The Future is Yahoo the Platform

Via Mashable

September 18, 2008 – 4:47 pm PDT – by Rob Diana 4 Comments

During the Microhoo debacle, everyone was wondering who was going to buy Yahoo. While all eyes were on that, Yahoo has been quietly going about its business. Their business now seems to be wanting to become the platform that everyone develops for, and that initiative is called Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS).

In the past few months, we have seen the release of SearchMonkey, FireEagle and the BOSS API. On Monday we saw the addition of two preview technologies, Yahoo! Social APIs and Yahoo! Query Language (YQL). Obviously, Yahoo has not been giving us empty promises.

So, what have they given us so far?

• SearchMonkey – the structured search result data API
• FireEagle – the location aware API
• BOSS – the build your own search service API
• Social APIs – a suite of preview APIs for basic social networking, contact communications, user status and user activity.
• Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) – a preview release of a single endpoint service to query, filter and combine data across Yahoo and beyond.

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Why the Google-Yahoo Ad Deal Is Nothing to Fear

Via The New York Times

By RANDALL STROSS

 

Published: September 20, 2008

GOOGLE controls about 70 percent of the search advertising market. Doesn’t that give it a monopolist’s ability to set prices as high as it wishes?

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Paul O’Driscoll/Bloomberg News

Brad Smith of Microsoft said Yahoo’s gains would be at the cost of American businesses.

It does not. Google does not set the prices. Its advertisers do, bidding against one another for the amount they will pay when a user clicks on one of their ads. They do the same for ads on Yahoo and Microsoft search sites, too.

Auction pricing is so deeply embedded in this business that you can see why Google and Yahoo innocently thought that their advertising pact, which was announced in July and is to be put into effect next month, would sail through a regulatory review to which they voluntarily submitted.

The review continues.

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Why the Google-Yahoo Ad Deal Is Something to Fear

Via Tech Crunch

by Michael Arrington on September 21, 2008

Randall Stross at The New York Times goes to bat for the Google/Yahoo search marketing deal, saying there’s “nothing to fear” from the two companies linking their search products. I believe most of his analysis is wrong, and he also skips the publisher side of the market entirely. In short, I feel that he is exactly wrong in both his approach and his conclusions.

He begins with “GOOGLE controls about 70 percent of the search advertising market. Doesn’t that give it a monopolist’s ability to set prices as high as it wishes?”

Well no actually, a monopoly controls only the supply side of a transaction, so it can’t change whatever it wants. If prices go too high, users stop buying (this is known as demand elasticity). Being a monopoly just gives you the ability to charge much higher prices than you otherwise would be able to because you don’t have a competitor who can undercut you for less profit.

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Yahoo’s All New Home Page A Mix Of Old And New

Via Tech Crunch

by Michael Arrington on September 17, 2008

Yahoo will begin bucket testing a new version of its home page this evening with small percentage of users. The company’s last home page redesign was more than a year ago, and earlier this year Yahoo began integrating third party content onto the site via their new Buzz product.

Any changes to this page ripple broadly through the Internet – 314 million people visit the Yahoo home page world wide each month (Comscore, July 2008). 82 million visit it daily.

The new page combines what Yahoo calls “broadcasting” elements, which are the same news and resource links for everyone, with “narrowcasting,” which are highly customized home pages made popular by My Yahoo, iGoogle, Netvibes and others.

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Newspapers Worldwide (Minus U.S.) Oppose Google-Yahoo Deal

Via the New York Times

By Miguel Helft

In the early hours of Monday morning, the World Association of Newspapers posted a lengthy communique on its Web site calling the Google-Yahoo advertising partnership anti-competitive and urging regulators to block the deal. According to its Web site, the World Association of Newspapers represents 76 national newspaper associations and more than 18,000 publications in five continents. Its communique led to flurry of headlines that essentially said “Newspapers Around World Oppose Yahoo-Google Ad Deal.”

But hours later, the U.S.-based Newspaper Association of America, a member of the World Association of Newspapers, issued a communique of its own (they called it a press release). In it, John F. Sturm, president of the association said: “While NAA is a member of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), I would like to clarify that the NAA Board of Directors has taken no position on the proposed advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo.” The association represents more than 2000 newspapers in the United States and Canada. Its members account for 90 percent of the daily circulation of newspapers in the United States.

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Palin comes under fire for using Yahoo e-mail for state biz

Via ARS Technica

By Julian Sanchez | Published: September 16, 2008 – 10:35PM CT

John McCain has caught his share of flak for not knowing his way around e-mail. But as his running mate has been discovering over the past week, being a bit too clever with e-mail has its pitfalls as well. As Sarah Palin seeks to beat back charges that she improperly used her position as governor to urge the firing of her estranged brother-in-law, an Alaska state trooper, internal documents suggest that her staff may have hoped to channel sensitive correspondence through unofficial personal e-mail accounts to evade potential subpoenas.

“Troopergate,” as the iron laws of American political scandal nomenclature dictated the fracas would be dubbed, began as a dispute worthy of Judge Judy: Palin’s sister was embroiled in a nasty divorce and custody dispute with State Trooper Mike Wooten, and the newly elected governor made no secret of her displeasure that the ex-in-law was not yet an ex-lawman. The family tiff blossomed into a full-blown ethics investigation after Palin dismissed public safety commissioner Walt Monegan, who has claimed his refusal to fire Wooten led to his own termination.

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