Easily the biggest tech story of the past two weeks has been Microsoft's unsolicited $44 billion takeover bid for Yahoo! It's not just the enormous amount of money that has brought it so much attention (though it would rank among the biggest tech mergers of all time), but also because of how drastically the combined company would alter the Internet landscape. If Microsoft succeeds in its proposed acquisition of Yahoo!, the combined entity would be by far the most trafficked on the web and control a third of US web searches.
In October, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the company planned to acquire 20 companies per year for 5 years, with acquisition prices ranging in size from $50 million to $1 billion. Ballmer's statement came at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco and presumably the acquisition strategy he was talking about would focus on Internet companies in an effort to compete with Google. 4 months later, Microsoft made a nearly $45 billion offer to acquire Yahoo! -- hardly the right way to start off on the 20 companies per year route promised by Ballmer.
The Wall Street Journal put up an interesting article today about profile thieves. These guys don't want your Social Security number or your bank account information, they just want to be cool. Like you. And they do it by ripping off your social networking profile, word-by-word.
In the early days of blogging you could go to the Technorati Blog Index, enter some identifying terms for a particular niche topic and discover what the top blogs were in the field.
Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick pros and cons of the options I'm familiar with. Perhaps you'll add some of your own favorite methods in comments.
TradeVibes, which has up until now been operating in stealth mode, is soon-to-be-public wiki focused around company information. TradeVibes combines an informational wiki with a number of community features aimed at using the wisdom of the crowds to create a company database similar to Hoovers. Though the company is still in closed alpha testing, ReadWriteWeb readers can access the site through this invite link.
Last.fm, one of the web's most popular recommendation and web radio services, provides their recommendations based on what "people like you" enjoy. This brings a social aspect to their system where friendships have an impact what people listen to. But what do these friendships look like? Are they localized groups having little contact with other users? Or do they actually span across the network of last.fm users?
Our fourth daily Comments Competition winner is Chuck Lawson, for his comment on our post Is the iPhone the Ultimate eBook Reader?. Congratulations Chuck, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. Chuck noted that the Kindle is better for eBooks, but the iPhone is always with him. So why not enable syncing between the two? He wrote:
We like startups and innovation here at RWW so we try to pay attention to the news good and bad about what tech entrepreneurs are up to. It certainly seemed strange then that almost no one but its users and the intrepid Andy Baio seemed to notice that the CNet-acquired hipster dating/social site Consumating announced that it will close down in mid March.
Movie reviewer Ben Brown founded Consumating some time between 2003 and 2005, as a joke, unless he's joking about it being a joke. This is the Bay Area we're talking about, so from an outside and sane perspective it's hard to know what's real.
There's an old well-worn addage that says, "The customer is always right." On the surface, it means that you should always strive to provide good customer service. But on a deeper level, it means that if your customers do things with your service that you never intended, perhaps you should just go with it. That's likely what happened with Twitter, which started out as a place to report the random little happenings in your life, and has begun to evolve into a platform for serious discussion and breaking news.
Tom Coates of Yahoo Brickhouse (ex-BBC) is over in Wellington for Webstock, giving a talk on the Web of Data. I've been a fan of Tom's Web theories for a long time, so it was great to see him speak live.
He starts by saying that the companies that have done well on the Web (Facebook, amazon, flickr, twitter, dopplr, etc) are much more than websites - they've broken out of the browser/page and manifesting themselves elsewhere (devices, other sites, etc). Moreover, they're all platforms and have benefited as a result; and some have made lots of money.
