Yahoo!

Web surfers searching on Yahoo! are in for a real tweet.

Yahoo! users are now able to browse through tweets and images related to their search queries without having to navigate to the Yahoo! News page, CNET reported, as the search engine is using Twitter's public application-program interface, and then running tweets through a Yahoo! algorithm to determine relevancy.

HP-owned Snapfish is now the preferred printing partner of Yahoo!-owned Flickr, the latter announced on the Yahoo! corporate blog.

According to TechCrunch, the two companies were acquired by their respective parents days apart, with Snapfish going first.

The blog post read:

Today we are excited to announce a new deal that will make Snapfish the preferred worldwide printing partner for Flickr! With 22 worldwide printing locations, our partnership with Snapfish will enhance the experience of Flickr's 40-plus million members by increasing the number of printing options and providing cost-effective, quality photo-printing functionalities for both the U.S. and international markets.

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These guys found the way to destroy the most massive amount of history in the shortest amount of time with absolutely no recourse.

Who are "these guys" and what did they destroy? The answers are Yahoo! and GeoCities, respectively, TIME reported.

TIME posted a fascinating look at efforts to save content from GeoCities, which was founded in 1995 and bought by Yahoo! in 1999, as that content marks the first experiments with the Web by many people.

TIME wrote:

When Yahoo! switched off the servers for GeoCities, the Web posting service, on Oct. 27, some 7 million of the Internet's first Websites went dark forever. The bulk of these were people's personal home pages, which were pulled offline with no backup and no permanent record of those users' frenetic early forays online.

Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz spoke with a group of reporters following the company's press conference, discussing the end of layoffs, the Microsoft deal, the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium and Yahoo!'s role in enterprise business, paidContent reported.

On layoffs:

We have no more layoffs; we're done. That's it.

On the deal with Microsoft:

Everybody wants what I call a "pre-Lehman deal." They want the world. I was focused on three things from the Microsoft deal: I wanted ongoing revenue, which is important to funding our strategy; if I'd have gotten the money upfront, every $1 billion gives me $3 million in interest income. That's it. Because I give half to Obama. So I get about half a million. I get half a percent interest. That's $2.5 million. I don't have a balance-sheet problem; I have a strong balance sheet. What I need is revenue so I spend money. So, with the Microsoft deal, I got revenue and my expenses covered.

On business enterprise and consumers:

I don't think you have to choose which one should be the focus. (The enterprise and the consumer parts of Yahoo!) are two children and they both come to the dinner table. We couldn't run the consumer business at its scale without getting money from the ad business. So the fact is, we have some of the biggest data centers in the world. We serve up more mail, more photos than any other company. But that is informed by people buying ads against those services. It's not a separate focus.

Yahoo!'s latest attempt to join the world of social networking is the alpha launch of an English-language version of Yahoo! Meme, which is run by Yahoo! Southeast Asia, paidContent reports.

Yahoo! Meme allows users to post short entries, photos and videos to their pages, or memes. They can also follow other memes and repost entries from them, as well as tracking entries from memes they are following via one central dashboard, according to paidContent.

From Yahoo! Meme's About page:

Meme from Yahoo! hopes to be an efficient "memeplex." In other words, somewhere to multiply and distribute fragments of information. These fragments, or "memes," travel from one person to another and survive through their own merits or circumstances. They evolve, suffer mutations and some may even get to be very famous.

Memes have always run loose through the Internet, surviving all kinds of hazards: heavy rain, unstable Internet connections, heat waves or packed inboxes. We hope that here they will find a warm environment where they can live and reproduce freely.

Yahoo! acquired Arab online community Maktoob.com, and the two companies said they will combine efforts to offer Arabic-specific information and Arabic versions of Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail, CNET reported.

Maktoob.com has more than 16.5 million users in countries including the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and it claims that it reaches one-third of online people in the Arab world.

The two companies said they expect the transaction to be completed in the fourth quarter, after which Maktoob.com will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo!. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, according to CNET.

Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz said in a statement:

Access to information and communications tools can positively impact people's lives in many ways and, with the acquisition of Maktoob.com and our investment in the region, the Arab world will soon get a Yahoo! experience in Arabic with relevant local language content, programming and services.

Maktoob.com general manager Ahmed Nassef added:

Internet users in the Arab world will have access to Yahoo!'s vast content portfolio, as well as world-class communications products, which will be available in Arabic for the first time. In addition, advertisers will be able to leverage the vast reach of the newly combined audiences to effectively market to consumers across the region.

Yahoo! purchased the OMG.com domain name for $80,000, Domain Name Wire reported.

Yahoo! runs celebrity gossip site omg!, and OMG is shorthand for "Oh my God."

Domain Name Wire added that LMK.com (LMK is shorthand for "let me know") sold for $58,500 this past week.

The $80,000 price tag seems like a bargain when compared with the $4.9 million Zappos.com (now owned by Amazon.com) paid for the Clothes.com domain.

Yahoo! filed details of its search and advertising agreement with Microsoft with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Silicon Alley Insider fished out some of the highlights.

According to the SEC filing:

· The agreement must be finalized and executed by Oct. 27.

· An arbitration panel will moderate any disputes and set the pact's final language.

· The deal can be terminated by mutual consent by July 29, 2010, but Yahoo! can extend that date by six months if the necessary antitrust approvals aren't rubber-stamped by then.

· Yahoo! gets an 88% share for the first five years on Yahoo! properties, and then after five years, Microsoft has the option to kill Yahoo!'s sales exclusivity for premium-search advertisers. If it does, Yahoo!'s revenue-share rate will rise to 93% unless Yahoo! exercises its option to retain exclusivity, in which case it would drop to 83%. If Microsoft does not exercise that option, the rate will be 90%.

· Microsoft will pay Yahoo! $50 million annually for the first three years of the deal.

· Yahoo! can terminate the contract if the trailing 12-month average revenue per search of their combined queries in the United States falls below "a specified percentage" of Google's estimated RPS, or if the combined Yahoo!-Microsoft query market share falls below a specified point. Yahoo! can also cancel the deal after five years if the trailing 12-month average of Yahoo!'s U.S. RPS is less than a specified percentage of Google's RPS.

· If Microsoft tries to sell its search business, Yahoo! has the right of first refusal and right of last offer to buy it.

· Microsoft will hire at least 400 Yahoo! employees and pay them competitively, and the companies will also agree on a retention plan to keep those 400 and an additional 150 Yahoo! employees to help during the transition.

· The companies will swap worldwide patent cross-licenses.

Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz stopped limping around her office long enough (she had replacement knee surgery three weeks ago) to give a long interview to The New York Times, in which she discussed the deal with Microsoft and her company's future away from the search business.

Bartz told the Times Yahoo! got out of the search business because it could no longer keep up with the investments Google and Microsoft were making in the sector, adding that the influx of resources from Microsoft would be used to strengthen Yahoo!'s display-ad, content and mobile-services technology.

Highlights of Bartz's question-and-answer session with the Times:

My first reaction when I got here was that I wouldn't even do a search deal, until I looked at our expense structure and our actual options and looked at what our prime job was, which is to grow audience.

On her statement at an industry conference that Microsoft would have to fork over "boatloads of cash" for Yahoo!'s search business:

I made a mistake. I was never interested in doing it for upfront money. That doesn't help me operate a business.

On her dealings with Microsoft president Steve Ballmer:

He called my first day. I told him: "Go away. I haven't even found the bathroom."

On Yahoo!'s investments in technology:

We are actually behind in investing. We should have invested more.

The New York Times' Bits Blog was all over Wednesday's agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo!, looking at the transaction from several angles. And Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer discussed the deal in detail with Fortune's Brainstorm: TECH.

On the deal's impact on Google, Bits Blog pointed out, "More bidders for the same supply should lead to higher prices. That means more money for Microsoft and also for Yahoo!, which will get 88% of the revenue from searches on its sites. But that doesn't mean that Google will lose anything. It still has the largest marketplace, the best advertising technology and, thus, the highest revenue per search. Even if Microsoft earns more, the bids on Google won't necessarily go down."

The Times added,"Even with the deal, the Microsoft-Yahoo! search operation will be dwarfed by Google—with a 28% market share in the United States, versus 65%—and will face an uphill struggle to try to wean people away from Google's simple white search page."

Advertisers were enthusiastic about the Microsoft-Yahoo! combination, with David Kenny, managing partner of VivaKi, the digital unit of Publicis Groupe, telling Bits Blog, "It's got a good interface, but the real question is audience and, obviously, getting Bing embedded inside of Yahoo! will give it a bigger audience," and Covario chief executive Russ Mann adding, "From what we can tell, we think this is going to be a very powerful combination," and saying ads for his clients on MSN and Bing regularly yielded higher conversion rates than on Yahoo! or Google, so he was pleased to see the Microsoft search engine expanding.

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