Ajax Girl

The GeoNames project is a free global geographical database.

The goal of GeoNames is to aggregate free data from various sources and make is available as a database or via a range of web services. Users of GeoNames include Microsoft Popfly, Slide.com, LinkedIn and Tagzania.

The GeoNames gazetteer includes over 8.5 million toponyms for 6.5 million places with 2 million alternate names in up to 200 languages. The information for places covers coordinates, administrative divisions, postal codes, population, elevation, timezone amongst others. GeoNames aggregates data from national mapping agencies, national statistical offices, national postal services as well as the US Army.

GeoNames answers questions such as: where is a place? what are its coordinates? which region or province does the place belong to? what city or address is near a given GPS latitude/longitude? Users of GeoNames typically need the data or web services for travel, real estate, online communities, store locators, vehicle tracking, address verification or applications dealing somehow with geography or maps. In April 2007 GeoNames reported 15,000 downloads of the database and 30 million web service requests.

A wiki style edit interface allows users to correct data and add new place names.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/119954077/

The major Internet portals like Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Google, etc. do not place links on their home page that go anywhere except deeper into the properties. Advertising is generally the only exception.

So it surprised us when Yahoo contacted us earlier this week to say that they are testing outside links from their home page. The goal, they say, is to make Yahoo.com as relevant as possible to their. By linking to outside websites, their hope is that the relevance (perceived or actual) of the Yahoo portal will increase.

An article from CrunchGear was included in the test and was on the Yahoo home page for an hour or so yesterday. Other sites were linked to as well. The links were placed prominently at top center in the “featured” section.

Yahoo says that they will analyze the data and feedback from the test to determine whether or not they’ll make this a permanent policy. My request is that they keep testing, and feel free to use our properties at any time.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/119840572/

Last.fm is a seriously popular music service (we’ve dubbed it a viral machine). So users are wondering why they are yet to release a Facebook application - competitors like iLike and MOG are the first and fifth most popular applications, respectively.

The Last.fm forums are being lit up with user requests for integration. In early May, a staff member (flaneur) commented “we’ve started work on some cool ways to get your music taste from Last.fm on [Facebook]” in one of the early threads requesting integration. But a month later and a day after the official launch of Facebook Applications, nothing has been released.

Perhaps Last.fm sees Facebook as more of a competitor than a partner, or maybe they didn’t realize just how important the new Facebook Developer Platform would be, in making the decision to hold off on creating a Facebook application. It doesn’t really matter, though, because users are starting to take over. Jake Jarvis (who’s also the founder of Middio) released his own Last.fm Facebook application earlier today. One of the more popular Last.fm features is that it tracks music you listen to on your computer and displays it on your profile. Jarvis’ widget displays the last few songs you’ve listened to on Last.fm on your Facebook profile.

I added it to my profile and it works just fine. Read more about this on Jake Jarvis’ blog. And thanks to Daryn Haynes for pointing this out in a comment to our post on iLike.

If you are a Facebook user, get the (unofficial) Last.fm application here. I’m looking forward to seeing how many users it has by tomorrow, and Last.fm’s response.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/119803512/

Despite a frenzy of speculation earlier this month, Microsoft has not acquired Yahoo. However buried amongst numerous reports at the time was speculation that the two companies could form a stronger relationship as part of an “Anyone but Google” grouping.

Microsoft Popfly could demonstrate part of a new relationship between Yahoo and Microsoft.

The private alpha test of mashup and widget creator Popfly was announced May 18 and is pitched as a Yahoo Pipes competitor. It’s expected that these sorts of services focus strongly on the respective creators products. Popfly doesn’t include one pre-set “block” relating to any Google property, yet offers a range of Yahoo blocks including Yahoo News, Traffic, Answers and blocks for the Yahoo owned Flickr and Upcoming.

Some Yahoo blocks could be offered due to Microsoft’s lack of home grown coverage of some verticals, and yet Yahoo News is offered alongside MSN News Feeds, Flickr along with My Live Spaces Photos.

If Microsoft is aiming to provide a more inclusive product with Popfly, why are there no Google blocks? There is any number of Google related products that could improve the mashup experience on Popfly. It’s difficult to believe that exclusion of all Google products was anything other than intentional. Conversely the inclusion of Yahoo related blocks that compete with Microsoft offerings must have been decided upon by someone, and the purpose of this is questionable: why Yahoo, why now?

All of this is not to take away from Popfly, it looks like a great service, yet even from small things, one can find hidden meaning.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/119776240/