Why is Yahoo bigger than Google in Japan?

Found this post on mashable.com about Yahoo being bigger than Google in Japan - when it comes to search. Why?

Stan Schroeder attributes this to things being different in Japan; for example the iPhone is struggling for market share there. Japan is way ahead of the rest in the world in technology, and it looks like that the iPhone is well behind in features compared to local phones. Japanese phones are built in with QR readers, fingerprint readers, watch TV, higher resolution cameras, conference call features and IC chips to charge for purchases, ex. transit tickets!

So why is Yahoo! bigger than Google there? I look at the Yahoo! and Google sites, and Google's simplistic approach is definitely more effective in my opinion. You visit google.com and you know what Google does - Search. On the other hand a visit to yahoo.com is overwhelming. This is true in the case of the Japanese version of both sites as well:
http://www.yahoo.co.jp/
http://www.google.co.jp/

So yes, things are different in Japan, but I am curious to know what is different that makes Yahoo! more popular than Google. Is this tied somehow to the local super-phones? and perhaps that is why on the Japanese Google site there are links to mail, youtube, news and maps at the top and under the search unlike the .com site where they are only present at the top.

Why Twitter sometimes collapses

I just noticed something odd in the twitter over capacity screenshot I took
the tweet birds are not flying in the same direction!

Ministry of Transportation Ontario Online Transaction - FAIL!

Although I have been in Canada since 2001, I started my drivers license graduated program in 2004 only - I should have done it earlier but that is not the point of this post.

The Ministry of Transportation in Ontario has an online transaction application to process your test booking - unfortunately this application seems to suffer from major problems. I recall this happened to me when I booked my G drive test. Say I was going North and hit a stop sign and was going to turn East, I did not wait for the car that was on the East side heading West to clear the intersection and apparently that was a "dangerous maneuver"

So the online drive test booking engine stalled on processing my booking request yesterday so I have no idea whether the transaction went through or not and now I have to wait until it shows up on my credit card online report.

Over the past decade we came to expect certain applications to work in a certain way - when we want to make a purchase online we expect the transaction to complete successfully or let you know what went wrong. Online transactions are supposed to be easy to use, increase throughput and be convenient by avoiding you to have to line up somewhere - but when it does not work this is a problem. I waited 70 minutes for the transaction and it still did not complete.

For online retailers, this failure results in lost business, there are many of them so you can easily switch to someone else and make the purchase there - unfortunately there is only one Ministry of Transportation but this does not mean that their online applications can be below average. MTO needs to look at people using their online apps to book tests or pay fines as customers as well. Yes you are going to pay anyway sooner or later since you have no other option, but money now is always better than money next month. If I was ordering pizza online and this happened odds are my pizza will be free.

Twitter Over capacity

wow..what are the odds, I was just trying to add a twitter feed to this blog and it was not pulling in any content.
What's worse is that there will be "too many tweets" about this as soon as things are back up.

I give a tweet!

I caught the twitter bug this week and decided to give twitter a chance. I did not even understand the whole idea behind it until I watched this great video that explains it all.

Basically its great for learning more about what your friends or in twitter-lingo people your following aka stalking are doing between e-mails, phone calls, chatting, blogging, going out when you actually have a chance to talk to them.

The main reason I started using it is at work we started using Yammer which is very much like twitter except it is limited to your company.

So follow me

Computer breakdowns, Google Reader, TimeSpace and goodbye 2008

Once again I find myself neglecting this blog, lets see if 2009 is a better year.
So my PC laptop crashed at home last week, and after many many attemps I managed to boot it into safe mode just long enough to drag all my stuff out onto another drive. I loaded all my photos, university stuff, master's project and papers, etc. on to my G4 powerbook last night and everything seemed like it was working fine. I "needed" to run my mac updates since I have not done so in a while, but really I should not have as something went coocoo after that update - maybe just a coincidence but I'm pretty sure the hard drive is pooched. So back to my PC laptop which I spent 2 hours this evening restoring and now it is in pretty good shape, much much faster than before which is one good thing that came out of this. But now I have this pretty g4 laptop that is pretty much useless until I figure out if I need a new hard drive or not, and whether I can grab the stuff inside or not. I do have a backup of it, but my only concern is I am not sure how recent my backup of the code I wrote for my masters is. Sure that was a while back (Jan 2008) but still I would like to keep the code I delivered...

Anyway enough boringness, for the first time I set up iGoogle and personalize my page. Very neat, added a lot of fancy little portlets, got my news, jokes, weather and shit all on one page. But then I decided to setup Google Reader and hook it to the blogs I like to keep up to date on. Now that Google Reader is a master piece - so simple yet I think it is probably one of the most useful product to come out of Google Labs. I love it! Thanks to Google Reader, I came across TimeSpace - a Google map based news aggregator with a time slider

Very cool. As you can see I have been occupied with the news from Gaza, what a sad way to end 2008. God help them and bless them. Anyway won't start my rant on that topic just yet...

Is this the coolest way to browse Flickr or what?

I Came across this Flex app (flash) a few weeks ago that searches tagged flickr images that match your choice of keywords. The app is called Tag Galaxy, try it out.

So once again I am MIA on this blog for several months now. Nevertheless I have been very busy the past few months working on some very interesting projects.

Google Earth Day 2008
What have you done for Earth Day this year? I was on a team that developed a website for others to make publish what they will do for Earth Day.

Martha Stewart Store Locator
A map based store locator for MarthaStewart.com allows users to search for stores that hold Martha Stewart products. Filter stores by city, zipcode, radius, product and retailer. Very neat!

Audiograff.com
A really cool Google Maps mashup that plots the location of music events - currently in the UK mainly, but will grow to world wide events at some point. The other neat component is that the database is loaded with new events from Ticketmaster every day! Got a band? what are you waiting for?

On another note, I bought a Nikon D40 recently and started reading about photography. I am really impressed with the picture quality of the D40, I barely have to do anything and the pictures come out ' redonculously' awesome! I will put up some of the best shots soon - maybe I can tag them and get them to show up on tag galaxy! All in all, I am very happy with that purchase.

This was a pretty generous update on Random Sh!t tonight for the very few readers left out there. I'll try to be more active in the future.

Come again