Entire Internet Goes Crazy Over April Fools
As usual, April Fools day was the internet’s Christmas, with many major and minor websites getting in the holiday spirit, most with unfunny fake news stories. A few were interest or stood out:
YouTube turned all the Featured Videos on its front page into links to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. The video, already the center of the Rickrolling meme, is now the unofficial anthem of April Fools day, with multiple pranks involving it somehow. The video pulled 6 million views in just one day.
Phillip listed a ton of others from Google, including a retread “We’re going to space” joke from Google (this time with Richard Branson and Mars and YouTube videos, but even less funny than when they did it in 2006), scratch-and-sniff Google Book Search, Google Talk auto converting everything you say into acronyms, a paper airplane template in Google Docs, custom email time in Gmail, Google Calendar’s Wake Up Kit (which pours a bucket of water on you if you ignore the alarm) and I’m Feeling Lucky button (random blind dates), Orkut renamed Yogurt, and more.
Blogger launched “Google Weblogs”, essentially a look at what a blog service by Google would have looked like in 2002, before Google discovered UI design
Andy talked about a Google USB Search Watch. Yes, a watch, as in what you wear on your wrist.
Google Docs Finally Gets Gears Offline Access
Google Docs, the most obvious candidate for offline access, has finally been enabled to work with Google Gears. You can now access and edit your text documents (but not spreadsheets or presentations, yet) without an internet connection, provided you’ve installed the Google Gears plugin. Wonderful news, and hopefully the start of a wave of Google products taking advantage of Google’s offline platform.
Here’s a video about it:
Google Spreadsheets Adds Gadgets Google Spreadsheets has added a directory of Google Gadgets you can use to extend its functionality. It includes charts, new table functionality, pivot tables, maps, search results, organization charts, and many other features Spreadsheets lacks. It also now has email notifications, autocomplete and a new visualization API. Unlike Docs, Spreadsheets is one area where the majority of users won’t be satisfied with an underpowered Microsoft Word, and any way Google can get advanced features in there, the better.
Google’s Search Lead Continues To Grow comScore saw Google share of the search market grow in February (surprising no one), reaching 59%. Yahoo fell to 21.6%, Microsoft slipped slightly to 9.6%, and Ask added .1% to reach 4.6%.
Viacom Will Not Get Punitive Damages Vs. YouTube A judge ruled that if Viacom prevails in its lawsuit against Google-owned YouTube over copyrighted videos, it would not be entitled to punitive damages. Instead, Viacom will have to prove actual damages, with each successfully proven “willfull” violation costing Google up to $300,000, and other costing as little as $750. Gonna have a hard time getting $1 billion out of Google that way.
Googler is Convicted Hacker Valleywag has an article about Christophe Bisciglia, a senior software engineer at Google who is also a convicted former hacker. Bisciglia got in a dispute with his boss about a decade ago at the age of 17, and decided to take revenge by flooding the system with emails, sending email to the company’s customers, and defacing their website. Obviously he’s matured since then, but lets hope the next time he loses his temper the results don’t show in your Gmail account.
Spring Google Doodle
Google ran this Doodle logo to mark the beginning of Spring:
Google Loses FCC Auction The final results in the FCC’s spectrum auction are in, and the winners of major blocks of the 700 MHz spectrum are Verizon, winner of most of the coveted and somewhat open C block with Vodaphone (along with parts of A and B block), and AT&T, winner of most of B block. In total, the auction raised over $19 billion, much more than was expected, none of it from Google.
Hulu Launches
NBC and News Corp finally launchedHulu.com, its YouTube competitor video site, to the general public last week. Early reports are that, despite a lot of criticism from the press a year ago, the site has developed into a strong, high quality platform with a decent amount of good content. Hulu has a bunch of TV shows and full-length movies, and doesn’t charge anything to show them, just inserting ads. As long as the content is there, there’s absolutely no reason Hulu won’t be a hit.
Google Completes Purchase of DoubleClick
With the European regulators finally signing off on the deal, Google completed its megabillion dollar deal to buy DoubleClick. The acquisition met with a lot of opposition from Google’s competitors, who complained that it would create a monopoly in online advertising, but both U.S. and EU officials determined that DoubleClick’s business was sufficiently different enough from Google’s core search ad business, plus a possible Yahoo/Microsoft combo would be competitive enough.
The final acquisition cost was $3.24 billion, according to Google, about $140 million than originally planned. That’s either due to inflation, unexpected costs, slight changes in the deal, or includes the cost of getting the acquisition improved in the first place. SEJournal has the text of an email Google sent to all of DoubleClick’s clients with some FAQs.
Yahoo Buzz Driving Massive Traffic
I completely recant my earlier criticism of Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo’s Digg competitor. The main difference between Buzz and Digg is that it only allows in publishers who use a Yahoo advertising program, and the top stories from Buzz make their way onto the Yahoo homepage, the most popular webpage on the planet. Publishers in the program are reporting all-time traffic records, even really popular sites like Salon and TechCrunch, making Buzz a huge incentive for publishers to use Yahoo for their ads. Yahoo should have thought of this years ago.
YouTube Integrated Into Spore
The much anticipated Spore, arriving later this year from Maxis and gaming legend Will Wright this September, will include integration with Google’s YouTube. Players will be able to upload videos of their Spore creatures to YouTube while playing the game, and an official Spore channel on YouTube will feature the best contributions from the community. I got to sit down with an EA rep at a recent games preview event, and I was shocked at how well-thought out and integral the community aspect was for Spore, and the YouTube integration represents yet another great addition.
AOL Buys Bebo AOL bought Bebo, a mega popular (in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand) social networking site for $850 million. While the acquisition price has been widely panned as too expensive, it does underscore the importance of social sites being popular in countries other than the United States, and how MySpace and Facebook are not the only real players.
Here are the logos ran by the major search sites yesterday in honor of St. Paddy’s, courtesy of Barry:
And Yahoo’s Flash logo:
Interestingly, yesterday was not St. Patrick’s Day! The church moved it to last Saturday, so as not to fall out during Holy Week, so everyone got it wrong. Based on how many people told me “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” yesterday, it looks like a lot of people ignored the church.
The Yahoo Search Blog is proudly touting the results of the latest Keynote Customer Experience study measuring customer satisfaction with search engines. Yahoo is showing off that from May 2007 to November, its satisfaction rating rose from 837 to 878, vaulting it past both Google and Ask.com. Yahoo credits its new Search Assist feature, which walks users through refining a search query, for the boost.
Keynote uses a panel of 2000 representative users to study how the major search engines stack up in terms of performance, relevance and customer satisfaction. The report also looked at how the major engines performed in terms of providing search assistance and suggestions. Keynote found that since launching Search Assist, our ranking jumped by 41 points to 878, taking us from third to first place in this category.
Recent Compete market share numbers show that while all four of Yahoo’s competitors increased their volume of search queries over 30% in the last year (with Google up 51%), Yahoo’s volume was up a practically non-existant 0.3%. Even if Yahoo’s users are more satisfied, Yahoo is failing to attract new users, or at least convince existing ones to search more. Happy customers are nice, but apparently no one is spreading the word.
Valleywag is reporting that Yahoo is planning on launching Yahoo Buzz, a social news site that will rank news based on popular search results and user voting. Buzz will be designed to compete with Digg, which is all well and good, except that it will have a particularly nauseating twist: Only sites that run Yahoo Publisher Network ads will be shown on the site.
We’ve heard of advertising biasing editorial content, but this is bordering on obscene. A news site that only shows sites that participate in an ad program is a news site users have absolutely no reason to trust. Given all the arguments at Digg over “secret moderators” and Bury Brigades and whatnot, how much of a shitstorm will be kicked up when the top stories seem like they are all coming from the most monetized publishers?
I don’t like the idea of such obvious bias, not even when it’s right up there in the purpose of the site. If this is route Yahoo wants to take, good luck for them. They could have had a solid, popular Digg competitor, something I think we’ve all been waiting for from the big companies, but instead they’ve got this strange advertiser showcase that may or may not be filled with crap blogs covered from head to toe in poorly targeted contextual ads.
Google is running this special Doodle logo for Valentine’s Day:
That’s actually pretty sweet. Last year’s Doodle was a mess, with a lot of sites reporting that Google had forgotten the “l” in Google:
Here’s the 2005 Valentine’s logo:
In 2006, Google did not celebrate Valentine’s Day because February 14 fell during the Winter Olympic Games, and Google runs special Olympic Doodles during those days.
If you forgot to get your special someone (or your pet, whatever) something for V-Day, might I recommend hitting up Rite-Aid on the way home? There’s always something there that says “I’m not a thoughtless jerk”.
Philipp notes that Google Docs is pink today, the Google Maps Street View guy is standing on a heart-shaped platform, and YouTube’s logo is heart-shaped.
The last 24 hours have likely been the darkest in the history of Yahoo! Inc. as the company fired 1000 employees, some deserving, some who deserved a better chance. The company’s decision to fire just over 7% of its workforce was pretty much a requirement as the company attempts to transition to more profitable systems and a leaner, more productive and accountable workforce.
News of the layoffs and thoselaid off spread like wildfire thanks to social services like Twitter and Techmeme. We heard of Ryan Kuder, who Twitter’d every step of the way, from nervous trepidation, to getting the call, to clearing out his desk, having his computer and badge confiscated, replacing his company cell phone, and celebrating unemployment with a giant margaritas at Chevy’s.
No doubt, there are Yahoo who badly deserved this, and no one is sad to see them go. A floundering company like Yahoo is filled with some employees who collect a paycheck, talk a lot of bull, and do nothing but consume company resources. However, the majority of those who lost their jobs were just regular folk doing regular jobs trying to support their families, and that is the tragedy of the day.
Often, companies do a round of layoffs in order to boost the stock price and earn a decent profit for board members at the expense of the average worker. Yahoo certainly can’t be accused of that, as Wall Street barely touched the stock today, due to its already inflated price caused by Microsoft’s offer to buy the company.
It’s hard to see this happen and not want Microsoft to buy Yahoo immediately. This company is bleeding, and Microsoft is offering a very expensive tourniquet. Sure, a lot of people will get fired if Microsoft buys it, too, but at least it’ll be a colder and more sensible integration and redundancy layoff round, and not the firing of good people because of management’s missteps and mistakes.
No one wants to see this happen again, but who honestly believes that there won’t be a round two if nothing drastic changes?
At least Google did okay. A smart Bradley Horowitz, head of Yahoo’s Advanced Technology Division, jumped from the sinking ship to join the Goog. Bradley will reportedly work on OpenSocial, and should be a huge asset for Google.
The Wall Street Journal, after talking to sources at Yahoo or Google, reports that Google reached out to Yahoo and made an offer to help Yahoo avoid Microsoft’s takeover bid. Google can’t offer to buy Yahoo outright; it doesn’t have that kind of money, there isn’t a good enough market to borrow the money, and Google’s got close to $5 billion tied up in the FCC auction. Plus, the antitrust regulatory storm kicked up by a vengeful Microsoft wouldn’t be worth it.
Instead, Google is offering assistance in helping Yahoo find alternatives. Google can help Yahoo line up other bidders, or barring that, Google could form a revenue agreement with Yahoo to keep the company away from Microsoft. One scenario I’m hearing discussed is the “Yahoo sells its soul” scenario, wherein Yahoo outsources a significant part of its business to Google, ruining the value of the company for Microsoft.
If Yahoo takes the poison pill, giving Google full control of its search and keyword advertising programs, Microsoft would not be able to make Yahoo succeed without kicking a portion of revenues to Google. Alternatively, Microsoft could try to break the contract, the costs of which could also be prohibitive enough to kill the deal. One wonders whether Yahoo shareholders would be able to vote to stop Yahoo from enabling a poison pill, especially since most of them want the Microsoft deal to go through.
Google also released its official statement on the situation on the Google blog, telling media “This will be our only statement for the time being.” In it, Google touts openness a quality of Google and Yahoo, and calls Microsoft’s bid hostile. Google brings up Microsoft’s past transgressions with regards to monopolies and antitrust violations.
Let’s try to keep some perspective here. Google isn’t trying to “help” Yahoo or internet users, it is trying to do what is best for the future of Google. Yahoo is a weak company right now, and the longer Google’s competition stays weak, the better for Google. Put Yahoo and Microsoft together, Google might actually have to deal with a real open market, and that’s something Google will fight to the last minute.
That said, wouldn’t it be ironic if Google saved Yahoo from ending its run as an independent company, only to see Yahoo rebound eventually? Yahoo’s executives keep saying that things will turn around in 2009, and while the market is impatient, it is possible the company could rise again on its own. Imagine Google saves Yahoo, and Yahoo comes back and actually beats, or at least becomes a match, for Google? We’d be laughing at the irony, sometime in 2011.
Microsoft has made an offer to Yahoo’s board of directors, offering to buy the company for $44 billion. It’s a sweet offer, a lot of money to the company that some firms say has the most traffic on the internet, and would create competitor large enough to compete with Google. I have a detailed article on the deal at InsideMicrosoft, one of the longest I’ve ever written, and encourage you to check it out.
While Web 2.0 junkies may talk about Google Maps all the time (and, once in a while, other innovative companies, too), MapQuest remains the untouchable king of online maps. Well, MapQuest is finally un-untouchable (touchable? nonuntouchable? ~untouchable? untouchable-less?), thanks to Google Maps more than doubling its market share over the last year, rocketing past a slipping Yahoo Maps to seize a strong second place.
Google was up 135% in 2007, while MapQuest traffic was flat over the last year. Google’s change in its search results to only show links to Google Maps, and not MapQuest, pushed so much traffic to Google’s own mapping product that it made all the difference in market share. In fact, the change was so quick and dramatic that Google may be up 135%, but it is only up 7% in the last six months (the change occured in March).
Right now, MapQuest owns 50.25% of the market, down 2-4 percentage points in the last twelve months. Google, meanwhile, has 22.2% market share, up from around 10%. Yahoo fell from just under 20% to 13.34%, and Windows Live Maps was mostly flat, finishing up perhaps a small fraction of a percent.
Congratulations! Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny, active blogger and flying enthusiast, got married Tuesday on the beach in Zanzibar. He’s uploaded a few pics to Flickr, and I wish the best to the happy couple. Enjoy whatever time you have off before returning to Yahoo. Marriage is a wonderful thing, and it should be savored. Looks like Jeremy got a good one there; don’t let her go.
Yahoo has announced at CES that its Yahoo Go platform will now allow independent software developers to design their own applications to run inside the platform. A software development kit is expected to be released within the next few weeks, and eBay, MySpace and MTV have already created their own Yahoo Go apps.
Yahoo Go is Yahoo’s all-inclusive mobile platform, designed to run on a variety of operating systems and phone types and allow access to all of Yahoo’s services. Anyone with a compatible phone can download and install it, but the real push by Yahoo is to get device makers and mobile service providers to pre-install it. With the new open application capabilities, Yahoo doesn’t just have its own application, but a platform to extend the features of mobile devices, a change which may make it very appealing to device makers.
The appeal of Google’s Android is that it can, in theory, enable more advanced phones at minimal or no cost. If Yahoo’s free platform does the same, but runs on the operating system the phone already has, it could be very popular. The more thriving platforms, the better, so I wish them the best of luck.
And Ask.com? They’ve got a bunch of balloons at the top of the page.
EXCEPT…
Take a good look at the source code for their homepage. If you were paying attention last week, you’ll remember a lot of the same code from the falling snowflakes. Yeah, I’m thinking that it would be a good idea to come back to Ask.com at midnight tonight, see some fun stuff.
(via Gary)
TechCrunch has an overload of charts showing the end-of-the-year numbers for Yahoo and Ask.com.
For Ask, Ask.com’s unique visitors increased for the year by 54%, from 29.8 million in November 2006 to 46 million last month. Ask may still be having market share troubles, but more users means a healthier company that isn’t going away anytime soon.
Ask’s other properties mostly enjoyed decent growth, with search results pages going up from about 20 million to about 30 million, Image Search up 91%, Spain and German up 2063% and 844%, respectively, AskCity up 548%, and the only down properties are Maps (really replaced by AskCity) and Weather (replaced by the same functionality in Ask’s 3D search results). Ask’s new search results are pushing traffic to its search verticals, growing them in a disproportinate way that Google wishes it had.
For Yahoo, TechCrunch had to run two seperate charts, showing the top growing properties and top declining ones, since there are so many. Yahoo’s U.S. properties are mostly on neither list, with small percentage raises (and a few small drops) leaving them stagnant. Yahoo Answers is one major exception, more than doubling its traffic. Yahoo’s biggest success was in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where search was up 7,452% and 6,763%, respectively.
As you can see, Yahoo Mail went slightly up and down, and finished 3.21% up for the year. On that same page, projections show Gmail topping Yahoo Mail at current growth rates by November 2010. However, that projection assumes you are an idiot, because it also shows Yahoo Mail with the same amount of growth.
Yes, growth is common, but Gmail can’t take over the market completely without Yahoo losing users. Plus, growth never continues forever, especially at rates like this. More likely, Gmail will take some users from Yahoo and Microsoft, both of its competitors will grow slightly, and this war will still be going on well past 2010.
Yahoo has released a plugin for WordPress blog creators, a convenient Yahoo Shortcuts plugin that helps you put Yahoo content in your blog posts. It simplifies the process of including Yahoo Maps, data and charts from Yahoo Finance, inserting Flickr images, showing product comparison results, Yahoo Auto info, and web and news searches.
The plugin scans your posts as you write and tells you how many Shortcuts it has found. Click a button, and you can choose whether to have the shortcuts appear as links beneath the chosen words with the added info as an overlay, or to activate a “badge” box, like an embedded map or stock chart, to appear alongside your post.
It isn’t perfect. It conflicts with some other word-linking plugins, performance isn’t great, having to do the work on a seperate page (and one located under the Write tab, not the Manage tab), not being able to force it to select words (especially when it fails to link company names and ticker symbols to stock info) and a few other things are annoying. However, it does work mostly as advertised, and at the least provides an easy means for embedding maps, stock charts and Flickr photos.
Google has reached 65.1% search engine market share, up .2% from the previous month and closing in on an amazing 2/3 market share, according to the latest stats from Hitwise. Yahoo fell almost half a point to 21.21%, Microsoft fell almost as much to 7.09%, and Ask fell a tenth of a point to 7.63%. Of course, Google won’t truly be satisfied until it hits 100%.
(via John)
The top searches of the past year (or rather, the first 11 months of it) are being released by the major search engines.
Google’s Marissa Mayer revealed the ten fastest growing queries of the past year, though the 2007 year-end Zeitgeist is not out yet. They are:
1. iphone
2. webkinz
3. tmz
4. transformers
5. youtube
6. club penguin
7. myspace
8. heroes
9. facebook
10. anna nicole smith
The fact that MySpace and YouTube are on this list is a testament to the fact that, even though they were incredibly popular before 2007, they enjoyed amazing growth all year. Celebrity gossip was a big deal on the internet, as gossip blogs supplanted shows like “The Insider” and mags like “The Enquirer” as the top source of celebrity dirt. And the iPhone, a brand new product, became more popular than baseball.
Yahoo has their full 2007 report, including top news stories (Sadaam, Iran, Iraq, gas prices, presidential candidates, the S.D. fires, Virginia Tech), top environmental searches (number 6: Al Gore), top troubled celebrities (Britney, Vanessa Hudgens, Amy Winehouse, Rosie), top tech (top 3: YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook), top consumer recalls (#1: pet food), top endings (top 3: Harry Potter, Anna Nicole, Sopranos), top del.icio.us tags (top 3: design, HDTV, games).
(via Andy)
Ask also put out its list of the top actual searches (as opposed to a sanitized or top rising searches list):
1. MySpace
2. Dictionary
3. Google
4. Themes
5. Area Codes
6. Cars
7. Weather
8. Games
9. Song Lyrics
10. Movies
The list speaks to ask’s strengths. They are the only engine with smart answers for area codes, easy weather for any city or area, and lots of smart answer boxes for things like movies. Annoying that the number 3 search is looking for Google.
They’ve also got a list of the most popular searched-for presidential candidates:
It’s been 21 months since Google Finance, Google’s financial news, information and stock price site was launched, and that ComScore chart above shows that it doesn’t really have any more users now than it did a year ago. Google’s that hot pink line at the bottom, representing 1.5 million monthly unique visits, well behind leader Yahoo’s roughly 38 million, MSN’s 20 million, AOL’s 12.2, and CNN Money’s 6.7 million.
Why does Google have so little upward movement that in the last 12 months, Yahoo has gained as many users as Google has in total, seven times over? Google may promote its own Finance product at the top of search results, but it also links to Yahoo, MSN, CNN, MarketWatch and Reuters, giving itself no more real space than the competition. Plus, the Finance chart it inserts on certain searches actually discourages users from seeking further information.
Universal Search is useful for users, but it doesn’t seem to do any good promoting other Google services. In the long run, it may have more value convincing users to stick with Google search than convincing them to switch away from search verticals that are extremely popular at Yahoo, MSN, or anywhere else.
On a related note, it’s been just over a week since Google removed the Google Video link from its search link bar, and it gets more annoying every day. I really miss having an easy way to get video search results.
The Wall Street Journal, after talking to sources at Yahoo or Google, 
