Microsoft announced its intention to buy Yahoo! for 44.6 billion dollars on February 1st. This means the share price Microsoft offered for Yahoo! is 31 dollars per share, a value lower than in the past weeks and months. Yahoo’s declining value, and recent moves towards cutting down on work force, are all part of something many see as a crisis. In that sense Microsoft’s offer is timely and balanced. There have been many speculations already about what a merger between the two companies might produce as a result. Both companies have worked on improving and developing their search presence in the past months, and both have succeeded in areas related to search, but none has achieved any significant increase in search scape share against Google. This post tried to compare the two companies’ online efforts and determine which was a “winner” in each area. It seems Microsoft would have a lot to gain by simply integrating Yahoo! but also a lot of area where a merger would actually produce something competitive unlike each company’s independent effort. One such area would be local maps where Yahoo’s interface would be a great improvement on Microsoft’s features. Perhaps this press release by Microsoft sums up their goal best:

“Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.”

Interesting to say, Microsoft would have probably bought Facebook, if it was available for sale, although they chose to ensure an ad platform instead, by purchasing a Facebook share. Personally, I think the merger would bring improvements for those who use the two companies’ services and a more solid search alternative to Google, but there are opinions that Microsoft is again heading for monopoly issues again. Google hasn’t said anything yet about Yahoo!, probably because their ownership of it would probably be regarded as search scape monopoly … or would it?

Yahoo! is still thinking about Microsoft’s offer, but there are rumors others may be interested in Yahoo! as well - they’ve certainly got the cash.

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Yahoo! introduced its newest social network called Yahoo! Mash. It’s still in beta, but you can get in by invitation. I got in through inviteshare.com (Thanks Ongo!). Naturally, you have to have a Yahoo! ID in order to sign-in, but if you don’t have one you can get it in about 30 seconds, the time it takes to sign-up for one.

The person who invited you makes the initial profile for you (other users can change the look of your profile by default, unless you restrict them through privacy settings). Upon first login you can choose to continue with the profile or start a new one from scratch. As you can see it’s a two-column layout, the left being the wider content column, and the right narrower which is great for inserting modules. Pretty much similar to a standard two-column blog template. Each bounded box can be moved (drag and drop) around the page, but the drop location will be geometrically consistent with the layout. This is good because it preserves the neat look of the page, unlike MySpace where you can put stuff all over the place (which, I guess, has its advantages if you know what you are doing).

Easily enough, you click on the appropriate places and fill in content (text) that will be shown from then on. You can add a background image, and set colors for fonts, borders and modules. Then comes the more fun part of choosing and adding modules. this is at the bottom of the profile page. For now there is a choice between some ten modules, but I expect the number to rise significantly in the near future (this is Beta after all). By the way, you can create your own modules if you are able enough, but this won’t happen for a couple of months yet. You can integrate a box with latest post titles from a blog feed, for example your own.

In the coming months we’re going to open up our module development platform to 3rd party developers.

While redesigning the look and feel of the page you can click on the link “this is fugly” to revert to the default stripped down look, or back again by clicking on “show me shiny”. If you play around long enough you can actually build a quite nice profile page.

In Settings, you can control who can see your profile, who can edit your profile (you, friends, best friends, family, all friends, anyone - keep it to yourself in the beginning), who can post to your guest book. Pretty much the usual, except for the “edit your profile” part.

Looks good so far, and really is a mash-up of different things (MySpace, Facebook) but brings some interesting new things. I will definitely play with it for a while (I like the easiness of the process) to see how far this will go. I would have liked to see an option to send people a link towards my profile page that would be visible to others on the Internet, without having to be signed-in on Yahoo!, but that’s maybe something that will happen in the future. There is the Y! Mash blog for more info. There is only the one introductory post so far, but I will follow it for further developments. Wanna get your own Yahoo! Mash profile? Head on over to InviteShare and register for an invitation, and possibly participate in sharing invitations to this and other services if you can (that’s the idea).

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This is a new concept being developed by Yahoo! with the idea of creating a social network for college students looking to get connected with alumni at companies they might be interesting in working at after graduation. The new concept, which has been seen as something that will change the game, is currently being researched in order to get opinions from college students about the new concept, and possibly new directions of development.

The concept makes it easier to network with peers with similar interests for professional involvement, but also for finding out about companies that may be of interest for a future career. Kickstart is almost like a successful hybrid between LinkedIn and Facebook. If it proves to be successful, and everything is pointing in that direction, than Yahoo! indeed may change the game in professional networking.

See in more detail here.

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