Posts Tagged with ‘microsoft’

It looks like Microsoft is pretty serious about social networking - serious enough to carry out a dedicated study to prove Kevin Bacon's law of 6 degrees (that you can be linked to by anybody else by less than 7 acquaintances).
To prove this idea Microsoft used the database of Microsoft Messenger users for the study with the major goal of finding out what's the distance between two random people on Earth if they are connected [...]

I was under impressed with Microsoft's Live.com Live Search page when it first came out, and have largely ignored it since. When a few of the people I follow on Twitter gave the new feature release today bad one line Twitter reviews, I felt compelled to revisit it and see what they were bothered about.
Looking over the "big news" from Microsoft I see… hot spots and images? Is that it? Wait, the hot spots also have fly overs. So, we [...]

So Google is in negotiations with Digg to buy the social voting site for “around $200 million”. Now what? Of course, a valid question here would be why Google is still acquiring companies offering all kinds of services when it could have been much simpler to build a similar service of their own in a matter of weeks (and there are tons of scripts allowing to launch a Digg clone available already so this is hardly any problem at [...]

Anyone else tired of "breaking" Yahoo/Microsoft news? The New York Times is reporting that Yahoo has issued yet another infamous statement rejecting another offer from Steve Ballmer and his new best friend Carl Icahn. As usual, Yahoo held an emergency board meeting, "evaluated" the offer, and issued a statement to the media.
Don't they teach Negotiations 101 in business school anymore?
Even the youngest child knows that when you get an offer you don't like, you offer something else in response. It's [...]

We wrote about Evri earlier this week and how it falls short of the mark on being a valid semantic search tool. Now Microsoft is jumping into the quest for true semantic search by purchasing Powerset and lumping it under the Microsoft Live Search umbrella.
Microsoft has made no secret of its great desire to be more of a presence on the web in recent months. It has continued a torrid on-again, off-again affair with the idea of buying Yahoo (recently [...]

I feel like the image that needs to go with this post is a stack of waffles judging by the amount of times we've written about the Microsoft and Yahoo on again / off again buyout affair.  It's made even more disappointing by how much I like Yahoo and how cringe-worthy its decisions throughout this whole mess have been.
I said recently that with the recent exodus of Yahoo staff, it had never been more ripe for the picking, [...]

Remember playing the "telephone game" as a child? You'd stand in a line or sit in a circle and pass messages from one person to the next, whispering into an ear. At the end of the line, the message was usually so garbled from the first person as to be unrecognizable from what it began as. So goes the tech blogosphere these days.
News moves at a fast and furious pace, with each blogger trying to jump on the latest news [...]

It seems from watching my news feeds that company executives from Yahoo and its properties are fleeing as fast as they can, like rats from a sinking ship. You can hardly blame them. Yahoo has been a shining example of what not to do the past few months - hardly confidence inspiring.
The two most recent departees are Flickr 's founders Catrina Fake and Stewart Butterfield. Flickr being one of my favorite of Yahoo' s cool properties, the news got my [...]

As an avid Apple afficianado and advocate of all things open source, my stance on Microsoft is usually clear-cut: I don't care for it.  Everything about Microsoft's business practices rubs me wrong.  With that said, I was surprised to learn that Microsoft has been toying with its own little pet social network since the beginning of the year.
After all, Microsoft invested hundreds of millions in Facebook just last year, and all the talk of a large-scale Yahoo! and Facebook [...]