Yahoo!

With Yahoo losing people left and right and nearly every media outfit calling them dead, I started to wonder about my data. The Flickr founders left earlier this week and tonight we've learned that delicious founder Joshua Schachter has also tendered his resignation (via Dave Sifry).

Now let me be clear that I don't think Yahoo is closing shop by any stretch of the imagination but the question is a good one for any Web application or company to which we put data into. Certainly has made me think about the Web services I use from both big companies and startups and how often I need to backup the data. This is not about data portability, I am only discussing my data (photos, videos, text) not how other users interact with the data (comments, etc.).

There's three main services I use on Yahoo: delicious, Flickr and Yahoo Mail. delicious offers an export function which I found easy to use. With regards to Flickr and Yahoo Mail, I was unable to find anyway to save out my entire collection of photos or mail. I've got nearly 3,700 photos on Flickr - no way I am saving these out one-by-one. And I was one of the first Yahoo Mail members and it's still one of my primary email accounts even today. Please let me know if there are ways to export this data in batch form.

If you are building a Web service, have you considered offering an export function from the beginning? If not, why?

I think today we've learned another great lesson. How many horror stories have we heard from people who lost an entire hard drive filled with data. We've learned to backup our hard drives to external drives for safety. Perhaps we need to do a better job of backing up our Web services for safety as well. One has no idea when a Web service might not be there the next time you attempt to access it.

I've written several times that I thought AOL and Yahoo should merge and create a very strong force in both the content and advertising spaces. After what I've seen Yahoo do to itself over the past couple of months, I no longer believe that a combination would be good for AOL. During my time at Graphing Social Patterns this week, I met a large number of AOL'ers who all explained to me how great times are at AOL these days. From what they told me, morale appears quite high. It seems like all of the wheels are in motion. Could AOL take Yahoo's slot in the ranks? Might have seemed crazy 18 months ago but not so crazy anymore. I used to believe in Yahoo - can't say I do today.

If AOL management was smart, they would call a company-wide meeting and get the horses moving even faster and explain that there's a chance now to step into a leading role and take Yahoo's place in the ranks. I can only imagine that the morale at Yahoo must be horrible right now. Yahoos are leaving left and right and the company just signed itself away to the devil. Shareholders may love the deal in the short-term (they don't care about people) but in the long-term, it will hurt Yahoo way more than help. And this is why AOL should do what it can to take every ounce of life that Yahoo has left. Offer incentives to Yahoo advertisers to switch, hire key Yahoos and continue to ramp up the content development effort.

AOL should also ramp up their OpenSocial effort even more and maybe win developers away from Yahoo. Imagine if developers got behind AOL as well?

AOL's deal with Google for advertising will continue to fly under the radar and I think it's fine for AOL to continue the deal. Eventually I'd like to see Platform-A take over ad sales but let's first get part I done. Steve Poland disagrees and adds his views on why AOL and Yahoo should still merge.

Is AOL perfect? Heck no. But would any dealings with Yahoo now help the company? Heck no.

Just off the newswire... Billionaire investor Carl Icahn received clearance from the Federal Trade Commission to purchase large chunks of Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) shares. Federal regulators granted early termination Thursday of the waiting period required under the Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust law, the FTC disclosed. Earlier this month, Icahn launched a proxy fight to unseat the Internet giant's board, saying it has acted irrationally and "lost the faith of shareholders" and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT).

Icahn has bought roughly 10 million Yahoo shares and options to acquire 49 million more, worth about $1.5 billion, since Microsoft withdrew its offer to acquire the company May 3. Icahn had sought antitrust clearance from the FTC to acquire up to about $2.5 billion worth of Yahoo stock. Icahn nominated 10 directors, including himself, lieutenant Keith Meister, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and former Viacom Inc. (VIA, VIAB) Chief Executive Frank J. Biondi Jr., saying Yahoo board's actions regarding Microsoft's $47.5 billion takeover offer were perplexing.

Yahoo's board came under fire from top shareholders after talks to sell the company to Microsoft broke down over price. Yahoo shares traded Friday afternoon at $26.77, down 30 cents.

Looks like we might just have yet another weekend of Yahoo/Microsoft news. There goes my date tomorrow night!

Yahoo has announced that they have filed a lawsuit against spammers and scammers who send out lottery scams using the name "Yahoo" in them. I am sure you've seen these - at least for me, most of them seem to be Microsoft lotteries, not Yahoo. These type of tactics are generally called "phishing scams".

Yahoo explains, "The complaint alleges that without permission or authorization, and with full knowledge and notice of Yahoo!'s trademark rights, the spammers willfully masqueraded as Yahoo!, and sent e-mails claiming that the recipient had won a lottery, prize or other award from Yahoo!."

Lately these scam emails have started to get smarter - it used to be easy to pick out things like poor english, grammar, company name spelling, etc. I have seen many phishing scams lately that look dead on accurate. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been hit with the "tax rebate verification" scams which look almost perfect. I am sure the average Internet user will fall for these scams.

Yahoo reports that they block over 1 billion spam messages a day from their 260 million Yahoo email accounts.

A Cartooning Experiment has created a variety of cartoons about the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. The cartoons were created using Bitstrips, a company we interviewed on video at SXSW. Bitstrips really is a pretty fun Web app.

Here are the cartoons - click for the full-size version:

Yahoo has launched their local search into India this week into four major cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai. The local search in India works very much like the local search in the U.S. To be honest, I don't use Yahoo Local - I've been more of a Yelp'er or lately also searching via address using Google Maps. Though playing with Yahoo Local this morning, it's pretty robust. I like how it aggregates reviews from across the Web in addition to those from Yahoo Local, offers an interactive map and a variety of alternative suggestions for other topics in the location I am in. I don't see anything very innovative, the information is just presented in a very usable format.

On a more serious note, It appears that Yahoo Local India is easily hackable by injecting script code into a review and you can do basically anything from that point. Sridhar was able to create an iframe with Google in the body (see the screenshot below). He also notes that anything way more malicious could also be injected.

I tested this hack on the U.S. version of Yahoo Local and was unable to reproduce the security issue. When I entered any script code and clicked submit, the system removed the code within the script tags and prompted me to add more content.

I have submitted a ticket to Yahoo to get them to fix this.

Yahoo Answers is one of the most simple ideas online today - someone posts a question they need help with and others post answers to the question. The question lives for a short period of time which helps to keep the experts moving on to new questions looking for responses. It's like the world's largest how-to forum.

When we discuss Yahoo, Answers seems to be overlooked but it's clear from the chart below that it is one of their most powerful properties. Matt McGee was able to corner the Yahoo team into sharing the latest stats on Yahoo Answers and I've embedded his chart below. Wondering just how large Yahoo Answers is? 77 million answers in the last 7 months in the U.S. and 150 million worldwide. These numbers are answers not questions as each question will have multiple answers.

Is Yahoo Answers the largest online expert network? Google recently closed their Answers property and Answers.com isn't so friendly in usability. Yahoo Answers also can help with social media marketing and Matt created a guide for how to use Yahoo Answers for social media effectiveness. My guess is that the overall percentage of social media marketers is small compared to those helping just to help another person.

Yahoo posted an announcement yesterday that they have removed the minimum bids on keyword advertising. The company stated that bids could go both up or down in price. The two factors that Yahoo stresses in determining the minimum bid for a term are: quality and value.

Search Engine Roundtable is reporting on a variety of advertisers using Yahoo getting jacked up on their minimum bids overnight. Advertisers noticing changes (and reporting on them) all note a 2-4x increase in the bid amount. One advertiser said, "Yahoo just raised my minimum bids by 3 -4 times on many keywords.. they must be out of their minds."

So if your quality isn't there, you will pay a lot more now, but they will still take you. I find this interesting - if you can afford it, they don't care so much about the quality.

Mashable Editor Adam Ostrow has the lead on a breaking story about Pluck being acquired by Demand Media. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but Pluck powers some of the largest newspaper social networks including at the Washington Post, USA Today and Fox News. Demand Media has raised over $350 million in funding to-date.

Ostrow notes, "In a conversation with Rosenblatt and Pluck CEO Dave Panos this morning, the two likened the move to that of Google with AdSense, first building a successful network in-house, and then branching out to offer the same tools and advertising sales clout to other web publishers. To execute this strategy, Pluck will begin offering a revenue share with publishers, versus the current licensing model the company employs. Third-party publishers will also enjoy the traffic benefits of being part of Demand’s burgeoning network."

Pluck also powers BlogBurst which allows bloggers to syndicate their articles to major newspapers and news distribution outlets. CN is a member of BlogBurst.

Earlier this week, Mzinga acquired business white-label social networking provider Prospero. So which one of the other large white-label social networking players is next to be acquired?

Ok, a bit of fun in the title, shoot me. Information Aesthetics (IA) is reporting that the entire Yahoo Design team has been fired and the project closed. IA also notes that all of the design and innovation teams at Yahoo have been closed. The Yahoo Design site no longer loads, it redirects to 'next.yahoo' which apparently hasn't updated yet since some of the employees listed in the footer have also been fired.

My guess is that they will spread out the design/creativity functions into the brands that remain (mail, maps, etc.) instead of having separate groups. I've seen this before and while it certainly lowers the cost of maintaining another group, the ability to work together to create synergies in innovation company-wide suffers.

You can view the former work of the team on the Yahoo Design blog.