Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

13-05-2008

by Damien Mulley

This month's Rattleblog talks about Yahoo being a runaway bride and changing its ways to become a better company, even more hype about the iPhone and why advertising is now the revenue model for most tech start-ups.

"I never loved you anyway"

The Corrs's totally-pop pop song was definitely playing last week when Steve Ballmer sent a public disengagement letter to Yahoo. The gist of the letter was "It could have been magic but it's turned tragic" as Steve's open letter pointed out how Microsoft tried its best to acquire Yahoo but Yahoo's poison pill of flirting with Google was enough for Microsoft to walk away. Most people were shocked that Microsoft was giving up after getting so close and thought it was another push and pull move from the software giant. However, shortly afterwards TechCrunch showed how the alternative board Microsoft had lined up for a potential hostile takeover were also told they wouldn't be needed. For now the MicroHoo deal is well and truly off.

With that, the heat has been turned up for the Yahoo board. Om Malik, like many more, thought Yahoo's stock would severely tank. So far though it hasn't been dented too much, but Yahoo has a lot to prove over the next few months to increase the worth of the company.

Again, according to TechCrunch Yahoo will fight back against Google's dominance by releasing Yahoo Glue worldwide. Glue has already been released in India and it combines search results from Yahoo's web search and mixes in results from Delicious, Flickr and Yahoo Video.

While the courting of Yahoo was going on, the search engine was still making and announcing deals. A huge one in terms of VoIP is that the firm outsourced the voice communications for Yahoo messenger service to Voice 2.0 company Jajah. Jajah will now be handed a potential 97 million customers.

Yahoo has also been working on creating a single username and password for all its web services. This is something that Google works quickly on when it acquires companies but which Yahoo is far more laid back about. With dozens to possibly hundreds of web services under the Yahoo umbrella it makes sense for a Yahoo ID owner to be able to access these services without having to sign up every single time for each different service.

Very big news from Yahoo that probably went unnoticed with all the Microsoft noise is that it is now going to open up its search engine. According to the Yahoo search blog the firm will now allow third parties to get access to the core of its search engine and build new web services on top of that. In terms of search this is a very big move, something MSN or Google themselves have not done. Perhaps this is the way that Yahoo can regain some of the search market, by allowing very niche search engines to work on top of it.

Lastly with Yahoo, Xobni, the plug-in for Microsoft Outlook that makes sorting your e-mail much, much easier is now working on a version for Yahoo Mail according to VentureBeat. Ironically Xobni themselves, like Yahoo were talking to Microsoft about being acquired but decided it didn't want to become part of Microsoft in the end, despite the fact it is building functionality into a Microsoft product.

You phone, I phone, we all love iPhone! It must be the good weather and the craziness of the sweltering evenings but blogs are going mad with 3G iPhone rumours. We're already familiar with the idea of death by a thousand cuts but it's news by 1,000 blogs for the 3G iPhone. First is news that it might be cheaper when it comes out than the first edition with All Things D mentioning that it will be subsidised even more by AT&T in the US.

Engadget has almost daily stories on the new iPhone now; the strongest rumour is that the iPhone will be slightly thicker and will naturally come with 3G and GPS. A recent firmware release unearthed by Engadget also shows that there is a switch on and off 3G option in the next iPhone. Apple is naturally maintaining its usual strategy of being completely silent on these rumours -- which is the cheapest yet best means of building hype for this device.

Meanwhile outside of the Yahoo and iPhone bubble, other news items have also been happening. Simon Willison reports that Adobe is opening up Flash so it can be used on far more operating systems, but more importantly on more devices. The mobile web is finally getting some muscle.

Gizmodo reports the interesting fact that just a small percentage of internet users are the greediest, once again showing how the 80:20 rule applies to bandwidth as much as economics. An insightful fact though is that where peer-to-peer networks once took up most bandwidth around the world now it's legitimate online video sites like YouTube that soak up all the bandwidth. All that traffic yet Google has yet to make any kind of profit or return on its investment. Ouch.

While Google isn't making money from YouTube, ad networks are still where the money is and Six Apart, the company that through the Movable Type software push-started blogging, has now launched its own ad network and has also bought a traditional advertising company to sell its services on. With Six Apart making the move into advertising it further enforces the belief that you can only make money in tech now if you sell yourself to one of the top 10 companies or sell ads around your service.

Of course this is where the money is, as the BBC Technology blog reports. As of this year Google is now making more money from ads in the UK than ITV. We still think Google should buy Coronation Street and put it online though.

Damien Mulley is an Irish blogger and technology commentator.