Microsoft and Yahoo! Back in Talks

As reported by The Guardian, it looks as if Microsoft and Yahoo have been talking again about the possibilities for a commercial relationship. At the moment this appears to be strictly in relation to an advertising deal as opposed to any sort of acquisition attempts. Apparently the new Yahoo! CEO, Carol Bartz, has renewed last years negotiations, and held a number of meetings with Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, last week.

In the curent market, with Google's grip and reach expanding on a week to week basis, there must be a lot of pressure on the two companies to extend their own business activities. One option put out by The Guardian would see Yahoo taking over Microsoft's display advertising while Microsoft took control of all search advertising. Of course neither company has made any official comments on how they would do business with each other.

However, it's important to remember that it was only in February that Ballmer made a statement to Wall Street saying, "The fact of the matter is, these two guys [Microsoft and Yahoo] should somehow figure out how to get together and create more competition for this guy [Google]. And I'm hoping perhaps that that's a reasonable conversation to have with new management at Yahoo as Carol comes onboard."

Online Advertising - The Page Takeover

I spotted this cool example of a page takeover ad and thought it worth sharing. Unfortunately this is yet another example of a great creative route that is prohibited by most Irish sites.

Amazon's Latest Blunder

Over the weekend, in a move that defied any logic, Amazon suddenly removed all gay and lesbian themed books from their top-selling and recommended lists. This sparked thousands of Tweeters and Bloggers to start posting. Using the hashtag '#amazonfail' the entire incident became the most talked about topic on Twitter almost overnight. Suddenly we have a prime example of what Social Media can do when a business does something stupid. It also doesn't help that Amazon failed to properly monitor their online reputation.

So what happened?

While Amazon remained mostly quiet all weekend with the only explanation of the event coming from Patty Smith, Amazon's director of corporate communications, that the event was a 'glitch', Gawker reported that the hacker Weev had claimed credit for the whole thing. He was quoted as saying it was an "exploitation of a vulnerability in Amazon's product-rating tools." This in turn drove a large amount of interest in the hashtag #glitchmyass.

Amazon has since responded saying the incident was "embarrassing and ham-fisted", giving no further insight into the origin of the mess. However, it isn't really important if the event was a glitch or the work of a hacker. The main point of all this is that Amazon completely failed to monitor social media and online conversation. If they had had any sort of reasonable system in place they should have been able to deal with the whole thing much faster then they did.

This is just another example of why companies can't turn-off and go home for the weekend. The rest of us don't sleep, and if something goes wrong we're going to talk about it!

Google Easter Egg

Check out this funny little Google Easter Egg:
1) Go to Google
2) Type in 'Google Easter Egg'
3) Hit 'I'm Feeling Lucky'

Lets Talk Twitter

Following the weekends Twitter events I thought I'd share this great video of Evan Williams (co-founder of Twitter) talking about how many of the ideas driving the recent Twitter growth explosion have come from unexpected uses of Twitter invented by the users themselves.

Twitter Under Attack (Part 2)

In a follow up to my earlier post it turns out that there were two, and not just one, attacks on Twitter this weekend, and both originated from the same source. The attacks which were mounted using cross-site scripting (XSS) were the work of Mikeyy Mooney, the 17-year-old creator of StalkDaily.com from Brooklyn, New York. Mikeyy was quoted as saying:

"I am the person who coded the XSS which then acted as a worm when it auto updated a users profile and status, which then infected other users who viewed their profile. I did this out of boredom, to be honest. I usually like to find vulnerabilities within websites and try not to cause too much damage, but start a worm or something to give the developers an insight on the problem and while doing so, promoting myself or my website."

The attacks utilised a vulnerability by adding obfuscated scripts to the Name and More info URL entries in a Twitter user's settings.

Today, Twitter published the following blog post - Wily Weekend Worms.

Easter Sunday Music

It's funny how many times I must have listened to this song and never really thought about the religious imagery in it. Great song all the same; Dave Matthews - Bartender.