Yes yesterday noticed one thing when a friend logged into his email account at yahoo at the top left area in the window there was a window which caught my attention the picture of it is given above it said check other mail and there it should http://www.rediffmail.com so any a very very curious techie I clicked on the link to see what surprise was in store for me it took me to the mail accounts page and there was a message shown which said unfortunately there was a problem
the image is given below of the message

I am totally perplexed so once my friends account was logged off from I logged in to my yahoo account and that box was not there for me and no my friend is not a premium yahoo mail user he is a free account user like me.
Is there something that I am missing here are yahoo and rediffmail working on integrating their mail offerings and allowing people to migrate their email accounts to and fro or will both offer a interface with which you can access both your mailboxes from a single login to any of the vendors site if there is a deal in the offering well that will be a big big boost for rediff

Search on google for yahoo rediffmail threw up one of this as a result this says that yahoo and rediff have a strategic alliance to jointly promote online shopping and mobile content across both portals but now maybe that has grown from just the shopping and mobile content to their mail offerings too.

Yahoo has a product called pipes it is a neat little product built on top of plagger (read it somewhere cant remember where though) and YUI library for the nice ajax interface and the back end for interacting with RSS is based on plagger.

Microsoft has a similar product called popfly which is built on top of Microsoft web 2.0 framework which some people have called flash killer silverlight it is a nice little offering but the adoption is what is the worrying factor but with this framework going into some Microsoft products even the adoption of silverlight framework will pick up slowly and reach the main stream audience.

The latest entrant among the web trinity going for the gold pot in the online business is Google which is somewhat odd as Google is usually the first one to innovate the entry of Google also confuses because now it seems that Google can make money on monetizing this mashups with their latest purchase of feedburner as the other two in the game are giving this as just play toys to the developer communities of geeks who want a bit of extra power when dealing with their RSS feeds.

Well this trinity is after each others market share so it makes sense for them to launch copy cat products as soon as the others in the race do it as all are sitting on a talent on some smart engineers who can innovate as well as reverse engineer and improve upon.

The last tech bubble was because of unrealistic and not sustainable business models for startups and lots of money was pumped into this startups by VC’s then but now the trend is for some of this web 2.0 startups the barrier of entry is not high (in terms of manpower,infrastructure etc) like how it was in the 90’s so this startups can go to market with limited resources but most of this startups are building their services or products to have a limited monetization options for them and if they don’t have any monetization option then just join an ad network. well there is nothing wrong with this model of using ads to monetize I remember reading one of the web 2.0 startups for sale on ebay the owner said that the money made from google adsense was sufficient to cover the basic server costs ya well good but then it is only enough and not more so for more money you need to get more users and more users mean more server costs and so the income coming in is in line with the growth graph of users and consumes 100% of the income if you follow this model the break even is reached but then you have to find other ways to take it to the next level.

With all this activity going in the online advertising space makes me really wonder is online advertising business as lucrative and sustainable as it looks look at me on an average I think I have atleast 20 queries on google every day but I never click on the sponsored links I only go to the natural search results but then again I think many many people will be there like me who dont click on the sponsored links but still google makes billions in revenue only from advertisers money yes I know they can actually help you track your campaigns  with better tools to track the ROI on your campaign but still I dont think it is for long time sustainable business for others because google has one thing till now that makes them rake in the ad revenues and that is their search technology all the ad networks sprouting around addressing niche markets or being restricted to just a small geographic section etc etc personally I dont think most of them stand a chance unless they can identify the next google killer and associate with them but then there is good hope because of the other wannabes in the ad space Microsoft, yahoo, aol and others are on the look out for them. Recent buy out of aquantive by microsoft, google buying out doubleclick, aol acquirring two firms one for the mobile ad space and one for online ads. WPP acquiring 24/7 real media, yahoo picking up stakes in ad companies etc etc.

The deals have been huge and sure the space is booming(only because more people are coming online) but then again the online ad biz makes sense only if you have publishers who have huge huge  number of users and this is where the fight in the future will be interesting as the publishers will become more demanding and the advertisers become more choosy over their spendings once this happen I think the mad rush to buy ad companies for huge sum of money just to justify competing with google will go and sanity will return again. I just hope it is not a bubble and some sanity returns in the online ad space.

Looking at Yahoos latest financial standings that looks like a good price for financial details see the following

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=yhoo http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=Goog

According to the latest updates Microsoft has a cash reserve of 25.48 billion at their disposal so if they go with the valuation of 50 billion and yahoo decides to accept it then they still have to raise another 25 billion more which I don’t think will be a problem for them and google also has 11.94 billion dollars in cash( I am also looking out to see who is going to be googles next acquisition target)

Yahoo also has cash reserves of 2.35 billion but then again the other two giants are debt free where as yahoo has a debt of  749.76 million
well I would guess that bigger question is does yahoo want to sell to microsoft??
or the other way around does microsoft want to buy yahoo??

Both the parties have not yet confirmed any sort of negotiations but then again this is not the sort of deal u want to put it out in the market before anything concrete happens.

But if microsoft is willing to buy yahoo then the questions that need to be answered are

1)How much will they pay??

2)What will they do with yahoo (brand yahoo is one of the most recognised brands in cyberspace)??

3)Which of yahoo offerings will survive and which ones will vanish??

4)Will their shareholders be happy with this deal (since yahoo is almost in a coma state at present)??

5)The mother of all questions would be will be combine entity be able to take on google (otherwise microsoft shareholders will not see any benefit of this deal)?

If this rumor is true then I guess Microsoft’s concern is not the price tag or the debt or the usefulness of yahoo brand and access to its loyal users but the fact that integrating yahoo’s assets (IP and web properties) into Microsoft’s family of products will be a gigantic task and all the issues faced while integrating and migrating hotmail into the msn family will come back to haunt them and also the open source movement will lose one of its champions yahoo is the user of many open source offerings like php, mysql, apache etc etc

Well only time will tell whether this is true or false but overall I dont think the merged entity will be able to give Google a decent fight why you ask? well because google does one thing well and that is search unless someone else comes up with a better search engine google will remain in the limelight (yes I have tried Microsoft search engine and it is good but then again it is not part of Firefox  and also it does not make you come back looking for more information the way Google does)

I am assuming that it is the most widely used IM client in India because people were not onto the Hotmail and msn bandwagon because of the slow crawling dial up speeds that were available at that point of time and yahoo became a darling to the thousands of Indians online at that point of time.

Yahoo is losing this edge now to Google and most of the people (including me)have made our gmail accounts as the final frontier in managing a mailbox.Well I am not surprised that yahoo came out with a web version of their most used service after their free email service off course (Again my assumption) and rumors were ripe some months back that yahoo was going to acquire meebo but I guess these deal didnt see the day of light.

Now here we are with yahoo’s own version of ajaxified IM client well I am perplexed by yahoo’s use of flash as a platform for this rather then building one using plain old javascript and ajax technologies build on top of their popular open source yui library.

Well I did login and use the service it is pretty neat I must say since  it is very simple to use and nice clean interface  and easy to use and explore and also the colours are easy on the eyes (even though I am a bit disappointed with the whole purple theme that yahoo has going now for them i would love to see some more vibrant colours the purple colour is giving them a funeral kinda look and it goes well with the state there are in now )

And one of the most fun feature that I liked in yahoo messenger was the feature of leaving offline messages and am glad that yahoo has carried this useful little feature in the ajaxified version of yahoo messenger too.

Well this is one of the new cool offerings from yahoo considering that most of the yahoo users are now in the corp world and that they are on networks where they no longer have privileges of installing desktop applications on their office pc’s and this will give them access to their yahoo pals.  I was sad that this offering from yahoo did not create much buzz in the blogosphere and it is a shame that a decent offering from yahoo goes unnoticed and a Google’s april fools joke is giving a wide coverage well that goes to show that the new darling of the media is Google and not Yahoo.

I am really hoping that Yahoo gets it groove back their ability to innovate is almost dead well I guess the first thing is drop the purple gloomy colour and go vibrant and then look at the consumer offerings and see where they have missed out in recent times (they have missed out on a whole lot) but I guess after the colour change they need management change and then they have to rejuvenate  their employees and wake them from their sleep and motivate them to come up with gd stuff

Also the other thing you will notice is a .php extension to the page when you login to the webmessenger which is a first for me since i have known for a long time that they have replaced their old yscript with php for some time now but this is one of the rare occasions that they say openly(via the browser address bar hahahaha) if u do a search you will find lots of presentations by Yahoo and its employees on php and mysql and how it is being used at Yahoo

I am wondering what this is all about since they are saying that it is a service I am guessing something in lines of a code repository OR a search engine that finds source code of open source projects

well we just have to wait and watch what this new service is all about
also it has got me wondering how will yahoo react to this bit of news

if anyone has any idea as to what this might be or would like to take a guess leave a comment

update: i know what it is now if you dont goto http://code.google.com/hosting/ this service is not ultra cool but cool none the less