Yahoo's Acquisition Pattern: Smart and Cheap. Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus Yahoo has had its problems lately. Bad financial results in the 3rd quarter of 2006 and the peanut butter manifesto of senior vice president Brad Garlinghouse resulted in doubt about the company's ability to compete against Google and others. Some also think that Google's YouTube acquisition meant that Yahoo had failed in the crucial online video industry. But for us, things are not so dark. In this article we look into Yahoo's recent acquisitions and their new de-portalized strategy. Acquisitions in the Web 2.0 Era Today, Yahoo spends very little in acquisition when compared to the dot com era.
Now let's look into some of the acquisitions in this era of the Web (which for our purposes here, we'll say is 2005 and beyond). Blo.gs - Blog Search We don't know how much Yahoo paid for Blo.gs, but the number is estimated to be very very low - more at acqu-hiring levels. Flickr - Photo Search Upcoming.org - meetup, event search Jumpcut & Bix. Flickr Leech. Php code for flickr. Collaborative knowledge gardening | InfoWorld | Test Center | Au. Next month I’ll be giving a talk on social software to an audience of CTOs. To prime the pump, I’ve been spending some time with two of the newer services in the space: Flickr and del.icio.us. Neither focuses primarily on the six-degrees-of-separation dynamic that drives LinkedIn, Orkut, Friendster, and Spoke. Instead, both Flickr and and del.icio.us address specific activities that benefit from an informal, diverse network of people.
Flickr, as I would explain it to my friends and family, is a way to easily upload and share digital photos. And del.icio.us does the same thing, only for Web bookmarks. To CTOs, though, I’d say that both are collaborative systems for building a shared database of items, developing a metadata vocabulary about the items, performing metadata-driven queries, and monitoring change in areas of interest. Conventional wisdom holds that people will never assign metadata tags to content. Abandoning taxonomy is the first ingredient of success. Feedback is immediate. Caterina.net.
OReilly Network -- Stewart Butterfield on. By Richard Koman 02/04/2005 We collect images with cameraphones and so forth, but we have no good mechanism for advancing them out into the world. Here's a mechanism for batching them into a locked-and-loaded tool for firing them into the world. -- Ben Cerveny, Ludicorp's Itinerant Philosopher At the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference in 2004, a startup called Flickr introduced a funny little social networking app that let you upload digital photos into chatroom and IM conversations.
While the original launch met with rave reviews from attendees, the Flickr team kept adding features and evolving the service. By July 2004, they had achieved a critical mass of features, and Flickr was becoming the hottest thing on the net. As of this writing, Flickr boasts 270,000 users, four million photos, 30 percent monthly growth in users, and 50 percent monthly growth in photos. Several of these factors come together in a simple post by Cory Doctorow on the Boing Boing site. FlickrBlog. Flickr Tool.