Jay & Silent Rob Head South, among other net-things
Amidst the news of Yahoo! and eBay’s partnership, Microsoft and Google competing to be the search engine/displayer of ads on MySpace, and the continuing decline in the Vonage IPO, Jay & Silent Rob have some of their own news. Next week we will be attending the TechCrunch Seattle Web 2.0 Party next week. Seattle-based company RedfinÂ? will be the host with the most for the event, featuring net-heavyweights like Robert Scoble of MicrosoftÂ? and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, and there will even be the oh-so-popular Puppet Tom of MySpace in attendance. We’re a little excited about talking some nerd, nerd, nerd with some of the people we look to for both information and inspiration for Reality V2.0.
And back to the rest of the post…
WeÂ? posted yesterday about Yahoo! and how they seem to get overlooked, or perhaps put more correctly, maybe they don’t get the credit they deserve. This move has several different implications. First, not only is eBay not a potential partner for Microsoft, Yahoo! is no longer a partner either - both of which were still what we’d consider to be rumours, however, definitely significant enough to pay attention to. Google arranged a similar partnership (to that between Yahoo! and eBay) with AOL last year.
It’s fairly universally agreed upon that search and search-related advertising is an important area for the big three to capitalize on, and depending on how much of eBay’sÂ? information Yahoo! will gain access to, Yahoo! may have access to an amount of data that surpasses even Google’s in magnitude - check out Matt Marshall’s comments on SiliconBeat.
The battle for search on MySpace may become more important to Microsoft with that news. The article we linked to above (Yahoo! is no longer a partner either) has a quote from Terry Semel from Yahoo!: “My impartial advice to Microsoft is that you have no chance.” There is probably some truth to that statement, but Microsoft is, without a doubt, still big man on campus. Any sort of analogous partnership the software company makes will be significant, and the MySpace juggernaut isn’t something to underestimate. The popularity of MySpace has come into question as of late, butÂ? as a site ranked in the top 5 in the world in most relevant categories, it’s almost enough to make a nobody search engine a major player, let alone a company like Microsoft.
And as for the Vonage IPO, well, we would never claim to be gurus in that area, but based on everything we had read leading up to the IPO, is anyone really that suprised? We feel bad for the company, heck, we feel bad for anyone who loses $400 in a day,Â? let aloneÂ? almostÂ? $400 million. Best of luck to everyone earning that back.