Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

It seems like there are mixed feelings about this new feature. I like it though. Why? Because it allows a video viewer to avoid the need of visiting YouTube.com to search for videos, and it keeps that users for a longer session on the sites he is on. Just like Snap Shots!

Happy Thanksgiving, originally uploaded by twinsline7.

I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving filled with good food, family and friends!

BTW, in order to have a photo in this post, I did a quick search on both Flickr and Google’s Picasaweb for the term “Happy Thanksgiving”, and noticed how different the two services are: Flickr is all about creative & artistic photos of food, decor, nature, etc., while Picasa is all about family and friends. Something to keep in mind when trying to explain the impressive growth of Picasa in the past 12 months.

I was checking the new LinkedIn search feature earlier today and noticed that the results displayed once you start typing inside the people search box were covered by the 300×250 flash ad.

This issue exists on many web sites where Flash objects appear in the front, and cover dynamic HTML content. One example are pages that have embedded YouTube videos as well as Snap Shots that appear as a layer under the video player instead in front of it .

To solve this issue, you don’t need to be a Flash development guru. All you should do is make sure the Flash object (ad, embedded video player, etc.) has a transparent background. Depending on whether you are using the OBJECT or EMBED tag:

• Add the following parameter to the OBJECT tag: <param name="wmode" value="transparent">
• Add the following parameter to the EMBED tag: wmode="transparent"

Once you change your code, you should not see an issue similar to the one below.

Yahoo did more than just putting a custom logo for Halloween today. They also released a new homepage, currently visible probably to a small percentage of users. Lucky me…

The new home page is much cleaner and lighter that the previous one. The focus is put on search (note the yellow halo around the search bar), user’s personalized applications (mail, weather, stocks, movies, local events, etc.) and news.

A few changes to highlight:

1. Bye-bye red logo. The home page logo is also wearing purple.

2. Bye-bye white background. Say hello to the blue-gray gradient frame around the page’s content.

3. The “My Applications” box was moved to the left and increased. When you click on an application, a slider opens to the right to provide a large preview area.

4. A few boxes that existed on the old page are gone (Marketplace, Small Businesses, Today’s top searches). This helps reduce the noise and put focus on the key services – search, applications and news.

Here are couple of screen shots of the new page. More photos here.

and the old page with Halloween logo…

Do you know these house organizer services you hire to come to your house and organize stuff? Well, one of the best things that often happen when they organize your house & closets are the forgotten photos and other items they are able to find.  Things that you know are somewhere in the house but you have no clue where exactly.

Well, Xoopit is the same but for your Gmail (as long as you use Firefox). It is a great inbox search utility that makes it easy to find attachments (photos, videos) and browse through them inside Gmail.

You should give it a try.

I am trying out a new service called PodiPodi, a command line interface for a website inspired by Enso from Humanized. Not sure yet how valuable it is, and how frequent it will be used, but I like the concept & interaction.

To try it press Shift+Space to start. Then, type a command and watch the results. For list of commands, type “Help”

Like? Dislike? Leave your feedback in the comments section.

Can someone tell the folks at TheMarker.com that they should make their site compatible with Firefox 3. For some unknown reason, the site crashes the browser seconds after the home page starts loading.

This is really annoying, especially since beta versions and release candidates were avaliable for testing months ago.

P.S.

I did not link TheMarker simply because I don’t want your browser to crash as well…

iA, a strategic design agency based in Tokyo, released the web trend map for 2008. Around 300 of the most influential and successful web sites and services were pinned down to the greater Tokyo-area train map.

This year, the map (which is available as a 3D poster as well) not only uses Snap Shots to display previews of the home pages of the different sites, but it also lists Snap Shots among the successful and influential ones. Next to Snap Shots, on the “Technology Line” (green), you can find MyBlogLog, WordPress, Technorati, Reddit, Blogger, Feedburner, Drupal, Opera, Adobe, Flash, PDF, MySQL, IBM, Linux, Python, Sony and others.

This is a very nice acknowledgement to the Snap Shots service, and a great implementation using Snap Shots.

A few weeks ago I criticized the language inconsistency and other bugs that existed on the Apple Israel web site. It’s time to follow up and see whether things have improved:

• If you just look at the home page, then yes, the site feels more localized to Hebrew speakers. The top navigation bar uses more Hebrew labels than in the past. However, the experience across the site is still inconsistent. The home page (and many other pages on the site) serves as a simple launch pad since many of the links take the user to apple.com.

• The support section has improved and contains plenty of content in Hebrew including quick starts, PDF guides, FAQ and more.

• There are still annoying bugs that I don’t expect to find on an official Apple site, such as linked “Store coming soon” image  that leads nowhere, or problems with Safari for Windows (as I wrote in the previous post).

Last note – In the past few weeks, some of the top search keywords that led traffic to this blog were “apple Israel” and “apple.co.il”. I expect this to increase when iDigital starts selling the iPhone, MacBook Air and other products. I wonder when will Rami Prashove, the owner of apple.co.il, get an offer he won’t be able to refuse.

I have always known that cellular carriers will do everything they can to keep a subscriber. But when this business philosophy turns to be the way they run their web properties, things become ridiculous.

To opt out from Cellcom’s newsletter (Israel’s largest wireless carrier) you would have to wait up to 7 business days! Don’t they have something better to do with their call center staff then to manually go over opt out requests? Any email marketing management software, like Constant Contact, will do it automatically and most important, immediately.