Peter Cooper

Microsoft Offers $44.6bn for Yahoo!

In just the last ten minutes, news has come out that Microsoft, in its seemingly never ending courtship of Yahoo!, has now proposed an acquisition valued at $44.6bn. This follows suggestions from analysts in the last few days that someone should buy Yahoo!.

It doesn’t mean too much to me, and it’d be nice to see Yahoo get the shot in the arm it clearly needs. They have a lot of cool properties, but seemingly no strategy, no deep involvement with the community (they started out well with their APIs, but kinda left them out to pasture - and HackDay was good too) and Yahoo has never been seen as a cool place to work (or a cool site to use! - since at least 1997).

The only side effect of an MS purchase of Yahoo will be that I’ll be rolling out my own del.icio.us clone, and moving to it, and evacuating from Flickr to somewhere else (perhaps Smugmug - if you have any suggestions, do comment) because there’s no chance in hell that I’m using Microsoft’s online services (I have a great amount of respect for Microsoft’s programming language and research divisions, but the rest of it stinks) other than as a casual browser. Personally I’d rather see Google buy them, but Google would be attacked for monopolizing the market, as MS has been in the operating systems field over the years.

Would love it if Google bid on Yahoo..
Having delicious, flickr and answers integrated into their services & api’s would be amazing. It’s not going to happen though is it ?

Imagine having answers integrated into gmail!

Regards best photo sharing sites SmugMug is definately your best option - you can use all the features for free for 14 days without any restrictions. Worth checking it out!

Massive news Coop!

If your rolling out a del.icio.us clone after Microsoft’s (possible) acquisition of Yahoo then let me know!

The only Yahoo related product I do use is del.icio.us. I too would probably migrate away from this too something else. Have you checked out Instapaper?

Not before now I hadn’t, but I just had a play with it and it’s surprisingly nice. It’s nowhere near power enough for what I need to do, but it’s a really nice implementation for what it does do.

(Just to pre-empt anyone who wants to suggest Ma.gnolia.. I don’t like it. It’s too designed, too focused on community, and feels clumsy to me. Not saying it’s not a good site or a good achivement, but it’s not right for me.)