What Would a Combined Microsoft-Yahoo Look Like?

Microsoft’s $31 a share offer for Yahoo is made possible by Yahoo’s slumping shares (Yahoo’sstock was trading at about $31 a year ago). While Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s entreaties in the past, with Terry Semel stepping down as chairman of the board yesterday, things might be different this time. I ran some quick, back-of-the-envelope numbers to see what a combined Microsoft-Yahoo would look like financially, and how it would compare to Google.

* Microsoft figures are trailing four quarters and headcount is from June.

Those headcount numbers and operating expenses  could be cut significantly.  The real impact to Microsoft, though, is not visible in these numbers because Yahoo represents a new growth opportunity for Microsoft in advertising revenues and online services.  During the last four quarters, Microsoft’s revenues for its online services (MSN, Windows Live, etc.) were $2.8 billion and it lost $949 million.  So just combing Yahoo wih that business, you getrevenues of $9.8 billion, but Microsoft would still be showinga net loss for that business of $289 million.

[Source: TechCrunch]

UVLayer: Watch and Share Videos on AIR

UVLayer is a new application that works on Adobe AIR. The service revolves around a video player and sharing tool, letting you search for clips across the web, and share them with friends with drag’n'drop capabilities. Once you’ve downloaded Adobe AIR and the UVLayer application, you can login and begin watching clips.

The videos available on UVLayer can be organized, pretty much however you’d like them to be. If you perform a search, than you’ll see all the videos from your query displayed in a box. You can watch any one of these, share it with friends, see related clips, leave a comment or see the activity going on around this clip. You can also remove it from the search query (which acts as a saved search) and create a “stack.”
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Stacks act as channels for these videos. You can name stacks, and add other clips you’d like to include in a particular stack. These collections can be shared with friends, as can individual videos and search queries. Sharing videos with Facebook is easy enough, as there’s an option to login to your Facebook account directly from UVLayer. Otherwise, sharing with other UVLayer friends is as simple as dragging a clip over your friend’s avatar, which displays (like a buddy list) on the righthand side of the UVLayer application.

One thing I found particularly buggy (or nonexistent) is the related videos option for clips you access through another related search. This greatly halts the search and discovery process for such an application as UVLayer. I also wonder how the adoption rate will be for UVLayer, as there is a two-step download process for new users, and little interaction for the application itself. If only looks could be everything! At least UVLayer recognizes the need for integration with other social networks, so hopefully the company will continue to build in this direction as it launches its service to the world.

[Source: Mashable]

Microhoo! What Does it Mean for Users?

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 Kedosky. 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.

It's going to validate a lot of innovation at Yahoo! Many people, including Microsoft on the conference call early this morning about the news, are focusing on what this means for advertising and for search. Since when is Yahoo! particularly good at either of those things, though? Yahoo! has created a web presence with more traffic than almost anyone else on earth. That's what they are good at and the issue is that they haven't been able to make money off of it.

Yahoo! is great at content and online innovation, though. That's what Microsoft needs right now. Google is posing a threat to Microsoft not just because it is winning in advertising, where Microsoft is a relative beginner, but because Google is shifting the software world to online.

Microsoft is serious about innovation, they just haven't been doing much of it in house for awhile. The Live.com work and the Microsoft acquisitions in the health space indicate to me the company really is trying to do more than just catch up in search and advertising.

I think that this acquisition is going to mean a whole lot more energy put behind services like Flickr and Del.icio.us and innovative content sites like Yahoo! Sports and Finance. All of that will be good for Microsoft and it will be good for those of us who find those sites and services inspiring.

It's hard to know what the impact of layoffs will be, or if the Death Star culture of Microsoft will quash a lot of the Yahoo! spirit, but it's going to be a huge company and I'm hoping we will see some very cool things come out of it.

[Source: ReadWriteWeb]

Plaxo Pulse First to Use Google's Social Graph

Although only announced hours ago, Plaxo's Pulse is already using the new Google Social Graph API. They got a head start due to a collaborative effort between their Chief Platform Architect, Joseph Smarr, and Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick. Now, the Plaxo public profile pages will serve as the flagship example of what this new API has to offer.

An Open Social Web

Plaxo's Pulse platform, mistakenly thought of by some as just another social network, is actually an attempt at an open version of the social web where sites inter-operate with each other. Currently Pulse supports integration with flickr, YouTube, digg, LiveJournal, Windows Live, del.icio.us, yelp, MySpace, webshots, last.fm, Pownce, xanga, tumblr, jaiku, twitter, smugmug, Yahoo 360, Picasa, and Amazon.

A great example of the type of interaction Pulse aims to achieve on their platform is the new two-way synchronization feature between Pulse and Twitter. A little over a week ago, Pulse quietly launched a "status" feature. Then a few days ago, they announced that this feature could now be used to synchronize with Twitter, two-way. If you set up your Pulse status to sync to Twitter, when you update your status in Pulse, it instantly updates in Twitter. You can also update in Twitter, and this will be synced back to Pulse. And if you have the Twitter Facebook app installed, it will update there, too.

Dynamic Public Profiles

With the launch of Google's Social Graph API, Pulse is now giving users the ability to create a unified public profile enriched by some or all of the aggregated content streams from the social web.  Pulse uses the API to gather together your various URLs on the web to create a public identity that you can control. With this, you can manage your own data and content and determine how you want to present it to the world.

This is a new sort of public profile page. Instead of a being a static page, like the one you would have on MySpace, the page is constantly being updated by your stream of content that you create all over the web.

The public profiles are a completely opt-in feature. You decide for yourself what content and information is included. The resulting pages are tagged with microformats, so your profile page is readable by Google and other web sites.

Over the next few weeks, Plaxo promises to introduce even more in this area, as this is just the first release.

To get started setting up your Public Profile, Plaxo members can go to Pulse, then click on "My Profile" at the top. On the left-hand side, click on the "Public Profile" link to begin.

Google Releases Social Graph API

Google today announced the release of a new API for graphing social net connections on the web at large. The Social Graph API is a way for developers of social applications to let users easily find data on their social connections across the open web. The information the API returns can be useful in helping users locate and add their friends when starting up at a new social application.

It was only a few weeks ago that Google announced that it had joined the DataPortability.org work group. It didn't take them very long to make good on the promise of contributing to the cause of data portability, though I suspect that Social Graph API has been under development at Google since before they joined DataPortability.org.

The Social Graph API uses the same algorithms at play in Google's search engine to discover how people are connected across the Internet. In fact, it only uses publicly available data -- if it's not on Google, the API won't be able to find it -- which Google says puts users in control of their own data since anything they don't like showing up, they can change at the source level.

The API works by searching for connections between people based on how people are linked on social networks and via publicly available profiles and pages -- i.e., if Marshall Kirkpatrick and I linked to each other on our personal blogs, or if we followed each other on Twitter, the Social Graph API might consider us friends because we have a strong connection. So, if I then sign up for a new social service, I can feed it links to my social presence elsewhere (like my blog or Twitter profile) and it will analyze those public connections and suggest to me that maybe I should be friends with Marshall on this new service because it looks like I'm friends with him elsewhere.

As more and more users are beginning to suffer the effects of "social networking fatigue," anything that helps automate and make easier the process of adding your existing connections to a new network is a useful tool. The Social Graph API could be an important part of the data portability movement in that it allows users to find and evaluate their public social connections and take control of that information.

Google has set up a Social Graph API group as well as provided developer documentation.