Yahoo Stand with Google for OpenSocial Network

Yahoo said on Tuesday it is backing a program by rival Google to make software work fluidly across different social networks, and will create a joint foundation to promote the effort.

The normally fierce competitors are working together in the OpenSocial network, which Google formed in November to lure Web software developers and other social network sites away from the emerging market leader in social networks, Facebook Inc.

Many social networks -- including News Corp's MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn -- support OpenSocial, a set of technical specifications that lets software developers build applications such as games and photo shows that can run on any social network, expanding the audience for such software.

However, neither Facebook nor Microsoft Corp, which gave Facebook $240 million in backing last year, has signed up to support OpenSocial. Microsoft, which has mounted a $42 billion hostile takeover bid for Yahoo, also has an agreement to sell advertising on Facebook's site.

Source : Yahoo News

mobile apps contest for developers

Mobile Challenge for the developers of Applications

Google Code Challege

Cool apps that surprise and delight mobile users, built by developers like you, will be a huge part of the Android vision. To support you in your efforts, Google has launched the Android Developer Challenge, which will provide $10 million in awards -- no strings attached -- for great mobile apps built on the Android platform.

How It Works

The award money will be distributed equally between two Android Developer Challenges:

• Android Developer Challenge I: We will accept submissions from January 2 through March 3, 2008
• Android Developer Challenge II: This part will launch after the first handsets built on the platform become available in the second half of 2008

In the Android Developer Challenge I, the 50 most promising entries received by March 3 will each receive a $25,000 award to fund further development. Those selected will then be eligible for even greater recognition via ten $275,000 awards and ten $100,000 awards.

Build Your Favorite Mobile Application

We welcome all types of applications but are looking to reward innovative, useful apps that make use of Android's capabilities to deliver a better mobile experience. Here are some suggested areas of focus to get you started:

• Social networking
• Media consumption, management, editing, or sharing, e.g., photos
• Productivity and collaboration such as email, IM, calendar, etc.
• Gaming
• News and information
• Rethinking of traditional user interfaces
• Use of mash-up functionality
• Use of location-based services
• Humanitarian benefits
• Applications in service of global economic development
• Whatever you're excited about!

full info here

Microsoft new Office Live Workspace Free

Microsoft Joining the Band Wagon of Google Docs: Its online Too

Good news for Microsoft office file users: At last(?) Microsoft has decided to enter into the free online option with its MS Office on web suite.Announcing the entry of Office Live Workspace, a new Web-based feature of Microsoft Office into the arena, MS is now a challenge taker with the future on either side.
Using Office Live Workspace users may be able to store as many as 1000 documents online but DOES NOT ALLOW to create and/or edit the docs within a webpage.
The step taken by Microsoft is after careful evaluation and recognizing the threat posed by the fast expanding online environment specially in the light of Google Docs.
So Long Live Open Source !!

CMS concerns over SEO

What is CMS ?
CMS stands for content management system . A computer software program mostly used to create/delete/modify/manage files and folders on a hosted space.CMS makes it easy for a novice webmaster or website administrator to manage the overall site without much technological/programming knowledge expected.
There are a tons of open source and freeware based on PHP and MySQL Content Management Systems(CMS) available on the www.

Advantages of using a Content Management System (CMS)
- Easy to distinguish between content, structure and design.
- Layout definations
- Time saving for multiple changes across pages
- Using a Graphical User Interface(GUI), a WYSIWYG ( What You See Is What You Get) Editor, content creation and documentation can be made in no time. Importing files ( sound, video ,flash etc) is easy as compared with direct coding techniques.
- Easy updates possible as you can make changes to your website by using browsers like Internet Explorer (IE) or FireFox (FF)

SEO Friendly CMS :
The concerns regarding a Content Management System (CMS) to be search engine friendly are discussed below:
- CMS structure is generally not flexible unless you are good at tweaking the code.
- Excess code is generated per page giving the HTML extra load ( in term of scripts and definations etc)
- Most of the CMS dont conform to W3C ( World Wide Web Consortium) standards on web page layouts.

For SEO parameters to be looked while choosing a CMS for your needs include:
- Dynamic URL Optimization - Here changing the URLs to simplified ones help users as well as engines in case you are passing too much parameters for a single string/URL. Using Mod Rewrite can be of good help.
- Related Meta Tags generation as per the content and Unique title tags per page.
- CMS Templates with javascript codes can be replaced using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) as some search engines find it difficult to read a script.

Popular Open Source CMS are:
- Drupal.org
- Joomla.org
- typo3.com