How much would Google help Yahoo if they worked together

You've probably lost interest by now in the Yahoo-Microsoft-AOL-Google dealings (if you were following it at all), but here's an interesting projection - look at the financial estimates of increased revenue of Yahoo outsourcing their search advertising to Google - 25%...50%...100%... that's how much better everyone thinks Google does search advertising than the rest of the market - give them your inventory, and you will make your money back in multiples. Personally, I hope no one buys or merges with Yahoo- its more fun to have several players in the market vying for market share, more products come out, more interesting moves get made. Now Yahoo and AOL just have to start committing to some of their products, improving and supporting them, and we'll be getting somewhere.

Yahoo Puts All The Chips On The Table. Time For Somebody To Fold: "Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney previously said that a Yahoo-Google search deal could boost cash flows by 25%. Experts we talked to estimated that could boost Yahoo’s market valuation by $7 billion or so, less than half the premium Microsoft offered on February 1.

That Mahaney estimate of increased cash flow from a Yahoo-Google deal is now “more than $1 billion a year,” a 50% gain in cash flow from 2007. That puts the offers roughly on par, give or take a few billion. And it gives Yahoo a potentially viable alternative to the Microsoft deal."

AOL Instant Messenger calls innovation what ICQ did years ago

I don't know how many people used ICQ back when it was big, but ICQ was the client I started using in college in 2000 to trade movies with friends.  At the time it had better file transfer options than other instant messaging clients, and it also had this kind of cool but dangerous feature where it showed what someone was typing as they were typing, and then removed the typing if they deleted before sending.  This could be fun if you wanted to make underhanded comments without committing to them, but it meant you also couldn't rethink what you were saying before you sent it.  Well now AOL has released a beta of AOL AIM 6.8 featuring "Real-Time IM", which is the only major feature update for AIM 6.8.  It's kind of sad that this innovation existed at least 7 years ago in a now almost extinct IM client that had features apparently way ahead of its time.

Technorati Tags: aol,im,aim,instant messaging,icq,instant messenger,aol im,aol instant messanger,real-time IM,im preview

Google Spurs Change

Google Operating System has an interesting post called "winning even when you lose" where they discuss how Google spurs change in industries regardless of if it loses the apparent arms race.  The few examples given, of which there are likely many more, are:

Email - 2004 - Gmail launches with 1GB of free storage compared to Yahoo's 4MB of free storage.  In response, Yahoo grew to 100MB, then 1GB a year later, and finally, is now uncapped, while Google is only at 6GB for free (although it's growing at all times)

Instant Messaging - 2005 - Google Talk launches as an open standards chat program meant to exchange IMs with all open IM clients (although at the time that meant none of the big 3 competitors - AIM, Y! Messenger, or MSN Messenger).  In response Yahoo and Microsoft teamed up to link their IM services later that year.

Mobile Phones - 2007 - Google announced that it would bid for the 700MHz spectrum in the US, declaring four conditions of open applications and devices.  Later that year Verizon Wireless finally announces that it will open its wireless network to 3rd party devices and software.

Social Networks - 2007 - Google launches OpenSocial, an open widget application platform, and a month later Facebook announces it will open it's widget application platform for use on other social networks.

GMail and Facebook plug-in for AOL AIM

AOL is quietly rolling out some great plug-ins for AOL AIM. Back in October they launched a Facebook plug-in that alerts you to when friends write on your wall, send you a message, or update their profile. Today they launched a Gmail extension that allows you to receive Gmail email alerts from AIM. More email clients will be supported in the future. These things could be really popular, how come AOL doesn't promote them at all?

Technorati Tags: aol, aim, facebook, greenhouse, plug-in, gmail

AOL Testing Facial Recognition Image Organizer for Your Photos

I haven't read anything else about this, but AOL has a prototype of a facial recognition image organizer available for download at their beta site, AOL Greenhouse. It has a fairly poor interface, so once you start to tag your photos going back and viewing them is, say, not even close to as easy as with Picasa. Still, it does identify faces in pictures pretty well, groups similar faces, and is fairly intelligent in tagging people once you've begun training it. In early testing, it seems to be more accurate than Riya, but isn't even as usable as Riya's web interface.



The problem with this, of course, and the problem with Riya, Flickr, Picasa, etc, is that they all have their good and their bad, but none of them are as strong as I want them to be. Picasa is necessary for managing a full collection of photos on your desktop, but Picasa Web Albums is limited in storage and usability, so I need to have Flickr on the web. Flickr is a step behind in web functions, though, and could definitely benefit from the addition of some AI such as facial recognition.



So now I have photos in Picasa, in AOL Image Organizer, on Flickr, on Riya, on Picasa Web Albums, and a few scattered on things like Zooomer. What I really want is the ability to share information from site to site - share geotagging, facial tagging, descriptions, etc, and important/sync the data across the storage / community sites. It simply takes too much work to manage a large collection of pictures at this point, and no one property is strong enough to handle all of my wants.



So is anyone else writing about AOL Image Organizer? Is anything out there going to tackle these problems?

Technorati Tags: zooomr, flickr, riya, picasa, webalbums, picasa web albums, google web albums, aol, aol image organizer, facial recognition, photo storage, photo organization, geotagging