Blackhacker

Microsoft offers $44.6 bln for Yahoo; targets ‘dominant player’ - MarketWatch
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Microsoft Corp. on Friday offered to buy search-engine operator Yahoo Inc. for $31 a share, or $44.6 billion, in an effort to better compete with online-advertising juggernaut Google Inc.

The article goes on to say that the point of the offer is so the MSFT can compete with Google.  Which makes sense, Yahoo! has been losing share price, just posted a quarterly loss, a announced layoffs, making it vulnerable to a take over bid.

Lots of times these deals are more trouble than they are worth, thins AOL(link) and Time Warner, HP and Compaq. Time will tell.

BetaNews | Yahoo to embrace OpenID standard for validating users
“All Yahoo IDs will be OpenIDs on January 30,” a Yahoo spokesperson confirmed to BetaNews late this morning, in a change-over that may elevate the whole issue of users’ online identities to a new level.Yahoo is calling its embrace of OpenID this morning a breakthrough in the field of Web user identity. Over the next few months, other Web sites that employ OpenID 2.0 validation, including all those not necessarily hosted by Yahoo, will be able to look to Yahoo as a validator of usernames.

Glad to see OpenId is really gaining traction. Its an open standard that ANY one can implement for FREE. Its a standard that is built on existing technologies, so any one who has a website already has the pieces they need to use this. And with Yahoo backing it looks like it will have the traction to be THE way authentication will be done on the Internet.

update:

I realize that I sometimes don’t explain things well, so I dug up this talk by Scott Kveton, CEO of JanRain , a player and developer of openid. He does a better job than me.

Yahoo! and Microsoft Bridge Global Instant Messaging Communities: Beta testing of unprecedented interoperability between Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger with Voice lets users communicate across IM services.
SUNNYVALE, Calif., and REDMOND, Wash. — July 12, 2006 — Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: “YHOO”) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: “MSFT”) today will begin limited public beta testing of interoperability between their instant messaging (IM) services that enable users of Windows Live® Messenger, the next generation of MSN® Messenger, and Yahoo!® Messenger with Voice to connect with each other. This interoperability — the first of its kind between two distinct, global consumer IM providers — will form the world’s largest consumer IM community, approaching 350 million accounts.1

One of the most frustrating things about IM is that people on different systems can not communicate. AOL(link), Yahoo! and Microsoft have kept it this way. Only Google has opened it network in a standard way that allows interoperability. Unfortunatly NONE of the large IM services have taken GOOG up on the offer yet. Well YHOO and MSFT are holding a limited public beta to test interoperability between those two services. Naturally they wish to combine forces and take on AIM(link) which I believe is still the dominant IM and the ever looming threat of Google. Maybe someday ALL of the big IM services will embrace XMPP or some other open standard that allows any service to “talk” with any other service and we will have a truly ubiquities IM communication that would surpass the phone, the postal system and even email. And hopefully this will happen before I loose my sight to cataracts.

All other internet companies
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bow

Google is now an ICANN-accredited registrar of domain names, providing it with yet another potential line of expansion. The fast-growing search provider is approved to sell names in seven top-level domains (TLDs) including .com, .net, .org, .biz., info, .name and .pro.

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How does Google plan to use its new status as a domain registrar? Speculation abounds. One of the most intriguing theories, outlined at Datamonitor, is that Google will use its access to the list of recently sold domains to clean up its search results, resetting a site’s "PageRank" when its domain changes hands.