Yahoo Small Business is raising its domain renewal price from $12.95 per year to $34.95 per year effective July 1, 2008. The announcement was made through emails sent to account holders with domains set for renewal before the effective date.
This is Yahoo’s second price increase in under a year.
The $22.00 increase is a hard pill to swallow for web workers who have used Yahoo to register domain names for their web projects. Competing registrars are reacting. GoDaddy, for example, is offering a 30% discount on domain registration this week.
Have you had to settle for an email address that you just don’t like? Perhaps one incorporating your name or nickname with a string of random numbers at the end. If so, Yahoo! comes to your rescue as they announce the availability of two new domain choices for your email needs.
Actually it’s one new domain at @ymail.com, and the resurrection of an old classic with the renewed availability of @rocketmail.com addresses. For those unfamiliar, Rocketmail was a leader in the web based email market before being acquired by Yahoo in the late 90’s. An @rocketmail.com address might hold sentimental value for some users and it’s great to see them being released back to general availability.
In conjunction with this announcement, Yahoo! also released some interesting statistics from a survey they commissioned. It seems that having a personalized and meaningful email address is important to many folks.
“Of online adults who indicated that they are not currently using their first choice email address, over half (54%) agree that they want their email address to reflect who they are, and about half (48%) would be at least somewhat likely to change addresses should their preferred choice become available.”
If that sounds like you, head on over to ymail.com or rocketmail.com later today to register your new address. Accounts are free and give you all the same features and access to Yahoo! services that you would get with a yahoo.com address or ID.
Are you happy with your email address? Would you trade up if you could get the address you really wanted.
With Microsoft’s announcement this week that Outlook and Outlook Express will no longer support desktop access to Hotmail accounts raises some interesting questions on data portability.
After 30th June, Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail application will be the only means by which desktop and offline access to Hotmail accounts will be supported. This effectively means that a Hotmail user’s messages continue to be imprisoned within a closed ecosphere of services and applications. OK, smart people won’t be using Outlook, Outlook Express or Hotmail, but millions do and many have years of messages archived that they may wish to continue accessing outside a web-based interface.
However, there are some unofficial mechanisms that can not only continue to provide offline and desktop access, but also standards-based access into most email clients
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As covered before, working with calendars is another one of those business necessities that is crucial to running a business. Managing multiple calendars is tedious, but necessary to staying in sync with those in your work and personal life. For example, you may have calendars for each of your co-workers, your personal calendar, and perhaps even your family events calendar.
FuseCal, a new web application, allows you to combine multiple calendars and create one master calendar. Ideally, this means you can take any iCal calendar such as Outlook 2003/2007, Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal, and Yahoo! Calendar and add them into FuseCal, granting you new functionality.
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Yahoo has unveiled a new personalized mobile web content management utility called onePlace. The tool, which will be launched in the second quarter of 2008 as part of Yahoo Go 3.0 (a previously announced mobile application that enables easy access to existing mobile Yahoo services), will be able to track on mobile devices emails, news feeds, web sites, videos, search queries and more.
For web workers, onePlace could be a great tool for on-the-go research and tracking pertinent mobile content. For more, check out the complete post at GigaOm.
Use Skype IM within Pidgin
For those of us who use instant messaging to conduct our day-to-day business, we know the frustrations of having multiple friends spread throughout all the major IM platforms including Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, and Skype. Pidgin is a freeware multi-protocol IM product that allows access to all your contacts from Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, and many more systems. However, Skype however was always closed off.
Not any longer, thanks to the Skype API and the Skype API Plugin for Pidgin. Using this free plugin, you can instant message back and forth with your Skype contacts within Pidgin. At this point, it isn’t possible to do voice calling from Pidgin. However every Skype contact is brought into Pidgin for easy access. Because Pidgin is cross-platform, this functionality is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
In a move that is sure to strike fear in the heart of local news providers such as your newspaper or TV affiliate, Google News has added the ability to see local news based on your location.
Here’s how it works: simply go to Google News, look half way down the page you’ll see a text box allowing you to enter either a zip code or city/state. Do so and Google News will reload with your local city listed as one of the categories of news available for your reading pleasure. Aggregating local news stories from a variety of sources is nothing new for Google News, but this is the first time we have been able to see a specific city’s news items as a news category.
One obvious missing feature is the ability to search the local view. If you do enter a search term, you see the global search results. Additionally, at this point in time the local news feature only works in the United States and only in English.
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Editor’s Note: There’s no question that Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo is game-changing in the tech world. But how does it affect us? WWD writers Mike Gunderloy and Bob Walsh see different sides of the same coin, speculating on the potential impact on the individual web worker and independent developer.
Mike Gunderloy: So, you start it off: what’s the upside?
Bob Walsh: Well, I see three major benefits to web workers if this deal goes through: Google gets some real competition, Microsoft gets a big dose of Open Source culture and flickr and del.icio.us get some innovation. First off, as much as I like Google - both as a web user and a microISV - they’ve had it way too easy for way too long. Having a real competitor - not just Microsoft’s currently lame efforts - would bring some much needed focus to the company.
Mike: Competition for Google would be a good thing, I agree: the sheer domination of Google is starting to make people doubt their “don’t be evil” mantra. But can you combine two also-rans in the search market to make a serious competitor? And there’s more to competition than size: innovation is what we’ve been missing from #2 and #3 in this market. I see more search innovation in small companies than I do in either Microsoft or Yahoo.
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