Yahoo has launched a new version of its Calendar service. To describe it briefly, it has been designed for those who like keeping things as simple as possible without having to sacrifice utility.

Looks-wise, it’s safe to say Yahoo’s engineers were inspired at least in part by Apple’s iCal program. The layouts for both are quite similar. Performance, meanwhile, is pretty much on par with most any other top-tier Web-based calendaring service. You’re able to make edits with very little time involved. Only when switching between ‘Day,’ ‘Week,’ and ‘Month’ views is where you’ll notice lag, if any. Otherwise, peppy it is.

All things considered, there isn’t much within the new Yahoo Calendar that hasn’t been achieved by its predecessor or its competitors. Functionally speaking, it’s very ordinary. You might prefer one service or another for the way it behaves in response to user input, or because it is integral to the experience provided by a particular brand.

If you like Yahoo Mail, you may tend towards its Calendar service. Or, if you enjoy Google’s Gmail client, its Calendar might be your preference. But if you’re curious as to the Yahoo Calendar Beta’s measurements next to Google Calendar, it’s really an either/or type of circumstance. Both are easy to use. Both are efficient with data presentation and management, and sport similar drag-and-drop functions. Just as users would expect, really. My time spent with Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail service is pretty much a non-factor, so I can’t compare the three so thoroughly as some readers may wish, but I’m confident in pegging this new Yahoo item as qualitatively very good. Among the best, I gather.

Of course, there are some differences to consider. For one, Google Calendar allows additions either through specific keyword arrangements (i.e., 2pm lunch), or through title entries followed by specific detail edits made within the application’s event manager. If you’ve learned the ways of Google Calendar, you might be quick with keywords, and the ability to cycle through various calendar views through simple touches of the ‘D’, ‘W’, ‘M’, and ‘A’ keys helps hasten things a bit. But if you have not been schooled in the art of such functions, or any others that reside within the Google’s framework, it’s no special creature.

Specify a date within Yahoo Calendar, on the other hand, and the application expands a 24-hour planner into view, where you can choose a time and enter whatever information is necessary. Furthermore, you can hover your cursor over the lower border of an event, and drag it to include whatever frame of day you like. You can’t do the same with the topmost border of an event, but you can drag the entire block upward.

Strangely, if you click an event to view it in detail, you’re shown the default 12:00 a.m. view. You’ll have to scroll down to see anything occurring later in the day. This is unfortunate, and needs fixing. Sooner rather than later. My advice to prospective users: position your cursor over the event in the default calendar view and you’ll be shown a small bubble in 1-2 seconds’ time with essential details. (Clicking on the blue link within that bubble will bring you to an edit page where you can view and add notes and other data.)

One aspect Yahoo is touting with this beta is a Flickr connection, which just so happens to be active by default. (You’ll notice the checkmark in the list of calendars to the left of the main window.) Of course, this is to tell users of its existence, but the execution of the connection is where I find fault. This is because photos are placed in somewhat random order, and do not blanket the page when the user is in Month view. Only a few images are displayed at any one time, and all are gathered from the Creative Commons class of photos within the Flickr database. And you cannot specify your own library of media to be shown. Not yet, anyhow. Suffice it to say that if you uncheck the Flickr option, it will remain off.

In the realm of tech support, Yahoo promises compliance with things like iCalendar and CalDAV, which is good, because the more accepted standards, the more empowered users are. And the company intends to introduce things like Upcoming integration and “other Yahoo properties,” as well as “auto-synch with Outlook and (the) iPhone.”

Interestingly enough, Yahoo, in debuting this release, mentions its placement among webmail and calendaring applications, but states that Yahoo Calendar alone, “sees only a mere 8 million users per month.” Which is downright paltry compared to Yahoo Mail’s 250 million or so users. Now, I doubt Yahoo will see this new beta increase its own reach within the market by a substantial amount, so I say take it for what it is: a decent step forward. Nothing less, nothing more.

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Throughout last year, Stan and Pete both reported the acquisition by Google of an in-game ad providercalled AdScape. AdScape’s assimilation was described by Pete at the time as a sign of Google’s changing mission statement from “organizing the world’s information” to “cramming as many ads into the world as possible.”

Rumors have been floating ever since that the company would be put into action any minute now. Word filters down to us today that the time is now. Google says that AdSense for Games is now available, and Web-based games are now invited to integrate text, image and video advertisements in “new ways” (more on that in a second)

They’ve been working, apparently, with some select game developers and publishers including Konami, Playfish, Zynga, Demand Media and Mochi Media so far, hitting many of the recognizable social and casual game networks we cover fairly regularly here at Mashable.

The real question is, though, what does this do that plain old vanilla AdSense won’t do already?

If you look at most online games, both casual and flash, most of the monetization is done through one the side bars, away from where most people are focusing their attention. Couple that with the fact that when you’re playing a game, the last thing you want to do is go check out that limited time offer blinking at you, and it’s no wonder that the low ad conversion rates on gaming sites rival only those from social network.

As you can see from the video above (be patient, the money shot is towards the end), with the new AdSense units, they look more or less the same, but they show up in game instead of off to the side.  Because the user is already acclimated to bells, whistles, lasers and other noisy what-not, the video ads are allowed to auto play.

This turns the gaming experience into something a little closer to television viewing. The ads are likely going to have lower conversion rates than standard AdSense units on a content site because of folks not wanting to leave the experience, but will probably function quite effectively as a sort of brand impression unit, similar to how standard TV works (of course with the added benefit of being clickable).

All in all, not a total bust, and given the scope of the beta partners and the reach of Google, this could very quickly become a major profit center for Google, and a game changer for monetizing online games.

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DiggTop is an Adobe Air desktop app that scrapes and displays the images and videos from the Digg stories that you choose to track. After installing DiggTop you customize which categories you want to follow for News, Videos and Images. You can then view a slideshow of the images related to the stories you’re reading.

As for videos, DiggTop does a similar thing. You can change which topics you want to follow for video and they will appear in the app’s player which does a good job handling video.

At any time, you can launch a browser session and go to any particular story on Digg by double-clicking it. This comes in handy whenever you want access to the Digg service. However, the app can provide most of the day to day features of Digg such as reading and digging stories.

I know there have been way too many useless Adobe Air apps unleashed to our desktops lately, but I think DiggTop is actually a rare useful one. If you want a quick glimpse at the hottest news items along with a visual slideshow of images and the ability to play videos instantly right next to the story then DiggTop is the app for you. It’s small and fast and gives Digg a new look and feel.

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Among the hundreds of companies and social platforms debuting at Web 2.0 Expo NY was Xignite, a new financial web service. Xignite’s platform lets financial sites show global delayed stock data in their applications and satisfies the growing demand for reliable stock quotes from emerging countries.

MP4 / Subscribe for Free

Xignite uses an on-demand model to serve clients like ING, Goodyear, and McDonald’s and provide market quotes, news, corporate data, industry information, analytics, tools and more. Until recently, much of the data that Xignite collects and organizes was otherwise scattered, raw or only available in bulk form. With their services, Xignite is leading the way for service-oriented business applications.

I had the opportunity to meet with Stephane Dubois, the CEO and Founder of Xignite, and discuss Xignite’s goals, special features and Splice, their new platform for creating web services mashups. (And, I don’t need to remind you how excited I get about mashups). Using the Splice visual designer, developers can create a mashup in just 60 seconds by dragging and dropping objects without ever having to write code.

A special thanks to Sony for letting me use their amazing TG1 HD camcorder, without which none of the Web 2.0 Expo videos would have been possible. You can watch the video via the embed below or download the MP4 directly.

How many times have you seen a YouTube video and just had to buy a product or a service related to the video? Ok, never. But still, if you want to spend your hard earned cash in these times of looming recession, now you can do it directly from YouTube.

Thousands of YouTube partner videos will now get click-to-buy links, which appear on the watch page beneath the video, right there with the other community features, like share, favorite, or flag. For starters, iTunes and Amazon.com links will be embedded on videos from media companies such as EMI Music - I cannot see it, because it apparently works only in the United States. Google says that they’ll slowly expand this program to international users, too.

Google promises that this is just the beginning of a broad e-commerce platform from which both users and partners will benefit. Partners who use YouTube’s content identification and management system can enable these links on user-generated content, if they use Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site. So, next time you create that viral video, kids, make sure that it features a lots of enticing products which your viewers might want to buy.

From the user perspective, maybe sometime in the future this turns out to be the key of making YouTube profitable, but currently it’s just a bunch of simple “buy me” links which are far from earth shattering.

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Facebook rolled out Microsoft Live Search today as an integrated part of its search. It gives the exact same results as you would get on Live.com, but in generic Facebook layout.

Sorry Facebook, that’s not really all that exciting. Especially for the innovators of the Internet, we know you can do better. So in that spirit, here are a few quick suggestions for Facebook to make its newly upgraded search features more interesting and a hell of a lot more useful:

1) Show your friends’ searches in News Feed

Come on, who doesn’t want to know who their girlfriend or boyfriend has been searching for? There would be hours of entertainment just watching your news feed fill up with searches. Find out who has been searching for you or announce to the world that you’ve been searching that one girl you work with ten times a day.

Maybe on second thought…

2) Live search cashback for Facebookers

What college kid doesn’t need a little more cash on the side for…uh, books? For those who don’t already know, Microsoft offers a cashback program for searching and shopping through Live.com. It only amounts to a few bucks here and there, but to a cash-strapped college student? That’s a case of Bud Light, baby!

So come on Facebook, help out the poor college student. Give them a financial reason to justify their 4-hour-a-day Facebook usage.

3) Add Live Image and Video search

Facebook Live search functionality is very basic. Search for a term, come up with some website results. But often times we are not just searching for Web sites, but images, videos, and other dynamic media. Live search, just like the other major search engines, has the functionality to search for images, videos, news, and more. Why not extend this to Facebook? Facebook, as one of the largest photo libraries in the world, is a natural place for image searching. I’m hoping that Facebook will eventually offer it as well, because when someone updates their status about their new car, I’d like to quickly search for a picture of it.

4) Some space-themed search backgrounds, anyone?

I’m sorry, but I’m simply a fan of space, space exploration, the stars, you name it. I’m attracted to the very cool layout that Live.com uses as its homepage theme. Hover around the page and you’ll find information on NASA projects and more.

Now, I’m not saying Facebook needs to go all out, but some Moon action would be great to look at while I search. It will give Facebook Search some… unique flavor.

5) Suggest searches based on my friends and related searches

Facebook’s core asset and one of its best value propositions is its social graph. Knowing what your friends are doing and who they are connected to are invaluable pieces of information. Using this information to help suggest searches, just as Live.com does with related searches, would help people discover new and relevant content based on their social circles. Plus you can insert suggested searches into the news feed.

Funny. That sort of sounds like Facebook Beacon…

6) Allow users to comment and vote on search results

I couldn’t finish this list off without tipping my hat to one of our commenters. Oliver suggests that Facebook should allow users to comment and vote on search results. It’s an interesting suggestion that I actually envision happening in the future.

The reason this is possible is because Facebook already allows you to do this for your news feed and for ads you see. You can vote ads down and you can comment on any news feed item. It’s a little more complicated of a proposition to do it for search, but it is done by sites such as scour.com. The extra benefit to Microsoft is that it will have a mountain of user-generated data on their preferences in search. This can only help to improve their results.

Regardless of whether or not Facebook takes my suggestions and uses them, you can expect a lot more features to come out of Facebook’s new integration with Live search. And you can expect people using Facebook even more than they already do.

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With the presidential election soon upon us, politics are at the forefront of many discussions. Given that “brand management” is such a hot topic, should these political discussions be avoided? Many people that use social media sites like FriendFeed are consultants in some form. Brand or reputation management is a major concern for these people. Is it possible that someone’s political views could affect the way people view their professional credibility?

I do not believe this will occur frequently, but there are a few interesting cases that we need to think about. About a month ago, I wrote a post on my personal blog regarding how Reem Abeidoh had received an email that questioned her abilities due to her political views.

Are you out of your mind. [Reem Abeidoh] is a left wing loon. No way am I attending this event. Her praise of Olbermann is enough to tell me she is way out in left field. How can I trust anyone’s expertise who is so misguided?

Ignoring the comment itself, the problem is that someone made an assumption about Reem’s professional capabilities due to her political beliefs. I am not sure if there are several other situations like this, but I was surprised when I read about it.

Another example of politics and technology is Jason Goldberg’s use of the socialmedian twitter account. Jason is the CEO of socialmedian, so technically he can use the account however he wants. He has previously used the account to voice his political opinions. This is where the combination of tech and politics gets interesting.

Will people not use socialmedian because of Jason’s political views? I have not seen any real mention of this as an issue, except for a blog post from Kyle Lacy who brings up some good questions:

Should personal politics be brought into the company communication medium? When you are trying to set an image of a company into a market is it best to keep neutral and just share information with your followers?

There has always been the conflict of personal opinion and official company viewpoint. Typically, bloggers will have a disclaimer stating that the views expressed in the blog are personal and in no way reflect the opinion of their employer. With Jason the problem changes because he is the employer.

In most cases, if the CEO has a blog it is considered to be “official opinion” of the company. Because of this predicament, these blogs tend to stick to the topic of the company and their industry. Highly volatile topics like politics and religion are typically avoided. Personally, I tend to ignore the political commentary when I am working with the person’s application. So, in the case of socialmedian, I really do not care about Jason’s political opinions when taken in the context of the application itself. I tend to separate the two, but I know a lot of people will not. Jason has stated that he uses politics as a conversation starter:

People crave thoughtful discussions and dialogues not just links on a page.  socialmedian’s external voice intentionally pushes and prods and has an authentic human voice and set of opinions behind it.

So do you think Jason Goldberg is harming the adoption of socialmedian by stating his political opinion on Twitter and FriendFeed? As I stated above, I do not care. More importantly, neither should you. There will be a lot of political commentary in the next few months. Jason’s views have no bearing on whether socialmedian is a useful application. Reem’s opinions give no indication on whether she has any expertise in social media.

Going back to the brand management perspective, is it a good idea to share your political opinion? Sites like FriendFeed encourage discussion and community. For an individual like Reem or myself, it makes a lot of sense for us to share our political views. Sharing opinions is what makes FriendFeed a community. Obviously, given the divisive nature of political discussions it probably makes sense to be careful with your words, but an individual opinion is likely reasonable.

For a website or company like socialmedian, I would take the conservative approach and not state any political opinions. My reasoning is that you do not want to hamper adoption of your application due to the political views of one person in the organization. So, am I telling Jason to stop with the political opinion? No, it is his site and Twitter account to do with as he pleases. For his sake, I hope it does not harm people’s opinion of socialmedian.

What do you think? Should people that control a brand be mixing tech and politics?

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When Widgetbox debuted its blog network last month at BlogWorldExpo, I described it as “Web rings 2.0.” Today, that vision has come a bit more full circle, as the company has announced a partnership with Yardbarker that will feature Widgetbox Sports Channel widgets being dropped on the more than 600 sports-related blogs in Yardbarker’s network. The deal is exclusive, meaning if you want to participate in the Widgetbox Sports Channel, you’ll also need to join Yardbarker.

The Widgetbox Blog Network is essentially groupings of blogs in different categories – like politics, fashion, and autos – who in turn place a widget on their sites. That widget then displays links to recent articles from all of the members of that category, in turn driving more traffic to the member sites.

In all, Widgetbox’s network includes 32 different categories, while the company claims its widgets are featured on more than 200,000 blogs that reach 68 million unique viewers each month.

Deals with networks like Yardbarker make a ton of sense for Widgetbox – they add hundreds of blogs and millions of new widget views all at once. Meanwhile, Yardbarker gets a new way to recruit bloggers and increase traffic between its sites. I’d expect Widgetbox to make similar deals in some of the other content verticals in its network.

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MySpace has partnered with Hewlett-Packard (HP) to bring print-on-demand capability to the popular social network. That’s right. Those embarrassing photos of you Xeroxing your rear end at the office Christmas party aren’t just on your receptionist’s MySpace albums anymore. They’ll be printable so that even those who haven’t found the Internet yet can see them.

In all seriousness, this means that MySpace, home to over 4 billion images already, may fast become a hub for people looking for an easy way to share and print photos and information online. MySpace is already working with a user base that remains one of the largest in the social networking space, which means that this partnership puts both MySpace and HP at the forefront of the online print on-demand market.

The partnership starts off with a simple “Click to Print” icon on MySpace blogs, comments, photos and mail. This will allow users a one click way to print from MySpace. This is where it might make some users nervous. In order for the technology to work, HP and MySpace will be “unlocking” user profile data to format for printing. What this means for users of MySpace with private profiles is that their friends will be able to print their profile photos once they are allowed to view their profile page. I’m not sure this will cause Facebook and Beacon level angst among users, but I’m thinking MySpace and HP might want to make this opt-in for those with private profiles before launch just in case.

In the meantime, this will be rolling out just in time for the holidays, scheduled for November of this year. A future phase of the roll out will include a way to print your MySpace photos on actual merchandise such as hats, mugs, and calendars. This will make gift giving easy for friends and family, but for now it is strictly print to paper. The MySpace and HP partnership will roll out the “Click to Print” feature in America, as well as parts of Australia, Canada and Western Europe.

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