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It wouldn't be Monday if there weren't some new saber rattling from Carl Icahn over the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. This time, in a letter to Yahoo's shareholders, Icahn alleges that he has been in discussions with Microsoft's Steve Ballmer for the last week. In those calls, Microsoft apparently stated that it would still be interested in the Yahoo acquisition, but only if the current Yahoo board were ousted. Microsoft has confirmed these discussions.

Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo's properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo sells off its search division, Yahoo's other properties probably wouldn't be too affected by this, as they get most of their traffic from Google's search anyway. Only Yahoo Image Search, Games, Maps, and News get most of their traffic from Yahoo Search.

Update: Yahoo! and Google have indeed announced a partnership in the form of a non-exclusive deal allowing Yahoo! to run Google advertising alongside search results. The press release is here.

The clumsy $44 billion mating dance that began in February between Microsoft and Yahoo! officially came to an end today. Yahoo! and Microsoft each issued statements saying that talks had been concluded, though Microsoft left the door open for non-outright-acquisition partnerships. Meanwhile, multiple sources are reporting that Yahoo! and Google are set to announce some sort of search deal, perhaps as early as today. So what's next for both companies?

In a deal that was surprising only in its price, CBS has announced that it will buy CNet, owners of everything from News.com to Download.com to our competitors Webware, for $1.8 billion.

That's 10% more than Google paid for YouTube, and that deal was all for stocks. CBS paid a 45% premium over CNet's closing stock price and it paid it mostly in cash. CBS buying CNet is a big, complicated deal with a lot of possible take aways, but below are ours.

Communications giant Comcast has acquired social web application Plaxo for an estimated $150m or more. Techcrunch confirmed the deal first but offers an understated critique of the alliance. Many web users familiar with the operations of both companies are much more upset about the deal.

German social bookmarking startup Mister Wong yesterday afternoon announced the acquisition of Lifestream.fm, a lifestreaming start up that's something like Friend Feed without the interactivity and using Twitter's design. While "lifestreaming" still barely registers on Google searches according to Google Trends, it is one of the most talked about new phenomena in the blogosphere (see this BlogPulse trend graph). Though Lifestream.fm isn't one of the top players (Friend Feed gets all the press), it is a very capable basic lifestream aggregator.

AJAX start page provider Pageflakes officially announced today that it has been acquired by LiveUniverse. The deal is a combination of cash and stock, but the size of the acquisition was not disclosed. LiveUniverse, which was founded by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, owns a number of social networking and video destinations, most notably LiveVideo. Rumors of this deal surfaced earlier this week, and it was officially announced today.

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.

Presuming you've seen the news that Microsoft has moved to buy Yahoo! for $44 billion, the next logical question to ask concerns what this means for users and lovers of technology.

If its business analysis you're looking for, go read Paul Kedrosky. Here at ReadWriteWeb we focus more on the cultural impact of innovation in technology. On that front, I think this acquisition could be very good news.