ReadWriteWeb

I'm sure you haven't heard the news, but Yahoo's celebrated cursing CEO, Carol Bartz, was fired via telephone yesterday. Thankfully she wasn't dumped via text message, but all the same, discussion abounds as to whether this is just another sign that Yahoo's time is nearing an end or if this is a step in the right direction for Yahoo. We decided to put the question to you. Does Yahoo have a chance at survival?

Disclosure, I worked at Yahoo from 2007-2010 as the Community Manager for both the Yahoo Developer Network and MyBlogLog.

You answered and we culled your responses from the original post on ReadWriteWeb, Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Carol Bartz, who replaced Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang as the company's CEO in January 2009, has been let go by the company, according to a report by AllThingsD.

Bartz said she was "fired over the phone by Yahoo's Chairman of the Board" in an email sent to employees today. Chief Financial Officer Tim Morse will act as interim CEO until a longer term replacement can be found.

An experimental startup inside of Yahoo called Sled is undergoing a name change and being open sourced, instead of being shut down all together, the company announced this morning. Open standards community leader Eran Hammer-Lahav led the effort to build what launched as a community list building service with an emphasis on simplicity, family groups and off-line activities. (Planning a party, a house move, getting ready for a new baby, planning a trip.)

Hammer-Lahav wrote today that the service was built using Node.js, MongoDB, Express, Socket.IO, Jade, JS, HTML5 and OAuth 2.0. It included an iPhone app that was never launched. The entire package is now known as Postmile and is available on Github.

Get Ready for a Twitter vs. Google Plus Fight for Developer Love

Like to hack on Twitter feeds, streams and APIs? Then there's good news for you this morning. Twitter has acquired a small startup company called Bagcheck, but the real score in the deal was bringing co-founder Sam Pullara onto the team. Pullara was previously the Chief Technologist at Yahoo where he lead many of the best programs at that beleaguered but technically awesome company.

Yahoo Pipes, Yahoo Query Language, Yahoo Search BOSS and other inspiring technologies that enabled hackers all around the web to roll out sophisticated mashups powered by Yahoo's backend were championed for years by Pullara. Not everyone liked him, but people who love to experiment with data have got to be excited about his coming to Twitter, the world's most promising stream of publicly available, semi-structured, real-time social data. Twitter's relationship with developers has been troubled at times, but Pullara's joining the team is the latest step the company has taken to make amends with its developer ecosystem.

Rumors have been circulating for the past few months that Yahoo would create its own Apache Hadoop commercialization company to compete with Cloudera. Today GigaOM's Derrick Harris reports that Yahoo will make an official announcement this week.

According to Harris, the spin-off will be called HortonWorks, a reference to the elephant-themed Dr. Suess book Horton Hears a Who.

Today, Yahoo introduced two new search tools, one a new online search engine for finding new mobile applications, and the other a mobile app called AppSpot (iPhone, Android), which does the same. According to a Yahoo blog post, the goal of these new services is to help you better sort through the some 425,000 mobile applications on the iTunes App Store and the 200,000 apps on Google's Android Market so you can find the app you need.

But will Yahoo's efforts prove better than any of the existing services that already do the same?

Despite all the hullabaloo about the ascendancy of Web video and predictions about the demise of cable, Americans still watch a lot of television. Those are the findings, at least, from the latest study by Nielsen. And even with all the various ways people can now consume video, Americans' intake of "traditional" TV is still the dominant source for most viewers. Furthermore, this viewership has increased by 22 minutes per month per person over the last year.

That being said, mobile video continues to see substantial increases in viewership, up over 41% from last year and more than 100% since 2009. Internet video streaming is also on the rise.

The Web's three leading search companies are announcing today a new collaboration called Schema.org, where more than 100 new types of website markup for content like movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and more will allow search engines to better understand and present what they find on the pages that show up in search results. Yahoo announced the project first today on its Yahoo Search Blog and said it was reminiscent of all three search companies collaborating to create the sitemap concept.

This will change the way people design websites, it will change the way people do search marketing, it will change a lot of things. It should be very, very interesting.

Six months after announcing a redesign, the newest version of Yahoo Mail is ready to come out of beta today, promising more social integration, faster load times, better spam filtering, cross-device operability and better search. Yahoo announced the beta version in October 2010 and it is the first major update to the platform in about five years.

The Associated Press reports that Yahoo Mail has 277 million users, down 1% from the same time last year. Hotmail is the global leader with 327 million users while Gmail has grown 24% (43 million users) over the last year to 220 million. Yahoo's announcement coincides with last week's iOS update to Yahoo Messenger as the company looks to reassert itself as an innovator and communications leader.

Yahoo has invested considerable resources into Apache Hadoop over the past several years. And now it is considering spinning out the engineering group responsible for the data analysis software into a separate company that it believes has the potential to be a $1 billion business.

Hadoop is the open source distributed data technology that is now used by Web companies and increasingly by enterprise providers. It's an analytics and optimization tool that Yahoo uses to personalize content and optimize advertising.