ReadWriteWeb

Apparently Microsoft is talking profit in the midst of 15 straight quarters of losses, according to a Paid Content article this morning. The company is looking to Bing to pull it out of its nearly four-year long slide, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft senior vice president of online business, said in an interview last night with Reuters.

According to the interview, Bing is looking at becoming a "credible No. 2" as soon as Microsoft closes a deal with Yahoo, making Bing the backbone for Yahoo search. We do see a few areas where Bing has been gaining ground and wonder if Microsoft may be able to come back out of the red.

You're walking down the street. Your phone buzzes, a map or a screen overlay pops up and you're shown a note left in that location by one of your friends - along with an ad for your favorite pizza. Walk into the pizza place and your phone buzzes again - your friends have something to say about the guy behind the counter. That might have sounded far-fetched a few years ago, but it doesn't so much anymore, does it?

18 months ago Yahoo! filed a sophisticated patent on VIRTUAL NOTES IN A REALITY OVERLAY and that patent was published last week. Check out the patent sketches below.

Google and the Associated Press haven't exactly been on good terms for the last few months. Due to fundamental disagreements over copyright and payments between the companies, Google stopped hosting AP content on its site in December after the existing contract between the AP and Google expired. Yahoo, however, is a step ahead of Google and just announced a new deal with the AP. The details about the contract between Yahoo and the AP weren't disclosed, but chances are that Yahoo agreed to pay higher licensing fees in return for the right to host AP stories on its properties.

In an effort to add one more story to the list of reasons why Facebook already rules the world and can stop trying, we find that Facebook is the social-network-login of choice by nearly 2-to-1.

Widget provider Gigya sent us some numbers from their social network login tool and in a three company competition, Facebook came away with 65% of the traffic, Myspace with 18% and Twitter with 17%.

Yahoo! announced plans today at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to spread its tentacles deeper into the Internet-connected TV market, inking new deals with TV, media player and processor manufacturers, as well as releasing its widget development kit and signing on with new content partners.

When we looked at the rebirth of the Web TV last year, we had one major reservation - would people really buy a new TV just for the widgets? "Probably not," we said. This year, Yahoo! is bringing the Internet into our other devices, so we don't have to.

Five years to the month after it was founded, cross-blog social networking widget MyBlogLog will be closed down by Yahoo! in January, we're hearing from sources close to the project. MyBlogLog is a service that shows blog writers and readers the faces and profile information of other MyBlogLog users that visit their sites.

In one of ReadWriteWeb's longest-running traditions, every year we review the top Internet companies and their impact over the past 12 months. Today we're announcing the 6th annual Best BigCo, a.k.a. big Internet company. Next week we'll announce Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company.

In 2008 the Best BigCo went to Apple, due largely to the iPhone and App Store. Facebook won in 2007, Google in 2006 and 2004, and Yahoo! in 2005. Who will be Best BigCo of 2009? Will Apple be the first company to win it two years running? Will Google win the honor for a 3rd year? How about Facebook, which grew significantly this year. Let's find out...

Google unveiled its real-time search interface today and it looks much, much better than what rivals Yahoo and Bing have done so far. The new Google real-time search functionality will appear on selected search results pages, below News results, above or below top ranking natural search results - sometimes just above the fold of the page.

The new type of results are well-integrated, unobtrusive, diverse in contents and formatted simply. It appears to be a job very well done. It's hard to believe that neither Yahoo nor Bing have created an experience anywhere near as compelling.

Yahoo! announced this morning that it is adding Facebook Connect across many of its properties. This afternoon Google Friend Connect announced the inclusion of Twitter as a top-level log-in option. These moves will be convenient for users, but may not be good for the future of the web.

People have always said that Google does what's good for the web, because what's good for the web is good for Google. In this case I'm worried that the Royalty of the web's last generation has crowned these two leading social networks as the Royalty of the current generation in a deal that offers traffic and money but that could suffocate the most creative developments of the open, distributed web. That could be called the web's next generation.

As the year draws to an end, all the large search engines have now published their year-end roundups of the most popular search queries on their sites. On almost every service, these include Michael Jackson, Twitter, Lady Gaga and terms related to Twilight. Google also just released its annual Zeitgeist survey, which features lists of the fastest rising search terms on Google's properties worldwide. Among the top queries related to technology and the Web, Facebook (#2) leads the charge ahead of Twitter (#4) and Windows 7 (#8) in the global survey. In the US, Twitter was the fastest rising search term of 2009, followed by Michael Jackson, Facebook, Hulu and hi5.

The social media data company Rapleaf has just released the final parts of their 3-part study involving the demographics and online behavior of webmail users. In the first part of the study, gender and age data was examined and revealed some interesting findings...like the fact that Gmail has more female users than male, for example. In the final sections of the study, the company has turned its attention to social networking data to discover more details about webmail users' social media profiles, memberships and network preferences.

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! started out as a hand-curated directory of links and will now recognize the value of manual curation again in a new project to be run by respected online journalist Andrew Golis. That according to Golis himself, who comes from Talking Points Memo - a site widely recognized as one of the best examples of new journalism online.

"The site will be a combination of curation and original reporting," Golis wrote this morning on his personal blog, "with gregarious linking and sharp, smart writing. In other words... I'm going to be building a team to bring the most popular news site in the United States into the news link economy."

Today, Yahoo!Mobile SVP David Ko introduced the company's new mobile homepage calling it "the world's most advanced mobile homepage."

At once rich and simple, the new homepage is accessible by more than 1,900 different mobile devices, which Yahoo! says represents a 500 percent increase since the mobile site launched in April. We checked out the site on a BlackBerry Storm tonight and were impressed by the features Yahoo! is offering for discovery and filtering of content. From tech-related videos to dynamically refreshed news feeds, Yahoo! gives mobile users plenty of room to play.

After a summer of establishing blogger guidelines and fair use, the Associated Press is considering charging online customers for a 20-30 minute head start on breaking news stories. According to a report by the AP's Jeremiah Marquez, the AP's chief executive Tom Curley made the announcement at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club. Curley suggested that because the AP licenses stories to major hubs like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, these outlets would be willing to pay for scoops.

Yesterday's phishing attack in which several thousand Hotmail username and password combinations were leaked to the web now appears to be just the beginning of a massive phishing attack affecting users of multiple webmail services including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, and Earthlink. The original list was posted anonymously on pastebin.com, a site generally used by developers sharing code snippets. Again, that site recently saw the addition 20,000 more login details from other webmail service providers, indicating what may the largest scale phishing attack to date.

The Yahoo! Developer Network blog has a post today calling for "innovative and flawless" applications to be submitted for inclusion in a gallery section on their redesigned homepage.

Apps are to be built using Yahoo!'s proprietary development platform, YAP. The YDN post further noted, "We're working on an array of additional developer monetization opportunities - these will be available soon." The gallery's inaugural class includes YAP-built applications from Mint, Lumosity, Flixter, Target, and WordPress.

Early this morning Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz rang the NASDAQ opening bell in honor of her efforts at New York's Advertising week. Said Bartz, "Yahoo is where half a billion people come every month. They come to be entertained, they come to be informed, they come to talk to their friends and their business associates. In other words, Yahoo is the center of people's lives. That is what we are." Bartz's words are significant as the company is expected to unveil a $100 million dollar "It's You!" campaign tomorrow morning.

According to Ask.com spokesperson Nicholas Graham, while companies are expected to help community organizations, it's not unheard of for these cause-related partnerships to also benefit the companies. After donating $25,000 to Autism Speaks through a targeted awareness campaign, 80,000 visitors changed their Ask home pages to Autism Speaks-related skins and 63% of campaign visitors became permanent users. Despite the fact that the promotion lasted only a few days, Ask saw a 10% increase over other holiday and non-cause related skinning promotions. In anticipation of October and Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Ask is building upon its community successes and teaming up with Susan G. Komen for the Cure in "Search for the Cure".

Earlier this morning, Yahoo's own Flickr app finally appeared in the iTunes App Store, but this was only the first of three mobile apps Yahoo released today. In addition to Flickr, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Fantasy Football have now arrived in the store as well. In their respective categories, Yahoo Finance and Fantasy Football are the #1 players and these apps should help Yahoo to stabilize this position. In addition to these iPhone apps, Yahoo is also launching new mobile sites and BlakckBerry apps for both services.