Social Media Take On: Microsoft And Yahoo Deal
Posted by: casualtech on: May 5, 2008
News broke out two days ago that Microsoft was walking away from their proposed acquisition of Yahoo. Apparently Yahoo’s Jerry Yang wanted the highest price he could get for the company or there was no deal, Microsoft just growth tired of he’s attitude and walked away leaving them in an uncertain position.
Minutes after the announcement the blogosphere and specially the Twittter/FriendFeed community exploded with reactions and annalists of how this is going to affect yahoo. After hours of discussion it was all a great experience that can only be describe has “been in the action”.
So here’s a recap of the reactions around the social media community from different people:
On Microsoft Walking Away From The Deal:
“They hope to grow on their own. I’m pretty sure that the deal wouldn’t have worked, anyway. Microsoft could buy every start-up in the valley with the money, I’m sure they would end up with more value for their shareholders. I even think Yahoo can get back to good performance, if they deliver what they announced lately”- seb
“I think it had a lot of do with life after the integration as well. MS earmarked $1.5 billion for YHOO employee retention after a merger, but many would still have been unhappy and quite possibly walked away. I’m sure we’ll hear more about it in the coming days/weeks/months — at least until MSFT makes another bid 6 months from now
“- MG Siegler
” I am thinking a 2nd *lower* offer will come from M$ later this year after Yahoo! ditches rose colored glasses following BAD PRESS from pist off shareholders watching their stock values go down (loss of confidence, poor performance). Yahoo! needs to wake up and re-assess their valuation. They were dumb to not take the $50B”- Susan BeeBe
“As a MSFT shareholder, I’m relieved. YHOO is a turkey”-Jeff Jarvis
On Yahoo’s Future:
“Some scattered and confused ideas: 1) Yang should sweep the management; only those want to ‘go to war’ should be kept. 2) Yahoo should streamline its sites and operations. Stop being an 90’s portal; send its current homepage to trash. 3) Flickr and del.icio.us should be the ‘anchors’ of the ‘new’ Yahoo. 4) Snag Technorati and make it an ‘anchor’ too. 5) OMFG YAHOO HAS THE AWESOME ZIMBRA AND DID NOTHING WITH IT! Pack hosted Zimbra, hosted WordPress and hosted Messenger and start a ‘Yahoo! Apps’.” -Cesar Cardoso
“Sounds like Yahoo was losing good employees left and right. Does this make them come back there? No. They need some time under the radar to push forward on new strategies to expand in existing and new markets, and attract new talent. But they’re about to get a lot of scrutiny for their $37 demand. This could get ugly.” -Hutch Carpenter
“I don’t see Yahoo’s search catching Google’s. I do see lots of opportunity for the if they monetize the right products and keep innovating. They’re far from dead. Buying AOL (before Microsoft) wouldn’t be a bad start” -Charlie Anzman
“So far Yahoo’s stock is still up and Microsoft’s is down. But I bet that reverses over next few hours as the market realizes how bad this is for Yahoo.” -Robert Scoble
Is The Deal Really Over?
I’m not totally convinced this is in fact over. If Y’s stock takes a serious dip on Monday, say south of $15, the board may ask MS back to the table. -Kevin D. White
“My guess is that MSFT ultimately ends up with Yahoo! and at a substantially lower price.”-Tom Turnbull
Conclusion:
“msft and yahoo deal ☠”-Fred Grott
The majority of people think what just happened leaves Yahoo on an uncertain position, it all depends on how they manage their assets and future acquisitions. Lets see if Jerry still has something up its sleeves that can keep the Yahoo ship sailing.
For another great resource of all things Microsoft/Yahoo just check out Scobles FriendFeed page where you can see almost all the articles and all the conversation that went on.
The Fall Of Digg: Social Sites
Posted by: casualtech on: May 2, 2008
Digg has been metioned a lot latley but not in a good way, there has been a lot of discussion about how the quality of the news hitting the frontpage has gone down a lot and why people don’t like it anymore. But what people are not mentioning is how Digg is in risk of loosing ground to the new way of finding things out 10 seconds after they occur.
With twitter and friendfeed been a new source for sharing stuff Digg might be in danger of lossing some of its most techie audience .Recently I have found myself only looking at Techmeme.com for breaking news and for discovering new stuff I check out friendfeed where people share interesting stories they find on Google reader and around the web. I see no need of checking Digg now that it takes so much for breaking stories to hit the front page .
Do you think Twitter/FriendFeed could ultimately eliminate the need for Digg like websites?
Why Friend Feed Is Closing in On Twitter
Posted by: casualtech on: April 25, 2008
FriendFeed.com describes itself has a services that enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages,
What Video Comments Need In Order To Work
Posted by: casualtech on: April 25, 2008
Theres a new topic around the blogosphere , video comments. They were introduced to what we can call the mainstream audience just two days ago by Seesmic.com(it was announced via Twitter/FrienFeed so it spread like wild fire), one of the major blogs on the tech scene rapidly adopted the service and people posted more than 100 video comments on a single post. But that was a eye opener for some.
Seen the massive number of video comments on a single post just made some realize the problems that come with video comments. Some people are already saying that they are never going to work but this is a fairly new thing that can still be tweaked. With some adjustment it could just work, here are the thing that need to be fixed :
A Way To Moderate The Videos: Right now there is no way to moderate what people post on their video, so is only a matter of time that someone will exploit that and spam with hundreds of videos in a single blog post.If seesmic can fix this fast enough before someone start spamming it could still have a chance at it.
Minimize The Video Windows: So many video comments on a post makes your blog go slower until all the video embedded load. I think what they can is that when people leave a video comment it shows only the tittle and if people click the tittle it expands it into the video.
Make Them A Little More Valuable: If blogger start using them in all their post it quickly lost their value, so if they could only use it for special post or only when is really necessary.
Direct Responses: Video is one of the best way of conversation so if you could actually respond directly to someone. Right now if you want to respond to someone your video comment is probably gonna be pretty far down the list and the person may not even notice.
Video comments are a fairly new thing so we cant just call them out yet. I think that with some tweaking they can work side by side with text comments, video is all about the new level of conversation on a blog.