No, neither of the merger names really work, but despite this Microsoft and Yahoo are again looking at a merger. According to the New York Post Microsoft had made an offer for Yahoo a few months ago which had been rejected but it looks as if Microsoft have made yet another more vigorous offer this week. Yahoo’s share price reacted appropriately to the rumors, ending Friday at around $31 an increase of 10% for the day. Yahoo’s price tag was a mere $50 billion at the end of trading.

Ever since Google purchased DoubleClick Microsoft has been under pressure to increase it’s own web advertising presence. Purchasing Yahoo would achieve that goal, although it would not make much difference to Google’s search domination. We’re certain that it would take more than a merger of the competition to worry the guys at the plex.

A lot of the media reports stated that the merger would not happen due to the diversity in the culture of the staff. We’ve never noticed that being a problem before with any mergers we’ve been a part of. There’s always a bigger partner whose culture slowly infiltrates the smaller.

With this merger it’s just a question of how much Microsoft want this, will they stump up the cash? And if Bill opens up his wallet Yahoo may not get to play much part in the joint role.

Would a MS-Yahoo merger be a good thing, could it spell the end of Google’s domination? Let us know your thoughts.

It was announced on March the 27th, so it’s a good five days away from April Fools. However, it does sound like a prank: “Yahoo! announces that it’s offering free unlimited e-mail storage starting May this year”. When I first found out, it seemed rather far-fetched, and it still does.

Basically, this means that Yahoo! is giving up one method of income, from users who payed 20$ per year for 2GB of space (and it’s losing those money from users starting May, as they will be refunded, if they want to), and it engages in the race to buy a LOT of storage space.

Irrealistic as it seems, this comes at a turning point in Yahoo!’s mail service. 10 years ago, Yahoo! Mail was being launched, a service which was capable of holding up to 4MB of mail, more than an average attachment today.

On the other hand, this might seem like a method of distracting people from GMail’s gimmick of the ever-expanding mailbox. Whether or not it will work, only time will tell. My guess is it won’t, mainly because people don’t look for storage space when they analyze possible e-mail accounts. Not unless they plan on using that space specifically to store stuff, rather than storing them on their on computer. While this might seem like a godsend for those kinds of people, it’s not. Yahoo!’s service states that abusive accounts will be suspended, however leaving their owners with the possibility of accessing their accounts and their stored data.

Instead of a conclusion, let’s look at what John Kremer, the Vice-President of Yahoo! Mail, said in his announcement:

We hope we’re setting a precedent for the future. Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill? Never having to empty your photo card on your camera to get space back? Enough storage to fit the world’s music, and then some, on your iPod? Sounds like a future without limits.

Very optimistic words, but is it really possible? My guess is it’s not. Because Yahoo!’s Mail is not unlimited, it just means they will have to acquire an enormous ammount of extra storage space to fit the e-mails of approximately 250 million people worldwide. This is something that you can not do, with today’s technology, with your iPod.

Yahoo recently launched a suggestion site that uses the Digg mechanism and resembles graphically with the well known news promoting website. However I don’t understand all the fuss around this, since Yahoo initially credited Digg for this in a post on the official blog.

“We call it a Suggestion Board — you can browse suggestions from other site visitors or post your own. Digg-style voting means we can quickly discover what’s most important to users. In addition to reading feedback from other users, you’ll find responses from Yahoo! employees about the issues. Product teams regularly read and take action on your feedback. Though we aren’t always going to immediately act on it, it’s incredibly helpful to us in making the best sites we can… and we’ve even been known to reward great suggestions with some Yahoo! schwag.”

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the “ue” this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it’s a good start on the Unix shell for mash ups. It can extract dates and locations and what it considers to be “text entities.

It’s something different than the Google Reader we’ve all got used to, and it’s worth a try.

Yahoo has started developing a brand new version of Yahoo! Messenger, specially created for Windows Vista. They say the new software is built from scratch and it aims to combine the reliable and easy-to-use features of Messenger with the cutting-edge experience of Vista.

The new version is not available just yet, but they have published a set of 4 screenshots, and they simply look amazing. You may check them out below. Click the thumbnails to enlarge.

Left to right: Sports widget, tabbed conversations, chat window, contact list.

Most of us are using Yahoo, and its hit software, Yahoo Messenger. Starting with Messenger 8, the software is open to developers to create widgets that work within the client. Along the time (more than half a year), the users shared their preferences and some of the widgets became more popular than others. I am planning to reveal these widgets further.

Note: All reviewed widgets can be installed for your Yahoo Messenger if the following requirements are met:
1. Yahoo Messenger v. 8+
2. You are signed in to the application
3. You click the download link ;)

The first and most popular of them all, is Yahoo! Avatars Space. You can hang out in style with your virtual friends. Launch this plug-in to open a cool Avatars-only environment that you can customize by changing the background, furniture and artwork. Change your Avatar’s mood on the fly and use the DECORATE command in your IM conversation to spice up the room with pictures from Yahoo! Image Search.

Second, the YEmotePLUS plugin, unlike its predecessor was re-written from scratch to include all the features users requested and some additional. For those that want more then the simple smiley menu of Yahoo, YEmotePLUS gives you access to ALL the secret and hidden Emoticons / Smileys quickly, and they even animate on mouse-over.

The third plugin in the list is called Pando and it comes in helping those who need to share large files and even folders, at a time, with their contacts list. Do I have to say more?

NewsGator’s editors search through hundreds of thousands RSS feeds to find you the coolest video and audio podcasts and the most interesting stories from around the web, so you can enjoy them right within your Yahoo! Messenger. You can even personalize your experience by creating a free NewsGator online account, selecting your own feeds, and reading your stories from within the NewsGator plug-in.

Last but not least, here comes Eazibo. The best way to interactively and instantly make flowcharts or diagrams, share photos and make annotations with your friends online while talking on VOIP. It’s called “Instant Graphics”. Futuristic, but real today.

These being said, I’m going to let you explore the widget universe of Yahoo Messenger, as soon that I let you know we’re looking forward to hear your suggestions, opinions and comments.

These are some mock-ups of the two most used Search Engines “out there”. You can sense the irony and humor in every little word on the pages. I will let you enjoy the pictures (click thumbnails to enlarge - 3 total thumbs ; 1 - Google ; 2/3 - Yahoo).