Open up today’s Techmeme and you will see this splashed across almost throughout the entire page. Because this is HUGE news. Microsoft has withdrawn its plans for buying out Yahoo, more popularly known as Microhoo in the speculative blogosphere. So what does it mean finally for us?
Does it mean that we can actually breathe a sigh of relief before some other giant (Google) makes the next move? Or has Yahoo got some other plans up its sleeve? Almost 3 months after the initial speculations of Microsoft’s plan of acquisition of Yahoo, and almost a 16 billion $ increase in market value, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer released his statement that it was withdrawing its offer of acquiring Yahoo. And now that the beans have been spilled, speculations are making the rounds.
Of course, most of them surround the Big Goog tying up with Yahoo to do things OpenSource. Also under the radar is the question of how Yahoo’s shares would turn out on Monday when the markets open. And unless there is a huge miracle, the stock-prices are expected to decline drastically. And well, as Techcrunch states in their post here, if Yahoo tanks badly, Microsoft can even be back with a lower bid. Hmm, so we just can’t count out Microsoft out as yet.
Indexed below are the sites which have covered the entire chapter from every possible angle and every possible aspect.
Yahoo Responds: “The distraction of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal now behind us”
Breaking: Microsoft Corporation Rescinds Offer For Yahoo Inc
Microsoft Withdraws Proposal to Acquire Yahoo!
Yahoo! Issues Statement in Response to Microsoft
Guessing Yahoo’s Opening Stock Price
OK, so what’s Microsoft’s plan B?
Email From Steve Ballmer To All Microsoft Employees
Ballmer to Yang: How stupid are you?
YHOO and MSFT: Jerry Yang should be fired
by Sujoy on April 23, 2008
Awright!!! It is finally here. Facebook IM. It is cool, it is handy and it’s almost non-existent, at least by the looks. It is really cool , coz you don’t have to actually browse away to some other application to chat with your buddies. And this is what you get. On your Facebook page, on the bottom right corner, you’d have noticed a change today. Yes, it is IM integrated into Facebook. See the screenshot below.
Unlike orkut, which just shows who’s online on GTalk, with that green dot beside your profile pic, Facebook IM is what it is!! A simple and functional IM within the social networking giant. It is very easy. You can check who among your buddies are online and well go ahead and strike a conversation. The functionality doesn’t work with IE 6 or below. But then, who’s using that? Works on Firefox and Flock just perfectly. Haven’t checked on Opera or Safari.
If you are facing any problem seeing Facebook Chat, here’s the official help page.
Inside Facebook has the details in their story here.
Check out Nick O Neill’s post as well on the new Facebook IM .
And for those who are still hungry, here’s the Official Facebook Blog Link titled “Now we’re talking“.
So you chat hungry people, enough reasons to throw around those emoticons. Oh did I mention, it is Emoticon READY!!! *wink* *wink* ;D
by Sujoy on April 19, 2008
I use a very few of those Facebook apps…NOT. I actually use quite a lot of them. Right from the different walls, to the Addicted to TV Series , and Flixsters and iLike etc etc. But I was glued to BlogFriends due to the wonderful functionality of letting your Blogposts known to your Facebook pals. But of late, I hadn’t seen any updates of my posts on my page. I wondered what was wrong. The latest post that was showing on BlogFriends was a post that was written on 28th March -
Saturday Night at Bangalore circa March 2008. This had already got on my nerves, when I saw even Flog Blog wasn’t updating my RSS feeds. I went to the app page of BlogFriends to find out that they have decided to let it all go DOWN. As in forever. The notification available on the app page reads:
Blog Friends is closing
Dear Blog Friend, We’re very sorry to announce that Blog Friends is to close down.
When i-together raised some seed funding back in the summer of 2007, Benjie, Jof and I fully anticipated taking Blog Friends onto great things, and we worked as hard as we could to make that happen.
Although it appears simple on the surface, Blog Friends is actually an unusually complex and resource-intensive application to maintain and grow. It also is pretty original in the way it combines your extended, fuzzy social network and your interests as filters for your blog recommendation River.
Because Blog Friends was so original and quite ambitious, we had no way of projecting accurately just how many users we could welcome before our solution began to creak. We hoped for 100,000. It turned out that 20,000 was closer to the mark. And now that we have around 27,000 users signed up, Blog Friends has been brought pretty much to its knees (as you will have noticed from the increasing frequency of the error messages you may have been seeing).
For the full screenshot go here.
by Sujoy on April 18, 2008
Here’s what I mean by the headline! Look at the pic below.
GMail as well as Google is for sure going through a lot of changes and has been continuously trying to improve and implement innovations in their wide range of services. This one is definitely a welcome change,which will prompt more people to read the Blog. Is it a stunt to push the Technorati Rank further? LOL. C’mon. What a week it has been for Google. First, the Opensocial Apps on Orkut, and now this. Btw, the post that’s showing on the GMail page is this . “9 Reasons to Archive“. The best reason here is no.6 which says-
6. Winning arguments
“But on May 5, 2005 at 8:43pm EDT you said….”
Fantastic post. Adios!
