Top Items:
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Hold Everything! We May Get Another YHOO Bidder! * — A Valley source is hearing that a major private-equity firm was just days away from making its own bid for Yahoo when the Microsoft bomb hit this morning. (The same source now reports that TWO firms were circling, both big New York-based shops).
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Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Microsoft to Yahoo: Two Days to Respond or Else! — Sources at Yahoo tell me that Microsoft made its most recent overtures right after Yahoo announced its earnings Tuesday and then told Yahoo execs they had two days to respond or Microsoft would go public with the offer.
Joe Nocera / New York Times:
A Giant Bid That Shows How Tired the Giant Is — Oh, how the mighty have fallen. — This may seem like an odd way to characterize a company that just announced its willingness to plunk down $44.6 billion to make its first hostile takeover ever. A company that will probably generate …
Discussion:
Strategic News Service
Jim Badenhausen / Yahoo!:
Media Response — 02-01-08 Yahoo! Board of Directors to Evaluate Unsolicited Proposal From Microsoft — Media Hotline — Robinson Lerer & Montgomery for Yahoo! Inc. — FAQ: Unsolicited Proposal From Microsoft — Q1. How is Yahoo! responding to Microsoft's proposal?
Scott Gilbertson / Compiler:
Flickr Rebellion Brews at Specter of M$ Acquisition — A small but vocal minority on Flickr are already staging online protests at the prospect of a Microsoft takeover. Flickr is one of several popular Web 2.0 websites owned by Yahoo that loyal users fear will suffer under Microsoft ownership.
Bill Burnham / Burnham's Beat:
Microsoft/Yahoo: A Bad Deal For Silicon Valley — There's a ton of discussion today about Microsoft's unsolicited bid for Yahoo. Much of the discussion focuses on whether or not the deal is a good thing for Microsoft, Yahoo or Google's shareholders. While it's possible it could be a good or bad deal …
Paula Rooney / Open Source:Yahoo! buy would give Microsoft ownership of open source e-mail, projects, code.
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TeleRead
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:What Would a Combined Microsoft-Yahoo Look Like?
Discussion:
New York Times, Guardian, CNET News.com, Hitwise Intelligence, WinExtra, Hitwise Intelligence, PC World, Valleywag, PDA, Mini-Microsoft, Search Engine Land, Good Morning Silicon Valley, Microsoft Watch, Between the Lines, Virtual Economics, Big Tech, Paul Kedrosky's …, eWeek, WebProNews, LiveSide, Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab, WebbyOnline, LucaFiligheddu.com and The Digital Home
Ashkan Karbasfrooshan / HipMojo.com:Google's Investment in AOL Set Stage for MSFT/Yahoo! Merger/Acquisition
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Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog
Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:Microsoft-Yahoo: The deal of the dinos
Discussion:
paidContent.org, Susan Crawford blog, Bits, Recovering Journalist, /Message, SmoothSpan Blog and mathewingram.com/work
Brad Fitzpatrick / Google Code Blog:
URLs are People, Too — So you've just built a totally sweet new social app and you can't wait for people to start using it, but there's a problem: when people join they don't have any friends on your site. They're lonely, and the experience isn't good because they can't use the app with people they know.
Discussion:
O'Reilly Radar, this is sippey.typepad.com, Googling Google, Scobleizer, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, VentureBeat, The Social Times, Andy Beard, Googlified, Valleywag, WebProNews, GigaOM, Search Engine Land, techno.blog, ReadWriteWeb, Wikinomics, Mac Beach, Google Blogoscoped and chrisbrogan.com
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Google Gathers Social Graph Information From The Web, Launches API — Tens of millions of people have been busy the last few years building Facebook's most valuable asset - their social graph. As people add friends, and those people add friends, Facebook gets to understand exactly how its users know each other.
Discussion:
Profy.Com, eWeek, ReadWriteWeb, bytes|genes, CNET News.com, Between the Lines, PDA, Raw and Mashable!
Google Analytics Blog:
Urchin Software Beta Now Public — Today we're happy to announce that the Urchin Software from Google beta is now available for download at urchin.com. Urchin Software from Google is a web analytics product similar in scope to Google Analytics, except you install and manage the software on your own servers.
Discussion:
TechWeb, Googlified, TECH.BLORGE.com, Download Squad, Unofficial Google … and Web Analytics World
Jeff Atwood / Coding Horror:
Every User Lies — Heidi Adkisson notes that features sell products, but the people buying those products often don't use the very features they bought the product for in the first place. … It's interesting that Heidi used the hedge phrase “may be different” when her own study data showed …
Alexander Rose / Long Views:
Decision: Blogs vs. New York Times — February 1st, 02008 by Alexander Rose — Long Bets has arrived at a decision for Long Bet #2 between blogger Dave Winer and Martin Nisenholtz of the NY Times. At stake is US$2000.00 plus half the interest that has accrued over the last 5 years in the Farsight Fund …
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Microsoft Offers $44.6 Billion for Yahoo … My guess: Sold. That's a big premium over Yahoo's current share price, and I don't see Yahoo getting there on their own any time soon. — Engineering-wise, it's interesting. Yahoo's stuff is almost all written in PHP, and runs on FreeBSD and Red Hat Linux servers.
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Nilay Patel / Engadget:
iPhone takes on semi, lives to tell the tale — We though we'd seen it all when it came to creative device destruction — iPod with a bullet: check, exploding laptops: check, everything in a blender: double check — but we've never seen anything spend over an hour on the highway and survive.
Discussion:
Tech Blog
Arn / MacRumors:
MacBook Air 1.6Ghz HDD vs 1.8Ghz SSD Benchmarks — Many readers are reporting shipments and delivery in our MacBook Air forum. First impressions and notes of the MacBook Air are being compiled in this thread. — Few head to head comparisons between the Solid State Drive (SSD) …
CNN:
Third undersea Internet cable cut in Mideast — (CNN) — An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days. — Ships have been dispatched to repair …
