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As Microsoft and Yahoo! look to merge, this is turning in to a real soap opera…

Microsoft & Google actually fancy each other; Microsoft loves Googles youthful energy and dynamic rise to wealth and Google loves the established, ‘old school’ power of Microsoft… but it’s a forbidden love. They can never be together, which drives them crazy and makes them want to constantly hurt and out do each other.

In the latest ’series’ of their forbidden love, they pull Yahoo! in to their destructive love-hate relationship…

Microsoft has a one night stand with Yahoo! and then proposes, though not because Microsoft actually fancies Yahoo! - it’s more to get Google’s attention! Something about hurting the ones you love.

Ironically, Yahoo! doesn’t want to marry Microsoft either, but she realises that she’s at a stage in her life where her looks have long faded and her living expenses are a bit higher than her income. Whilst popular, she may not get the chance to bag another rich suitor like Microsoft… but she could hold out to find someone who loves her for who she is. Dilemma.

Yahoo! is unsure about Microsoft’s proposal and decides to think about it, but Microsoft is used to getting any girl he wants and this ‘playing hard to get act’ is something he’s seen many times before. Normally Microsoft would just flash some more bling and the girl would get in the car, but this time, Microsoft feels he’s already flashed enough to Yahoo! so he just goes for the affirmative act of ordering Yahoo! to get in the car. Yahoo! runs crying in to the night…

Confused and upset, Yahoo! seeks solace in the arms of other men. The first to hear about her vulnerability is MySpace who decides to take the opportunity to have a quickie with her (because he’s that kind of guy), but in the morning Yahoo! is back out in the cold. Now she’s feeling really dirty, who should come along but Google. Google knows the situation and wants to get back at Microsoft for hurting him with the initial Yahoo! proposal. Google tells Yahoo! what she wants to hear. Google will love her for who she is and promises to share everything with her - unlike Microsoft. But Google wants to take things slowly, one step at a time. This way Google can really get back at Microsoft without never really needing to commit to Yahoo! (as soon as Microsoft has had enough and the proposal is withdrawn, Google will drop Yahoo! like a sack of potatoes).

Poor Yahoo!. She may be desperate but she’s not stupid. She knows she can’t marry Microsoft or Google as her parents would never approve. So Yahoo! agrees to Google’s ’slowly, slowly’ relationship as rumours surface of stolen kisses with other lovers, notably AOL…

Will Yahoo! actually marry anyone?
Will Yahoo! come home from work early to find Microsoft and Google in bed together?
Does anyone still care who AOL sleeps with?
Will MySpace ever clean up it’s act?

Tune in next week (at this rate) for the next thrilling installment of the MicroHoo! soap opera.

The future is coming closer as TGV passengers (with laptops or smartphones) on the (beta) wi-fi-equipped trains can get internet access during their journey. The service (currently free to both First and Second class passengers) is supposed to run at 2Mbps download and 512Kbps upload rates (hopefully that is a real measurement of the speed and not a Virgin Media measurement where 2Mbps actually means about 12Kbps).

The system, which is still in a test phase, only supports 50 users per train at present - approx. 15-20% of the total passengers per train (hmm, so it has the contention support of a Virgin Media line then…)

In a move heralding the ‘full circle’ of the internet, first-time users of the wi-fi service are asked to register via an online form before gaining unrestricted access to the internet and a multimedia portal (remember AOL) that is regularly updated with videos, news, city guides and other content. SNCF hopes the portal will help attract passengers to use the wi-fi service, which is unlikely to be free to use if it is rolled out commercially (ah, that’s the AOL thing again).

Apparently, the portal also has real-time geolocalisation data - showing the speed the train is travelling at, how far the traveller has progressed on their journey and a map of the train’s current location. Very nice, because the train is very likely to change it’s pre-agreed destination path. After all, it’s not like they are attached to rails or anything… Oh, they are. Well, I guess it’s still nice to know where you are on the map. They could try a similar thing in the UK but likelihood is that you would just see lots of red dots bunched together (the trains) and then a few brown dots up ahead (they would be the leaves on the line). The brown dots could be swapped with blue dots (rain) or white dots (snow) or even no dots at all because no-one has any idea what’s going on (Terminal 5 or BA). All of this presumes that you do not use SouthWest trains of course, in which case there simply would not be the room to get your smartphone out - let alone your laptop!

Seriously though, TGV should be commended for what they are doing here. It should have been Eurostar to showcase this - they have missed a trick. So we move closer to a brave new world of always being connected to a high speed internet… unless you are on Virgin Media where your line will display the reliability of a proverbial chocolate teapot. In a volcano. In the fires of Hell. It should also be highlighted that some people never learn from AOL’s mistakes… maybe TGV will make a walled garden next?

Finally, Terminal 5 and BA are crap.

As a response to my earlier post, just thought I’d show you this post taken from Mashable:

In one of the biggest deals yet in the social networking space, AOL announced earlier today that it has acquired Bebo for $850 million. That’s actually more money than News Corp paid to acquire the much larger MySpace, though only about half of what Google shelled out to buy YouTube.

As Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm notes, AOL is acquiring Bebo for $21.25 per user, which is actually a bit less than the $27.62 per user (at the time) that News Corp paid for MySpace, and paltry compared to the $300 per user Facebook is theoretically valued at.

According to AOL, they see the deal as an opportunity to marry IM with social networking – something they have already been trying to do to little fanfare with AIMPages. However, I’ve long been intrigued by the possibilities of doing so, which is one of the reasons I was so bullish on AOL’s Open AIM platform announcement last week. Nonetheless, it’s a lot of money to shell out for a social network with very little traction in the US – MySpace is a whopping 67x bigger than Bebo in the states according to some numbers that Hitwise shared with us.

So, let’s put it to a vote:

There are many factors that make up the value of a social network: users, time on site, open development are just a few, but surely one the most overlooked must be PR. Let’s look at Bebo, which is just about to be bought by AOL for £417m ($850m) in cash. A lot of money indeed, especially as most will be going in the pocket of Michael Birch, the British entrepreneur, who founded Bebo and still owns a big stake in the business - so will make a great deal from the sale.

Bebo is the third-biggest social networking site in the US, behind MySpace and Facebook. Whilst also being the second-biggest in the UK it sits at a lowly ninth on the global leader board. But is it worth £417m? Or did they sell too cheap?

Only last year, Facebook sold a 1.6% share to Microsoft for $240m. Is Facebook really worth 62.5 times the value of Bebo? Applying the same value calculation to key sales points we end up with some interesting results:

62.5 x 40m users (Bebo) = 2.5bn users!
62.5 x 78 page impressions (Bebo) = 4875 page impressions, per user, per day!

Now Facebook (despite what they may want us to believe) does not serve 2.5bn users or 4875 pages/ user. What Facebook does have is the ‘darling’ effect. It is the darling of the valley and has a brilliant PR team (and determined investors) who spin everything. Bebo meanwhile sat in the corner just getting on with things. Bebo does them really well too, but it just does not make a song and dance about everything it does. And that failure to project itself as the next big thing - or at least the thing big enough for everyone to talk about - has potentially cost it hundreds of millions of dollars.

AOL has announced that from the 1st March 2008, Netscape Navigator will be no more. The once omnipresent browser of choice through most of the 1990s will still be around for those of you who still want to use it, but not as a fully-supported browser option.

Athough AOL announced the end of Netscape Navigator at the end of 2007, and then extended it, this time it is really real. The recent small update for Netscape 9 was released in order to help transition users to other browsers. AOL’s alternative browser of choice? Firefox, reports Ars Technica. The open-source browser has gained a lot of steam in the past few years, and AOL has turned much of its browser-centric attention to integrating with the Firefox browser as much as possible, which certainly makes my life easier as a Firefox user.

So for all of you who were once young teens knowing of nothing but the Netscape browser, just see how times have changed. And make sure you switch over to Firefox!