Google moves to kill Microsoft-Yahoo deal

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Now there’s a surprise. The last thing Google wants is serious competition (even if it’s unlikely that a MS-Yahoo merger could provide it). It’s almost enough to make one feel sympathetic to Microsoft.

This is going to get very boring over the next few months.

Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to be one of the few companies that still funds basic research. It’s just announced that it’s opening a new research lab next door to MIT. Headed by a woman too. Hooray!

Across The Universe Day

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Hmmm… It’s Across The Universe Day.

Monday, February 4th 2008 is the exact 40th anniversary of the Beatles recording their anthem of universal peace – “Across The Universe” – in 1968.

To mark the occasion, Beatles fans worldwide are invited to play that Beatles song at the same time of day – creating a harmonic convergence around the globe.

And the Beatles’ universal message will NOT be restricted to Planet Earth!

The US Space Agency NASA will play a major part in the celebrations by beaming the song “Across The Universe” literally Across The Universe!

NASA is going to transmit the Beatles tune from a satellite antenna directly into outer space! And it will do this at the exact same time as fans Across The World are playing “Across The Universe”!

Hot roomy fiasco

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Apropos the Microsoft bid for Yahoo, a GMSV reader ran an anagram engine against a combination of Microsoft and Yahoo and came up with these:

  • Hot Roomy Fiasco
  • Mafioso Torch Yo,
  • Foray Sitcom Ooh
  • Fiasco Oh My Root, and
  • Chaos Firm Too Yo.

    • Word-count for TextEdit

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    A writer friend asked me if I could recommend an alternative to Microsoft Word. He’s a Mac user, so I asked him if he’d considered TextEdit, the free word-processing application that comes with the Mac. He hadn’t, so we looked at it. “Has it got word-count?” he asked. We checked, and it doesn’t.

    But a few seconds Googling found a neat — and free — little app which watches the current TextEdit window and displays an updated word count as you type. You can download it from here.

    Nicholas Carr…

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    … announces that he’s “thrilled” to be joining the Editorial Advisory Board of Encyclopedia Britannica.

    I take it that, in the interests of the objectivity that Carr so prizes and affects to practise, he will henceforth recuse himself from commenting on Wikipedia.

    Social networking peaks

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    From Creative Capital…

    I just got a hold of the ComScore numbers for U.S. social networking sites, and it ain’t pretty folks. (See an abridged version of the chart below this post.) After peaking in October of 2007 with 71.9 million users, MySpace, the leading social network, has seen its audience fall back to around 68.9 million unique visitors. December saw no growth over November, though visitors were up 13% from last December.

    More alarming are the engagement metrics. Since December 2006, when MySpace engagement peaked at about 234 minutes spent per visitor, time spent on the site has dropped consistently throughout the year. In December, time spent per visitor saw its biggest month-to-month drop, of about 8.5%, to 179 minutes per visitor per month, down from 196 minutes in November. That equates to a 24% year-over-year drop.

    But the pain is not just a MySpace problem. It seems to be an industry-wide issue. The total audience of U.S. social networks seems to be stuck at a low-to-mid-single digit growth rate, while the engagment metrics are falling for just about everyone. Time spent on Bebo.com has been sliced in half over the last four months, while Friendster’s time spent has plummeted nearly 75% in the same time period. Overall, minutes spent per site fell 5% in December 2007 compared to the year-ago period….

    More in that vein here.