagine if those people could easily share relevant articles with all other employees; and if those articles could easily be organized and classified… You could transform those individual initiatives into a powerful competitive intelligence tool. More than one [...]

Read on the Yahoo! Developer Network today: After careful consideration, we have decided to enter into a strategic partnership with PriceGrabber to power the Product Submit functionality of Yahoo! Shopping as of March 11, 2010. As a result of these changes, Yahoo! will no longer provide the Shopping Web Services API, including Shopping Results (the [...]

Of the importance of browser usage analysis It is common practice when designing a new site to decide which browsers to target: the product manager must define which browsers are used by the targeted audience, while the development team has to cope with the different behaviors of those browsers. The support of web standards has [...]

I’m using Google Chrome as my primary browser for a few months. Speed, simple, lean… Those are the words that come to my mind to explain why… Before Google, I was using Firefox… Slow, bloated, slow development cycle… Yes, that’s what I’m thinking about Firefox these days. A few years ago, I switched from Internet [...]

For the past days, my Google Reader has been flooded by news and analysis regarding the Yahoo! / Microsoft deal about search. Among all those articles, this excerpt from a ReadWriteWeb article summarizes pretty well what I think about this deal: At its core, this agreement means that Yahoo has given up on its search [...]

An interesting article on the eConsultancy blog: “six rousing user experience presentations”. The first one is about the “10 most common misconceptions about user experience design”, whose number 1 is, according to the author: User experience design is NOT user interface design A good example to illustrate this statement: Microsoft has recently released Silverlight3, the new [...]

Before the release of Internet Explorer 8, browsers could be enhanced through “fat” browser extensions to be downloaded and installed (i.e: eBay Browser Highlighter or StyleFeeder Personal Shopper): quite painful process to sometimes only test a new service… Then, we saw the rise of bookmarklets, small scripts added in the bookmark section of the browser [...]

Last September, I wrote “The rise of the awesome search bars” highlighting some recent innovations on search bars (either on browsers – like Firefox3 and Firefox Ubiquity ; or directly on web sites like Tripeedo). Those innovations provide easier access to data and services, including shopping services. In this part2, I’m presenting two other examples [...]

After months (should I say years?) of inactivity, there have been several signs of interest for the hProduct microformat proposal in the past 3 months. Posted by Hayes Davis on the Appozite blog in June’08: hProduct has the noble goal of describing a product itself outside the context of a classified-style listing of that product for [...]

I’ve just finished reading “Subject to change – creating great products and services for an uncertain world“, a book written by people at the design company Adaptive Path. Despite the facts the book can be considered as 160-pages long advertisement for Adaptive Path, the book is pretty inspiring for designers looking to produce WOW products. [...]

The recent months have seen the emergence of new concepts / prototypes / products related to search bars, either on web sites or directly embedded into browsers. The following examples, with various degrees of maturity, shows that innovation in this area will mean simpler access to data and services in the near future. Firefox 3 [...]

I borrowed the title of this post from a great article entitled “We need a Wikipedia for data” written by Bret Taylor (emphasis is mine): I have come to realize how hard it is for a everyday programmer to get access to even the most basic factual data. If you want to experiment with a [...]

Read on SearchEngineLand: Yahoo has launched Glue Pages Beta in Yahoo India. Glue Pages are specialized pages that contain an enhanced visual search result page, for select search queries. The search results that trigger the special “Glue Pages” run across searches in health, sports, entertainment, travel, technology, and finance categories. The Glue Pages combine classic [...]

AdaptiveBlue is a company focused on tools that leverage the benefits of the semantic web. I clearly believe the semantic web is the future of the web, even if the adoption rate is still low. I think microformats helped a lot people understands the benefits of the semantic web lately; but I regret the standardization [...]

This is the buzz of the day: a company named Evolution Robotics will launch a visual search technology for the iPhone in June: Gizmodo: Visual Search Engine Coming to iPhone in June Fred Cavazza (FR): Bientôt le ‘visual search engine’ sur iPhone Visual Mobile Search for Shopping! The idea is quite simple, yet difficult to [...]

Following the recent announcement for Search Monkey, Yahoo! has given more details regarding its strategy to open its Search platform: While there has been remarkable progress made toward understanding the semantics of web content, the benefits of a data web have not reached the mainstream consumer. Without a killer semantic web app for consumers, site [...]

Some sites have reported Google is currently testing a new clustered result page in their main Search: Google Categories Prototype, published April 16th. Google Categories, published April 18th. The published screen shots on those two sites suggest the clustering is “intelligent”, as the clusters can change depending of the query. From a shopping perspective, the [...]

Yahoo! has been in a lot of discussions in the last weeks. It started with the Peanut Butter Memo (quite negative press for Y!), the shutdown of Google Answers that led to a lot of positive feedbacks on Y! Answers, then the launch of Yahoo! TV that brought a lot of frustation to current users. [...]

Some articles that have been published lately suggest we may see some organisational changes at Yahoo! in the following weeks / months. The Wall Street Journal published yesterday an article named “Yahoo Memo: The Peanut Butter Manifesto“. This is mostly the publication of an internal mail from a Yahoo! SVP that calls for changes in [...]

Lately, I became interested in microformats and how they could help the shopping ecosystem. It came first from discussions with Seb, one of my friends at Yahoo!. Then I started digging the official microformats.org website. Microformats are an easy way to build a semantic web, by defining simple formats built upon HTML and XHTML languages. [...]

Buying YouTube is soooo material, get a higher ambition like Yahoo! and launch the Time Capsule project. In their own words: Do you Yahoo!? This is where you can share a piece of your world with the global online community, and be part of history in the making. This time capsule is the first-ever collection [...]

Signe des temps: depuis quelques mois, chaque moteur de shopping met en place un blog pour avoir une communication plus directe / humaine / simple / décalée… vers ses utilisateurs. Voici un panorama non exhaustif de cette tendance. Yahoo! Lancé en juin dernier, le blog de Yahoo! Shopping US présente des nouveaux produits (certains originaux, [...]

Retrevo est un vertical search orienté électronique grand public, dont la beta publique a été annoncée hier à DEMOfall. Ce nouveau service vous permet de trouver une mine d’information sur tout produit électronique. Les résultats sont groupés par thèmes: Les documents relatifs au produit lui-même (guide utilisateur…), Des informations sur le constructeur, Des liens vers [...]

Question étrange, n’est-ce pas? Vous trouverez des éléments de réponses sur ThisNext, nouveau site sorti il y a quelques jours. ThisNext est un YASSS (Yet Another Social Shopping Service); ses concepteurs sont partis de l’idée que les comparateurs de prix étaient matures, mais qu’il manquait des services pour découvrir les nouveaux produits. ThisNext propose donc [...]

MS a mis à jour le moteur de recherche intégré à Live, en intégrant notamment un nouveau moteur de recherche vidéo. Rien de bien intéressant de ce côté-là, le produit est encore très jeune. Plus intéressant, on trouve une nouvelle version du moteur de recherche d’images. Outre l’apparition d’un filtre sur la taille des images, [...]

Depuis quelques mois, les discussions vont bon train sur le développement du web office: le monopole de Microsoft sur les outils bureautiques serait menacé, à plus ou moins long terme, par les initiatives on-line. Le rachat de Writely par Google, l’annonce de Google Spreadsheet ou plus récemment la sortie de JotSpot 2.0 ont alimenté les [...]

Microsoft Live Labs vient de mettre en ligne une présentation de Photosynth, un nouvel outil pour gérer des ensembles de photos: Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space. Les deux vidéos de démonstration sont impressionnantes, et donnent envie [...]

Tout le monde s’est fait l’écho de la nouvelle homepage Yahoo! (US, FR, UK, DE, ES) – nom de code Spirit – et de ses accents Web 2.0. J’avais évoqué cette nouvelle homepage dans un post précédent, dans lequel, au vu des premiers screenshots, je me posais la question de l’originalité de ce redesign. Maintenant [...]

Le nombre de librairies AJAX disponibles est tout simplement incroyable. Difficile dès lors de faire un choix et de s’y tenir. J’ai récemment dû faire le choix d’une librairie AJAX dans le cadre de mon travail; j’ai fait le choix de OpenRico basé sur Prototype un peu par hasard (le buzz m’orientait soit vers OpenRico, [...]

Tout le monde a parlé de Google Finance dans les 2 dernières semaines… J’ai été très enthousiaste à la découverte de ce nouvel outil: enfin une nouveauté Google qui tient vraiment la route, et apporte des plus. Interface simple, complète, du AJAX / Flash vraiment utile pour une fois. Bref, belle réussite. De quoi faire [...]

Après Yahoo, voici que MSN.COM teste un relookage de printemps. Première remarque, ça ne marche pas sous Firefox. Même si on parle de beta, la moindre des choses est de tester la compatibilité multi-clients: question d’image. Ensuite, ce n’est pas très innovant. J’aurais bien vu un début d’intégration avec live.com (ça reste un mystère pour [...]

Yahoo! testerait une nouvelle homepage (via Digg). Deux captures circulent sur le net: celle ci-dessus qui garde le rouge du logo, une bleue qui ressemble trop à MSN. Fake ou pas? En tout cas, l’originalité n’est pas de mise. Je comprends qu’un Yahoo! ou un MSN ne veulent pas prendre trop de risques sur une [...]

Je viens de découvrir la nouvelle version de Windows Live Search, qui apporte quelques fonctionnalités originales: l’onglet “Feeds” pour rechercher les feeds RSS. L’intégration des feeds directement sur la page d’accueil Windows Live (via un lien “add feed to live.com” sur chaque résultat). L’intégration des recherches directement sur la page d’accueil Windows Live (via un [...]

Info-Lotus: A Peripheral Visualization for Email Notification – une étude de Microsoft Research Asia sur les notifications sur les emails que vous recevez. La petite pop-up en bas à droite de l’écran s’étoffe… Dans une future version d’Outlook? The Chaos of Joshua Davis – un article de Wired sur Joshua Davis, un artiste que j’adore. [...]

Yahoo! vient d’annoncer – via une interview de son directeur financier – qu’il capitulait face à Google: “We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google. It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.” [...]