Has Yahoo Buzz beat Digg to the mainstream?

The search engine has provided some statistics of activity on its site from its first two weeks, and it shows that the company may have the upper hand on bringing social news to the mainstream.

Read more via Betanews

Yahoo Buzz launched

And I don't like it. Why? Because the homepage is full of politics and because it doesn't have that digg style that attracts you.

Want to read more about Yahoo Buzz? Here

Quickies: Yahoo! Filters Pirate Bay From Search Results

As of this weekend, Yahoo started to filter some of Pirate Bay’s pages. For some mysterious reason, several pages from the tracker disappeared from Yahoo’s index. Unintentionally or not, a search for “The Pirate Bay” doesn’t show a link to the homepage of the popular BitTorrent tracker.

Read more

Yahoo Buzz! New competitor for Digg or Google

According to valleywag.com Yahoo plans to launch a Digg competitor on 26th of February.

As they write here:

Buzz, built under the direction of VP Tapan Bhat, will begin with a limited number of publishers -- about 100 -- and will rank stories based on popular search results and user voting. By summer, Buzz will open to the entire Yahoo Publisher Network. In other words, if you let Yahoo sell ads on your site, it will allow your stories to appear on Buzz.

It is a little bit different from what Digg makes. When submiting a story to Digg you just have to wait for the visitors to come and visit the website. If you want this from Yahoo you will need to have Yahoo ads on your site (not good...). And another different thing? You can submit stories on Digg even though you don't own that website that has the story, while on Yahoo you will simply can not because of the ads.
Why a competitor for Google? People who will use this service will need to publish Yahoo ads instead of Adsense ones (from Google).

Quickies: Yahoo acquires Maven Networks

Yahoo acquires Maven Networks

Quickies: Yahoo and AOL

Yahoo! set to revive merger talks with AOL after rejecting hostile takeover

Quickies: Yahoo to reject Microsoft bid

According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo is going to reject Microsoft's takeover bid.

After a series of meetings over the past week, Yahoo's board determined that the $31 per share offer "massively undervalues" Yahoo, the person said

Great news to see that Yahoo is loving its users and will not give them for money.

Digsby: Manage Social Networks, Email and IM - 1000 invites

If you are the one who talks to friends, co-workers and others using several different IM services, check several email accounts or even use multiple Social networks such as MySpace or Facebook you would like to link them all together in one simple and clean software.


The software is called Digsby and it will help you organize your contacts from Yahoo messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ, AOL IM and Windows Live Messenger, e-mail, Facebook and MySpace into one single client.

So it allows you to talk to your contacts no matter which IM they use, you have an e-mail notifier and a pop-up to keep track of your Facebook or MySpace account.

Want to take Digsby for a spin? Even if it's in private beta, we managed to get 1000 invites for all our iMoka readers. Enough talk, it's time for action, if you want to try Digsby simply go to download and install Digsby and when prompted for an invitation code simply enter "imoka".

The installation goes very smooth and you can even create your Digsby account from there (which is very good). After the instalation you can simply add your IM, email and social network accounts to the client. Go to Tools > Preferences to add them.

This is the best way to link all of the above in one single software and I recommend it 100%.


System requirements:
Windows XP and Windows Vista. No version for Mac or Linux as they are currently under development.

Installation:

1. Download Digsby
2. Install it and when asked for an invitation code enter imoka
3. Add you accounts and you are ready to go!

Yahoo! goes Live and then goes Playback

Yahoo! recently launched Y! Live. What is this? If you have a webcam you can start streaming live video to a dedicated site or so it should be. Why am I saying this? Because this service went down as soon as it appeared online. If you go to their website you can read:

Maintenance
Yahoo! Live is an experimental release. We’ve experienced heavy traffic and are taking a breather to tune things up a bit.
Check back later – or learn more about Y! Live on our blog.

Users create a channel and then start broadcasting to people. People come, stop by and watch. Sound interesting (even if it is an experimental release). Yahoo! Live is almost the same with: Stickam, Ustream, Blogtv and Justin.tv.

Enjoy it when it will be back online... (in a few hours?)

// It's back online

Yahoo hosting goes unlimited

or maybe we should call it "unlimited". From now Yahoo will offer unlimited web hosting for its small business customers.

What do you get?

• unlimited disk space
• unlimited data transfer
• unlimited email storage
• 1,000 email accounts

I think it's more then you even want... price? $11.95/mo

Click here to view the hosting plan

Quickies

Google To Offer Music Downloads in China?
iPhone gets video ads from Ad Infuse
Yahoo Could Give European Search To Google

Google and Microsoft talking to each other

Recently Google posted his opinion on the Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo. Now Microsoft came with a press release. Now let's compare those two:

Microsoft:

The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising. The alternative scenarios only lead to less competition on the Internet.

Today, Google is the dominant search engine and advertising company on the Web. Google has amassed about 75 percent of paid search revenues worldwide and its share continues to grow. According to published reports, Google currently has more than 65 percent search query share in the U.S. and more than 85 percent in Europe. Microsoft and Yahoo! on the other hand have roughly 30 percent combined in the U.S. and approximately 10 percent combined in Europe.

Google:

So Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

The conclusion? Microsoft says that this will be the best for the internet, bringing more openness and innovation while Google thinks that this will ruin the internet (exactly what I think).

Google thinks Microsoft+Yahoo will ruin the internet

And this is what I also think...
In a public post on the Official Google Blog, David Drummond writes some sad lines of text:

So Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

Google is for sure a little bit (more) afraid of this Microsoft and Yahoo love. I think they don't have the reasons to be scared because Google is the best in terms of Searching technology because of their Pagerank.

People don't want Microsoft to buy Yahoo!

after viewing some pictures on Flickr, reading some comments and so on, I saw that a lot of people will be really sad if Yahoo will go to Microsoft. Images from people complaining on the Microsoft-Yahoo "wedding" appeared soon over the internet:

Image from: here


Image from: here


Image from: here

Mashable.com also made a list with some images here. It seems that if the deal will be accepted, a lot of Yahoo users will move to Google.

Quickies: Microsoft to buy Yahoo?

This could be for real because Microsoft made an offer of $45B to Yahoo to acquire all outstanding shares of Yahoo!

REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 1, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008.

"We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market," said Steve Ballmer.

Read about this here and here

Yahoo: Revenue $6.7 billion (2007), NASDAQ: YHOO
Microsoft: Revenue $51.12 billion (2007), NASDAQ: MSFT

Yahoo to embrace OpenID standard for validating users

Yahoo is opening up its quarter-billion-user database to cross-platform username validation across Web sites with Open ID.

Source: BetaNews / Read more

Yahoo joins Real Estate

It's currently for US only, the interface is really nice (you can view the house position on the map).
Yahoo Real estate also provides you with useful information about prices, price changes and so on.
It's really nice if you live in US and really want to buy a home.

Website: Yahoo real estate

Get your copy of Yahoo go!

Even if it's still in beta, Yahoo go! is a great tool that connects you and your Yahoo account so that you can use Flickr, Messenger, Mail, News, Sports and so on.

Yahoo go! v3.0 beta doesn't support all the phones v2.0 does but I think once out of Beta, it will!

To check if your phone supports this software just check: this list and if you decide you want it, just follow this link via your phone:

get.go.yahoo.com

Yahoo opens its mobile platform to 3rd party developers

Tonight Yahoo announced that it will open its platform to 3rd party developers. This means that everyone can make a piece of software and then run it on the mobile platform (called Yahoo go!)

Yahoo go! already works on more than 250 mobiles and comes preloaded on some mobile phones.
Read more: here


// it seems like Yahoo mobile website doesn't work (it says it's updating to go 3.0)

Every well known company to join mobiles?

Apple made iPhone, a revolutionary phone.
Google launched Android, a mobile phone platform.
Yahoo opens its platform to 3rd party developers.
Microsoft prepares windows mobile 7.

It seems like everybody is in the game!