Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz continued to talk about Yahoo’s regrouping strategy at an advertising industry conference earlier this week.
She touched on the topics we covered in our post last week, The Steady, Efficient Decline Of Yahoo. Specifically, she’s counting on an improvement in the economy to drive Yahoo growth, and she claims to have made significant advances in display advertising tools, targeting and analytics. “People still have to display their brand in a more descriptive way than just keywords,” she told Advertising Age.
When asked if Yahoo was any different from AOL, she responded “Generally it’s not different, we’re just a lot bigger. The fact of the matter is, what they’re trying to do at AOL — and I shouldn’t speak for AOL, they’re very capable of speaking for themselves — but I think it’s like a mini Yahoo.”
Last December, Yahoo announced that it would be rolling out a deep integration of its products with Facebook Connect, essentially outsourcing all things social to the world’s most popular social network. Today marks one of the initial demonstrations of this partnership, with Yahoo Contacts now connected to Facebook.
Now Yahoo allows you to add your Facebook friends’ email addresses to your Yahoo Contacts via Facebook Connect. In the Import Contact landing page of your Yahoo account, you’ll be able to select Facebook (importing from Gmail and Hotmail already exists). Once you authorize the connection with your Facebook credentials, your friends’ email addresses from their Facebook profiles will be added to your Yahoo Contacts. Yahoo will scan the imports and delete any duplicates. 
Earlier today, in writing about Google buying the photo-editing service Picnik, we noted that the most interesting thing about the buy may be that Picnik is currently Flickr’s default photo editor. Upon hearing the news, we reached out to both Google and Yahoo (which owns Flickr) to see what it means for the future of the partnership. The responses were interesting.
Google, for its part, says that it will allow third-party sites (including Flickr) to continue to integrate with it. Here’s the statement they sent us:
Which online video companies will get bought in 2010? Venture capitalists are desperately looking for exits while the usual suspects are sitting on more than $80 billion in cash: Microsoft ($20B), Apple ($40B), Google ($15B), Amazon ($3B), and Yahoo! ($3B) just to name the cash positions of a few potential acquirers. Theoretically, it should be a match made in heaven, but the sheer number of venture-backed video startups is staggering so when the music stops, not everyone will find a dancing partner.
Once you assess what drives companies to merge or acquire one another, however, it seems like we’re about to enter a period of mergers between video competitors and see a series of acquisitions by larger companies looking to accelerate their video strategies, with a common theme being increasing both monetization and margins.
With that in mind, let’s look at those 10 potential deals.
Efficiency is a business school idea that suggests a company is running smoothly. It’s absolutely terrific when you’re talking about a coal mining operation or a Supercuts. But when it comes to a company like Yahoo it’s not a positive. The Internet is still in its wild west days, and the “ready, fire, aim” game plan of Facebook and the other young guns is eating their lunch. Even the massive Google is still trying to shake things up with new and controversial products.
Yahoo’s strategy seems more like “ready, aim, aim, aim, aim…”
Yesterday Jordan Rohan at Thomas Weisel Partners described Yahoo in his first analyst report on the company. He thinks this is the right management team to bring more efficiency to Yahoo. But he spends most of his time talking about the negatives, and there’s no excitement around new products or ideas:
For the record, we happen to believe the current management team is the right one at this stage in Yahoo!’s corporate evolution. The team is bringing efficiency to a massively inefficient company. Yahoo! is weighed down today by dozens of code bases, thousands of revenue-producing properties, at least three sales force factions (display, search, ad network), and a few thousand “extra” employees needed to run the media company today due to its complicated legacy assets and far-flung acquisitions.
For the past two days, Yahoo has been trying to get me to agree to an embargo on some piece of news they had for tonight. As you probably know, we hate embargoes, so I wasn’t about to accept it. Good thing. Not only did the news leak out almost 5 hours early, but actually, Yahoo itself was giving people hints on Twitter all day, and encouraging people to take guesses to break the embargo on Twitter. And yes, the news is a deal with Twitter.
So first, the news: Yahoo and Twitter have reached an agreement to share data between their properties. That’s great. Yahoo is only a few months behind Google and Microsoft (Bing) doing the same thing. And really, I’m not entirely sure why some kind of special deal was needed. For search, Bing is about to take over the data aspect for Yahoo, and that will very likely include the Twitter data. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s frontend elements and services already include Twitter integration, including Flickr. Plus, isn’t Facebook Connect handling all the social stuff for Yahoo soon anyway?
It’s been a long and winding road for Yahoo and Microsoft since Redmond’s first attempt to buy Yahoo for $45 billion two years ago, which ended up in the two companies agreeing to a complicated search deal in July, 2009. Today, the last hurdle to that deal has been removed, with government regulators in both the U.S. (the DOJ) and Europe (the European Commission) approving the deal. Yahoo and Microsoft can finally get on with their lives.
Microsoft will take over Yahoo’s organic and paid search results and blend those resources into Bing. Yahoo will continue to control the front-end UI of search on Yahoo’s sites, and consumers will continue to see and be able to use the Yahoo search engine. The transition of the back-end search algorithms and results may still take until the end of 2010 to complete. Advertisers and Website partners which use Yahoo search may have to wait until after the 2010 holidays to be transitioned to Bing. 
If you are still wondering why Google is pushing so hard with its new product Buzz, it is because it wants in on social traffic. For many sites on the Web, social traffic coming through Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace is beginning to rival, and in some cases overtake, search traffic as the single biggest source of traffic. This traffic comes from shared links, photos, and videos. What isn’t easily appreciated is the extent to which such social sharing is tied to different identity and authentication platforms across the Web. If you can log into a site easily using your Facebook or Twitter account, it is easier to broadcast links from that site to your friends.
To get a sense of which services on the Web drive the most sharing, I asked Gigya for some stats. Gigya powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites, including ABC.com. NBA.com, PGA.com, Answers.com, and Reuters. Consumers can click a share button on these sites and send an article link, photo, or video via a menu of different services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and AOL. Over the past 30 days, people have shared almost a million items over the Gigya network. Facebook and Twitter dominate with about three quarters of all shared items between them. Here is how the services break down:
The 2010 Winter Olympics kick off in Vancouver tonight, and for those of you who can’t be tied to your TV every night to watch the opening and closing ceremonies and competitions, here’s a compilation of sites where you can not only watch video highlights of the events but also see pictures, scores, medal counts and news from the Olympics:
On 12 January 2010, Yahoo applied for a trademark on Y.COM, a filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office reveals.
And this isn’t exactly the first time they’ve tried to secure that particular character mark: the company actually filed an initial application for Y.COM to the USPTO back in August 2005.