JohnTyra.com

Yet another questionable Yahoo! move announced today, but this time it’s in the gaming arena. Yahoo! has games and such available on their site but they are usually web-based games that are not stored locally on your computer. This announcement changes all of that by offering "more than 400 ad-supported games available to users by the end of the year" as quoted by their press release earlier today.

Don’t get too excited about this, fellow gamers…this announcement specifically states that the downloadable games will come from, I quote, "casual games publishers" which does not mean Sony, Blizzard or any other ‘less casual’ gaming company. What does this mean? If you’re looking for a free, ad-supported version of World of Warcraft or Everquest II to be available for download then don’t hold your breath…

For those who are avid TWiT network podcast listeners, this will not be anything new to you…sorry. However, for the rest of you, check it out! There is cool new search engine out there…wait…I hate to even use the label ’search engine’ because that’s so generic. Almost every search engine out there is the same: type in your search, get boring results. Google and those other search engines are useful, sure, but for some searches it’d be nice to get something…more. Well, that’s what you get when using Viewzi, and I am really taking a liking to it.

So, hit up www.viewzi.com and try searching for, oh, say photos of someone famous. When you type in the search term, you are given these ‘views’ from which you can choose to display your ‘results’. BUT! It’s not like the old ‘here is a list of 100 links’ deal, oh no my friend, it’s much more interactive than that. In fact, it’s almost a negative aspect presented by this ’search engine’ in that you’ll find yourslef just playing and wasting time instead of actually trying to find what you are looking for.

Well, it’s only about a month old, so we’ll see how well it scales as more and more people start to use it. Plus, I notice that it does not work properly unless you allow scripts to be ran from both the viewzi.com AND yahooapis.com domain. Hmmm…will viewzi break if yahooapis.com is having downtime or slowness?

What do you think?

I know, I know, it seems like every other story is about Yahoo! lately and you’re probably right. They’ve been in the news more than I’d like to comment on, and I’ll leave it at that.

Yesterday, however, they released a letter to their stockholders updating them the current Google-Yahoo! ad agreement and "the outcome of our discussions with Microsoft regarding a potential transaction", according to the letter. It also contains some negative comments regarding Mr. Icahn’s opinions on the Microsoft-Yahoo!-Google situation, which may be interesting.

The full letter can be found here:

http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=318447

Microsoft must have given up on Yahoo! and decided to aquire someone else. Today, Microsoft announced their plans to aquire MobiComp, but they are not a replacement for Yahoo! by any means. Instead, MobiComp is more of a technology company that deals with mobile "social network" content delivery plus backup and restore solutions. In their press release, Microsoft did mention MobiComp in conjunction with some big names like Facebook so it looks like this aquisition is not exactly ’small potatoes’.

Some of the named services that MobiComp offers is "MobileKeeper Backup & Restore, MobileKeeper Sharing & Communities, and Active mTicker" Microsoft says. The company has been around since 2000.

Is Microsoft trying to put pressure on Apple’s offering of services?