Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

11-04-2008

by Damien Mulley

Welcome to the steamy and soapy April edition of Rattleblog. Forget Corrie, forget Eastenders, Dallas and even Glenroe, the best soap is happening on the web and it stars Microsoft, Google, AOL, News Corp and in the very centre we have Yahoo.

Other minor stories in this episode will include the growing power and influence of Apple on the music and tech industry and how Google is now the king of being dumped.

So straight to the main storyline: previously on Rattleblog we reported all about the wooing of Yahoo by Microsoft and the back and forth between them. Over the past few weeks it started getting as boring and drawn out as an episode of Lost, this week however it feels like a new writer's taken over who's been hitting the redbull. Not only do we hear that Yahoo tells Microsoft it's warming to it but at the same time Yahoo has been making eyes with Google, according to John Furrier, and according to Techcrunch Yahoo has also been trying to get jiggy with AOL -- and all behind Microsoft's back. Gasp! But not to be outdone, Microsoft now seems to want to be involved in a love triangle with Yahoo and NewsCorp according to SiliconAlleyInsider Oh my. Now this is complicated!

While this has definitely been the main news on blogs around the world, there are some interesting other stories, or plotlines as we say in these parts. This week Google released App Engine, a platform that allows developers and companies to easily build web services on top of Google's very powerful and highly-distributed infrastructure. Rob Synnott predicts that with Google's move into hosting websites and e-mails for corporations it will allow the internet giant to resell these services to these companies with ease, since they're already built inside Google's systems.

While Google is on a high for App Engine, Facebook is still poaching high profile staff from the search giant. Om Malik reports that Facebook hired Sheryl Sandberg, Google's global VP of sales and operations and one of the biggest kahunas in Google.

And Valleywag reports that it doesn't end there. The humanity of it! The social networking site has also stolen away one of Google's top chefs. Seems like Facebook wants to be a foodie paradise too.

As Valleywag also reports though maybe this is a trick to fatten up the 'bookers as they seem to trounce Google every time they play them in frisbee. Yes, the world's brainiest and fitness obsessed company is getting whipped by the Facebookers on a regular basis in matches. Maybe this new top chef is merely a plant!

The dumping doth continue though as Techcrunch reports that the head of social media in Google has also defected and made their way to Facebook.

And lucky in search, not in love, Google also lost another VP, this time to EMI. After all of that though Google still has 12,000 other super geniuses it can have fun with.

How powerful is Apple now? The Salon Machinist blog reports that only retail giant Walmart sells more music than Steve Jobs and co, and Apple is closing in fast.

Staying with Apple, Engadget was trawling patent filings and saw that the company from Cupertino has patented a flip-phone version of the iPhone. Soon we might just have a range of iPhones and not just the same single design, which is the route Apple took with the iPod.

And while iPhones don't currently have Flash it looks like they will quite soon; someone blinked during negotiations between Adobe and Apple and Flash looks set to make its way onto the iPhone.

So with a big crib with the iPhone about to be taken care of, what about corporate e-mail support? This is on the way too according to Gigaom. It looks like the iPhone will get some of the same functionality as the BlackBerry. Our little cosmetic beauty is getting serious it seems.

And just when you thought we have enough social networks and everyone knows it, Wordpress has decided to try its hand at building blog-based social networks. Wordpress of course is the not terribly secure blogging software company, as Justin Mason recently pointed out on his own blog after the IIA's blog was hacked.