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Is Facebook really worth nearly $1 billion? Analysts easily agree the answer is yes. Reports are mixed, but the latest is that Yahoo! has just laid a $900 million offer on the table to acquire the social networking site. Created less than 3 years ago by Mark Zuckerberg, a then sophmore at Harvard, the site has grown to become one of the hottest sites on the web, drawing an astonishing 14.8 million unique visitors last month alone.

After rejecting a previous offer of $750 million made by Viacom earlier in the year, Yahoo! is hoping their offer, combined with a commitment to keep the company somewhat independent, with Mr. Zuckerberg in charge, will be accepted.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of Keira Knightley, but crowning her the greatest ever Hollywood starlet is a bit presumptuous. In a poll conducted by Yahoo! that surveyed 1,600 moviegoers, Keira beat out third place finisher Scarlett Johansson, and the legendary Judy Garland, known best for her role as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, who came in second.

* Summer is here again and chalk outlined bodies on towels are being used to remind us about skin cancer, but Adjab wonders if people get it.

* Lego reminds us to use our imagination.

* Google says that, It’s all about the photos, and introduces Picasa Web Albums, their answer to Yahoo!’s Flickr.

* ABC has concluded that people will sit through commercials in exchange for free TV.

In a bid to challenge Google’s market dominance, Yahoo! and eBay have announced that they have forged an advertising alliance. Yahoo! will be allowed to sell advertising on eBay while using PayPal to service the payments. While it sounds like a power play, neither party reaps large benefits from the union. eBay will receive new ways to generate money, but they still do not address the rise in competition such as Google’s Base and even Yahoo!’s own auction service. Yahoo! will gain a potentially huge expansion for its advertising business, however they just lost their largest single partner, MSN, when they decided to sell their own advertising.

Meanwhile, in the other camp, Google has announced a new alliance with computer make Dell. All Dell computers will ship with Google software already installed on them. The software includes several personal computer applications, a Google toolbar and a co-branded homepage. This move allows Google to directly challenge Microsoft’s software dominance.

Google definitely has the edge, but Yahoo is attempting to gain ground with the release of their new online maps. Yahoo Maps beta, while flash heavy, has many improvements over their previous offering which include extensive drag-and-drop functionality for location addresses, hybrid image maps and a very, very helpful navigator tool in the upper right corner.

The new Yahoo Maps Beta also offers satellite imagery and hybrid map/satellite views, but those were much slower to load. However, the fact that Yahoo has made this step to satellite views is a big plus for the company. Google and MSN have already been serving satellite and hybrid maps for quite some time. Here is a Yahoo satellite hybrid map.

In addition to the standard, “simple” API, the Yahoo Maps team offers Ajax and Flash (ActionScript, JavaScript, and Flex) APIs for developers to create their own mapplications.

And as if going after Google Maps weren’t enough, Yahoo has also stepped up the online airfare search game as well. Targetting sites such as Kayak.com, SideStep.com, Orbitz.com and Expedia.com, Yahoo’s new FareChase technology aims to make life easier for travelers looking for bargains on the Web.

Yahoo announced last week that it had integrated its FareChase technology into its main search engine, so that it can scan multiple sites for airlines, hotels and car rentals and show the lowest-price offers directly in results whenever someone types in, say, “lowest fares to Las Vegas.”

In a bid to curb spam, Yahoo and AOL will be charging companies 1/4 of a cent to a penny per email message if they want to ensure it gets delivered to their intended recipients. By paying a virtual postage, larger companies will be able to bypass the spam filters setup the two email providers.

AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users’ main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links. As is the case now, mail arriving from addresses that users have added to their AOL address books will not be treated as spam.

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But critics of the plan say that the two companies risk alienating both their users and the companies that send e-mail. The system will apply not only to mass mailings but also to individual commercial messages like order confirmations from online stores and customized low-fare notices from airlines.

Both Yahoo and AOL hope to offer this service in the next couple of months.

[via NY Times and The BBC]

Yahoo has silently acquired del.icio.us, a startup company that allows people to easily tag, compile and share their favorite online content.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company didn’t disclose how much it paid for New York-based del.icio.us because the purchase price wasn’t large enough to have a significant impact on its finances.

Del.icio.us will continue to run its own website, which allows users to create a personal account so they can create a page devoted to their favorite online articles, music and reviews. The material can be shared with others simply by sending along the web link. The content also can be identified with labels, or “tags,” to make it simpler to find.

It will be interesting to see what Yahoo ultimately decides to do with the service, but whatever the case, hopefully they have learned from the mistakes they made after acquiring Flickr.

[via Wired]

Yahoo has launched a new RSS via SMS service as part of an update to its alerts feature.

The free service will send a message to your phone with every new item posted to an RSS feed. The feature works with any RSS feed, but is likely most useful for feeds used to connect small groups of people (group projects, clubs, etc) where volume will be lower than on a news site.

Since normal text messaging fees apply (though there is no fee from Yahoo) make sure to use this feature wisely.

Read: MobileTracker

[via textually.org]

Yahoo, in cooperation with corporations, non-profit groups and universities, announced that they are planning to digitize hundreds of thousands of books and make them available online.

The new project, called the Open Content Alliance, has the wide-ranging goal of digitizing historical works of fiction along with specialized technical papers. In addition to Yahoo, its members include the Internet Archive, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, as well as the National Archive in England and others.

The digitization of print materials has been a continual effort on the part of various research libraries for the last several years. But the potential power of the new collaboration lies in the collective ability of many institutions to compare and cross-reference materials, said Daniel Greenstein, librarian for the California Digital Library at the University of California.

“This is the kind of platform we’ve been looking for for a long time,” said Dr. Greenstein. “Libraries digitize their stuff and put it up, but none of the libraries have comprehensive collections of everything. Now we can say: ‘We have this particular edition of Mark Twain, but it’s not as good as that one over there,’ and we add it to the collection.”

Hasn’t Yahoo been paying attention to the news? Unless they know something that Google doesn’t, chances are that Yahoo’s Open Content Alliance project will soon face the same copyright violation issues Google is currently experiencing.

[via NY Times]

Yahoo, feeling pressure from its rivals, is in the process of releasing a new, sleeker version of its free e-mail service.

With its changes, Yahoo’s e-mail will look more like a traditional inbox that operates through a software program installed on a computer hard drive instead of being hosted on the internet. Yet Yahoo’s redesigned service still relies on a web browser and won’t require its users to install anything on their computers.

Using dynamic HTML, Yahoo’s e-mail accounts will feature an inbox containing all e-mails on the top of the page with a separate pane for reading e-mail below it. The feature is meant to enable users to scroll through an e-mail folder without having to click back and forth between Web pages.

Currently the new service is in its testing phase with a “’sizable’ portion of its current e-mail account holders” already having received invitations to experiment with the new features.

[via Wired]