Yahoo announced today that it is buying Associated Content, a user-generated media company with 380,000 contributors and 16 million monthly visitors.
Yahoo, the second largest search engine after Google, said it will complete this acquisition in the third quarter of 2010. Although financial terms were not released by either company, the deal is thought to be worth in the area of $90-100 million.
Last week, we were very excited about all the possiblities offered by adding OAuth with IMAP/SMTP to Gmail, but as we noted then, don't let those acronyms cause your eyes to glaze over. What sounds like complicated, techie stuff really means simply useful additions to your email experience and this time, we're talking about Yahoo Mail, still the leading webmail provider.
As Programmable Web pointed out this morning, it looks like Yahoo actually implemented OAuth several days before Gmail got around to it.
Associated Press initially reported that three foreign journalists and one analyst have seen their email accounts hacked into today. The New York Times subsequently reported that there were "at least a dozen rights activists, academics and journalists who cover China," including the author Andrew Jacobs.
AP:
"They were greeted with messages saying, 'We've detected an issue with your account' and were told to contact Yahoo, they said Tuesday. Yahoo technicians told one of the four that his account had been hacked and restored his access, but it was not clear if the other instances were related."
As of today, Facebook Fan Page status updates will begin appearing in Google search results, according to a tweet by Google. The announcement means that we will begin seeing results from the nearly 3 million fan pages, but not from the more than 400 million users.
Google currently controls around 90% of the search engine market, according to StatCounter, with Yahoo and Bing its closest competitors. Will Bing's exclusive access to Facebook user updates change this at all?
These days, the web of connections between various social media sites, search engine giants, old software stand bys and hot Internet startups is starting to look like the diagram of an incestuous group of teenagers. And today, that web got one more strand, as Yahoo and Twitter announced a partnership that will bring the two companies closer together.
The deal comes on the heels of this morning's revelation that Twitter will be soon unveiling an advertising platform, which means more tweets seen in more places, and therefore more revenue.
The European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice just cleared the proposed search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo. Under the terms of this deal, Microsoft's Bing will soon replace Yahoo's own search engine on Yahoo's sites, while Microsoft will get an exclusive 10-year license to Yahoo's search technology. Yahoo will receive 88% of all the revenues from search ads on its site for the first five years of the agreement and handle the sales for Microsoft's and Yahoo's premium search advertising inventory.
Yahoo just announced that it has upgraded its video search product with new features that make it easier to discover music videos. Yahoo Video Search now recognizes and shows the most popular albums and songs whenever a user searches for an artist or band. A sidebar on Yahoo Video Search now displays an artist's most popular albums and songs. The album view then allows users to drill down even deeper and see videos for all the songs on this album.
Google's dominance in the search engine market isn't likely to end anytime soon, but Microsoft's Bing managed to continue its slow but steady growth last month, even though the search engine market in general remained at seasonal lows. According to the latest data from Compete, Bing's market share only grew from 8.7% in August to 8.8% in September, but the total query volume on Bing grew 8.2%. All the other large search engines - except for Ask - registered a decline in total search queries last month.
Social media data company Rapleaf has just completed a comprehensive study involving the demographics and behavior of webmail users. In the first part of their study, they looked specifically at age and gender data and revealed some interesting findings. For example, did you know that Gmail has more female users than male? And that Hotmail is the other way around? Meanwhile, AOL users are older...but maybe not as old as you think.
Yahoo Meme, a rich-media microblog that originally started as a Portuguese-only web app and has since expanded to Spanish and English language versions, is often mistakenly called a Twitter clone.
However, in stark contrast to the 140-character wunder-app, Meme has proven in the months since its release to be a much better platform for multimedia sharing and cross-platform content curation. Now, the Tumblr/Twitter/Posterous hybrid is offering an API built on top of YQL, Yahoo!'s query language that we covered back in May, when we were impressed with its power, versatility, and uniqueness. The Yahoo team has already used the API to develop a version of Meme for smartphones.
