I’m working on something that needs access to a catalog of songs and albums. I’m testing the Yahoo Music API, but I’m getting such horrible results. They are inconsistent. Simply asking for a different number of results per request causes the query to sometimes find nothing. I hate this, as they have a great catalog and the results that do return are good. The reliability is just awful, though, and that makes it hard to build anything around them.

Easily among the more misunderstood concepts about the Internet is the reliability and ability to measure how popular something is. There’s this notion that since one can count hits to one’s web servers, there must exist very accurate measurements of audience metrics. The reality is much more complicated. For example, the web servers are owned by the company running the web site, hardly an impartial bystander in the reporting of audience metrics. Technical issues also make it very difficult to identify humans from automated programs (like search engines). In the end, the methods used for ad rates tend to be a throwback to the way TV ratings are done. While these numbers are considered more reliable than web server stats, they’re not perfect for a number of reasons.

Take a recent example, as MySpace just passed longtime audience leader Yahoo in total pageviews in comScore’s metrics. The announcement has been met with a great deal of skepticism. Ultimately, people who want to live by these numbers, who shift their ad dollars based on who’s “most popular” or “the biggest” need to understand what they’re spending against, and understand the methodology of the measurement firm they choose to consider the final arbiter of these titles. At the end of the day, there really isn’t going to be a 100% accurate count.

Via John Battelle, I learned that Yahoo launched blog search tonight. About time. Not sure if I posted this here, but Google launched their blog search a while back (I may have just added it to the micro blog/links to the right).

Google announced their new personalized home page, similar to My Yahoo. I’m a big fan of Google’s simple, clean designs and their personalized home page follows in those footsteps. I like it. Yahoo, on the other hand, always seems cluttered to me. There’s just too much going on and a lot of it has to do with the infrastructure of the page. What I mean is that the boxes and the background and everything else just end up being too much. So, give the Google version a whirl. They also allow any RSS feed and have neat hookups to their email service among other things.

At the end of the day, del.icio.us isn’t about storing URLs, it’s about finding new things on the web that you wouldn’t have found otherwise, using common ways of thinking to identify peers that you want to share with. In other words, you might be interested in other things that someone else tags the same way. The point is to share and gather from a wide group of people also surfing. (this is a horrible explanation, but it’s the best I can do at 2:15 AM)

Well, Yahoo unveiled My Web 2.0, their social bookmarking service that combines some features that only a Yahoo or Google could pull together. It looks less useful to me than del.icio.us, but I think that’s because the target use is different than the del.icio.us case. I thought I would point it out, though, in case any of you end up liking it better than del.icio.us. It has APIs, too, so there’s something else to play around with.

(disclaimer: I just bought a tiny bit of Yahoo stock)

I know I’m not the first to say this, but I think Yahoo is moving forward with some cool new ideas that I think will end up making them money. They’re one of the few big companies that get the future of syndicated content (RSS or Atom, for example). Take their new Yahoo 360 service. Among all the usual features you’d expect from a thing like Orkut or Friendster, they have this little announcement:

Coming soon…

You’ll be able to share your RSS-enabled content (blogs, photos, etc.) in Yahoo! 360°.

What I think this means is that soon, I’ll be able to have my 360 page display posts from FatMixx, my photos from Flickr, and my bookmarks from del.icio.us. That’s pretty cool.

It’s even more cool when you think about what they’re doing with 360 and My Yahoo. They’re going to be able to bring together all of this different content that they don’t have to worry about creating directly. That’s a good plan for them, because they don’t have to worry about the tools to manage your photos (though they did buy Flickr), don’t necessarily have to force people to use their blogging software, and generally can just take advantage of the fact that people go there for a lot of other things. It’s nice being a portal.

The one thing I’m reading into the presentation of 360 is that perhaps they’ll have specialized display elements for different types of data. It’s all RSS, but an RSS feed that’s just photos is different from an RSS feed with comics strips even though both contain images. It would be nice if they could provide little widgets that focused on a particular set of tasks. Little details, like sorting or persistence behavior would need to be different so it might not be that complicated to build. That would be a nice touch.