Yahoo along with MySpace and Google would be forming a OpenSocial Foundation to ensure neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial being a community-governed specification for building social applications on the internet.  OpenSocial Foundation would be an independent non-profit entity.

OpenSocial would be handed over to the new organization by July 1. Yahoo! Inc Vice President for Platforms, Wade Chambers mentioned, “Yahoo! believes in supporting community-driven industry specifications and expects that OpenSocial will fuel innovation and make the web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions of users,” and also stated “Our support builds on similar efforts with the OpenID community and will expand the opportunity for developers and publishers to benefit from an open and increasingly social web.”

Read More »

Yahoo Inc. would be moving its Eurpopean headquarters located in London to Switzerland within 18 months. The search giant headquarters would now be near the shores of Lake Geneva.

This move would consist of a 5% work force move and is a part of its ongoing international business stratergy to deliver better financial results, increase its performance and efficiencies and to increase its competitiveness.

It should be noted that Yahoo Inc competitor Google Inc recently opened up their new European Research and Development center in Zurich.

Twitter For Location or the FireEagle platform has open APIs which can send and receive data. It can stream your location information. This can help third party web services gather vital information about your location even without asking from you.

FireEagle, built entirely on Ruby on Rails, a open source framework is an insight from the search product from Yahoo, ZoneTag. This platform would provide information on where you live, the city name, the zip code and can control peoples information on their location.

FireEagle also provides privacy features where a user can log off tracking of their geo location and can also delete all information stored related to their travel. This would be greatly useful in mobile applications like cell phones and Nokia phones with Symbian s60 might carry one of these.

Yahoo announced that it would be soon allowing third parties enhance the Yahoo Search Experience. This might give a new look to search results and might even be the future search list model.

Codenamed “Search Monkey”, the Open Search Platform would provide set of Yahoo APIs which would help third parties and developers modify a search result on Yahoo either by adding additional information, adding images or providing deeper links.
Read More »

Sources from inside stated that Yahoo has already started firing the employees. The cut down is wide spread across all divisions and different locations. However, they did mention that the firing is based on performance ratings and not in a plan to close the entire opterations.

Search engine optimizers have reported of Yahoo Search index and algorithm update. The last time Yahoo had an algorithm update was on December 3rd 2007.

Some webmasters have reported that their traffic has increased with better rankings and better indexing. However, people who had their rankings high for several months even years are disappointed with their rankings in top 5 positions moved towards 30’s and 40’s.

This as search engine observers believe should be due to an update on the search engine’s algorithm. Lets hope for better rankings.

The financial status of Sunnyvale-based company Yahoo Inc went down further in the end of 2007 and as a result, the company has planed to lay off 1,000 of its employees.

However, Yahoo has not informed which areas of expertise would be reduced. It should be noted that Yahoo chucked out 650 employees way back in 2000 during the dot-com break down.
Read More »

Yahoo! Co-founder and the fifth-biggest stakeholder lost half a billion dollars losing investor confidence with the company losing out to competitors and reduction of employees.

Jerry Yang took over as the search giant’s Chief Executive officer in June last year. With a 4 percent stock in Yahoo, Yang has been experiencing the pain in the reducing stock by about a third to $1 billion in the past seven months. Yahoo! further dropped 8.5% in the end of January 2008. The 39-year-old CEO along with his co-founder, David Filo got into the billionaire ranks in 1999 with Yahoo! shares rising up threefolds.

With Yahoo hitting a four year low, Microsoft has eyed on the search engine giant and one of the early pioneers of Internet search, Yahoo Inc. Sources estimate a whooping $50 billion price tag on this weakening Giant.

It should be noted that Microsoft had once negotiated and this is not the first time. Microsoft is now more willing and ready to pay more for this deal. Read More »

The financial status of Sunnyvale-based company Yahoo Inc went down further in the end of 2007 and as a result, the company has planed to lay off 1,000 of its employees.
 
However, Yahoo has not informed which areas of expertise would be reduced. It should be noted that Yahoo chucked out 650 employees way back in 2000 during the dot-com break down.
 
Yahoo Inc earned $205.7 million, this would be a 15 cents per share, during 2007’s final three months, a 23 percent drop from net income of $268.7 million, or 19 cents per share, at the same time in 2006.

With these bad statistics on Yahoo, analysts has alerted investors to expect the worst. The pessimism prompted analysts, on average, to project earnings of 11 cents per share for the period.
  Read More »