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The Yahoo! and Microsoft acquisition talks have finally come to an end  - and Google seem to have come out of it as the clear winner.

After a long-running discussion, Yahoo! have decided to partner with Google, building on their recent ad partnership. Yahoo! will now display Google ads next to its search results in the US and Canada from September. Google and Yahoo! also plan to make their instant messaging tools compatible. In total, Yahoo! are expected to gain $800m in additional annual revenues from the deal.

Viacom’s legal battle with Google over YouTube’s alleged copyright infringement has developed further since my first installment. Viacom, which owns MTV and Paramount Pictures, alleged that YouTube is guilty of massive copyright infringement after finding around 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programmes on YouTube.

The latest news from the lawsuit is the ruling by a US court that Google must hand Viacom a YouTube viewing log with details of everyone who has ever watched any video on YouTube (so basically everyone on the planet..) The viewing log will contain the log-in ID of millions of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details - and will total more than 12 terabytes of data - bad news for everyone out there who may have watched some copyrighted videos (so again, basically everyone on the planet…)

Viacom say they want the data to “compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing video with that of non-infringing videos”. But, digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the EFF) are arguing that the ruling is a “set-back to privacy rights” and is potentially unlawful because the log data will contain personally identifiable data. They are urging Viacom to “back off this overbroad request” want Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users. I can’t see it happening though, and I think there are going to be some pretty harsh words towards Viacom - and the Judge that ruled the decision.

The court have also ruled that Google must divulge the details of all videos that have been removed from YouTube for any reason.

MySpace was up 3% in April compared to April 2007, with a commanding 58.8 million users, according to data from WOMMA member company Nielsen Online. Facebook grew 56% over the same period and now boasts 22.5 million users. LinkedIn’s audience was up an enormous 361%, leaping from 1.9 million to 8.7 million users. Google’s Blogger was once again ranked the top-visited blog site with 38.4 million users, up 40% from last year.

For the full article, visit: http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/top-10-us-social-network-and-blog-site-rankings-issued-for-april-4658/

Lycos Europe, one of the dominating search giants of the 90s, is now up for auction. Unable to compete with Google’s power, the search engine ran into net losses of EUR 5.9 million for the first quarter this year, according to PaidContent.

Dresdner Kleinwort is now Lycos’ advisor in its bid to find a new strategy - which should clearly start with trimming their fat. They don’t need to be so big to be competitive. Small and flexible teams are really successful today, because they can react quickly to the frequent changes in the Internet world - something that Lycos has not done.

However, this may be difficult for Lycos. There have already been a number of cost-cutting measures undertaken at Lycos Europe recently, eliminating around EUR 6.2 million. But there were still losses.

Good luck to whoever takes Lycos on…

News for all you iPhone users out there:  Google News is now available for iPhone and iPod Touch, and it looks really nice (as you can see in the image)

To reach it from your device, you can either:

- Go to www.google.com, click on the “more” tab and follow the link to Google News
- Go to www.google.com and do a search, then click on the News link at the top of the screen
- Go directly to Google News at news.google.com in your browser

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.

I think it’s safe to say that it is now officially Facebook vs. everyone else when it comes to OpenSocial!

Yahoo has just announced it’s support for Google’s OpenSocial initiative, and it has now joined forces with MySpace and Google to form the non-profit OpenSocial Foundation. The idea behind the foundation is to “ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web.”

Others who are also in on the foundation include: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. So, basically, out of all the social networks and web giants on the web, Facebook is the only one that’s out of the loop - for now.

In the OpenSocial camp there is, of course, a lot of hand shaking, back patting and congratulating. Yahoo says they believe “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;” MySpace is “setting new industry specifications for social web application development,” while Google is reassuring us that “OpenSocial will be forever free and open..” All three companies will work on OpenSocial, everything will, of course, stay under the Creative Commons copyright license, and they’ve created an open source reference implementation called Shindig, available at incubator.apache.org/shindig/.

The official web site for the Foundation is opensocial.org, while the technical bits are still over at code.google.com/apis/opensocial/.

Microsoft Chief Executive, Eric Schmidt,  has stated that any deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! could be “bad for the Internet”.  Google have already made it clear that they believe that such a deal could have implications for the openness of the Internet, and exert an “inappropriate…influence” over the Internet.

When Microsoft proposed a buyout of Yahoo for $44.6bn last month (which was rejected by Yahoo’s board), experts said that the buyout was an attempt by Microsoft to challenge Google’s dominance. And Eric Schmidt admitted that he would be concerned by any kind of acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft.

However, earlier this month, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has said that they will gain market share against Google in search and advertising, even if led to his “last breath” at the firm.

As we told you last week, Yahoo have put back their decision to at least April, and now Microsoft have threatened to oust Yahoo’s 10 directors if it can’t broker an amicable takeover.

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:

Yeah, it’s kinda old by now but I’ve mentioned this video a few times recently and people were asking to watch it - so I dug this out of the archives. It’s not awesome by any stretch, the timing and acting leaves a lot to be desired but there are some great visual gags - like how irritating the Facebook girl is, the drunk MySpace drawing genitalia and the dubious relationship between ebay and PayPal.