The latest rumor gracing the gossip-rags is that Yahoo! has been in talks buy Digg, a user-generated news-site of sorts. If true (it's being denied at the moment) it would come on heals of the company buying out del.icio.us, and of course community photo page Flickr. So you can see how this whole thing is playing out, Google is printing their own money by dominating the search game, while Yahoo! is spending money on buying the hot community site du jour. Hmm, which strategy will pay off?
While Google's efficient search product usually does an excellent job at directing you to the page that you need, Yahoo's properties are all about bombarding you with a million links every few minutes. The Digg front page is always filled with links to useless and noisy articles like Man Gets Ajax to Run on Commodore64!!! and Apple Files Patent for iPhone!!!!.
Sometimes it can be fun to trawl through it all, looking for stuff, but if anything, I think there's a shift away from this kind of link-bombardment. Yesterday's meme was that blog aggregators were turning people's brains to mush. Several folks echoed (surprise!) that. VC Brad Feld, said yesterday that Nassim Taleb's Fooled By Randomness inspired him to stop using his MyYahoo! page, which contained far too much noise, and meaningless temporal information. I can say, from my own experience, that I've been deleting feeds from my feedreader, far more than I've been adding them (probably a ratio of 5-to-1). Perhaps it's too early to sense a seachange, but if I'm right, then Yahoo's timing couldn't be worse.
It's been said that Yahoo is trying to build a platform for brand building, but really, the company appears to be a mess. There's nothing coherent, their homepage looks like a pig's lunch, and they're constantly playing a game of catch up, trying to snap up what's hot. I wouldn't say that the sailing is clear for Google, not by a longshot, but it doesn't look like Yahoo is gonna give them a game.
Yahoo has long ago become a mass. On the contrary, Google only proves that it is the best search engine and internet company.
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Posted by: flykoo | October 25, 2006 at 04:47 PM