MySpace Annoucing Open Data Portability?

Hat tip to Nick O'Neill at Social Times for breaking the story, it looks as if MySpace is announcing that they have partnered with Yahoo, Twitter and others to have open portable profiles. TechCruch has more information here and shows a mock up of what it would look like while on Twitter.

This new found openness along with the developing Open Social standard will go a long way to creating a social networking environment that doesn't require me to keep 57 usernames and passwords and create a new friggin profile every time a new app or website pops up.

Yahoo Profits Up or Not?

Based on the stories I'm reading there is a little confusion about whether Yahoo's profits were up or not.

The Wall Street Journal says yes: "Yahoo Profit Lifted By Alibaba Gain"

MarketWatch say no, they were artificially grown by IPO and takes the China angle: "Yahoo's earnings boosted by China holdings"

TheStreet says hell, yes: "Yahoo!: How Do You Like Us Now?"

All in all it's a bit confusing- a result, I'd guess, of armies of Microsoft and Yahoo flacks arguing opposite points as Yahoo tries to maneuver itself into a higher valuation.

Yahoo Joins OpenSocial

Breaking news from the WSJ- Yahoo has joined the OpenSocial initiative. It looks like Facebook is on the outside looking in now. I wonder how long it will take them to cave in.

From the article:

Yahoo's announcement Tuesday could also put pressure on Facebook, the closely held social network that so far has not signed on to the effort.

Yahoo called itself a "founding member" of the foundation, which is planned to be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework. Related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1.

The foundation will focus on issues including technology, documentation and intellectual property.

Social applications -- which let users do things such as see the music friends are listening to and share photo slideshows - have emerged as a popular activity for users of social networking sites, and a potentially powerful vehicle for delivering advertisements. Prior to OpenSocial, if a developer built a "favorite photos" application to work on one social network, it would have to be built all over again to work on another site.

Google introduced the initiative to put pressure on Facebook and MySpace, which is owned by News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Facebook offers its own specifications for software developers and the over 7,000 such add-on applications for its site have contributed to Facebook's popularity and usage.

Steve Pearman, MySpace's senior vice president of product strategy, said, "Yahoo is an important addition to the OpenSocial movement, and through this foundation we will work together to provide developers with the tools to make the Internet move faster and to foster more innovation and creativity."

The OpenSocial foundation also launched a website: opensocial.org

Microsoft Buying Yahoo?

I've felt strongly for a number of years that Microsoft has to make some bold strategic acquisitions. My family were all Kodak employees at one point or another. The Kodak Lesson, for me, is that high margin, high market share companies suffer from the same disease: no one wants to kill the the golden goose. Risk adverse, they let the market and more innovative companies (and technologies) pass them by. Kodak is a great example of this- my Dad told me a story that he saw a prototype of a Kodak branded 3 megapixel digital camera in 1982- they shelved it because it was a threat to the film business.

Microsoft has exhibited a lot of these risk adverse, self defeating behaviors. However, along with the rumors that they were going to invest in Facebook, this might be good news...

From StrategyEye this morning:

Microsoft is rumoured to be considering making a public offer for Yahoo! if it isn't successful in its bid for a Facebook stake, according to the New York Post. The Murdoch-owned US paper claims that the software giant has thought about bidding publicly for the search engine for some months, after former Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel rebuffed all efforts to buy the company. It was hoped a public offer could stimulate shareholder interest, which would in turn put pressure on the management of the search giant to sell. Microsoft has USD21bn in cash available to spend, and is reportedly in talks with Facebook to acquire a stake in the social network, which Microsoft values at USD10bn. But, the New York newspaper claims, it is not willing to buy into both the social network and the search engine, given that it has already spent USD6bn this year buying aQuantive, and so is currently weighing up the two acquisition options.

On the other hand, the cynical angel on my shoulder asks, "so how long would it take to integrate Microsoft and Yahoo, fifty years or so?"