Facebook continues to be a force and has continued to do good things since the release of it’s API’s. An article looks at Facebook 2 months after the launch of their platform, TechCrunch suggests Facebook may be the next Microsoft, and of course, there is the lawsuit that just won’t go away. With everyone guessing an IPO is on the way, things will continue to be interesting for the community portal.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention that Facebook has made their first acquisition, Parakey. What’s more interesting is that Google is rumored to have been interested in the company, too.

Dictionary.com is one of my favorite web resources and I use the site almost daily. We talked about the site previously, when it had an extreme (and much-needed) makeover, and in the post, I compared the site’s importance to Wikipedia. Paul Kedrosky suggests this is merely the biggest domain name sale in the history of the web, which may very well be true, but at least the acquisition is easy to make sense of. The price is fair, the partnership between Answer.com and the package of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com creates a powerful package.

Redfin, a company Rob and I met over a year ago, has received an additional round of funding. The company takes a lot of heat from the Real Estate industry with their model, but this was probably an inevitable step for the Industry and another example of the Internet helping consumers save money.

When Yahoo! released their numbers earlier this week, few would have been surprised, but the response by newly appointed CEO Jerry Yang, co-founder of the struggling online portal (or whatever you want to call it), is a bit strange:

“The next 100 days or so will be spent mapping out Yahoo’s strategic plan,” said Yang. “We’re well underway in our review of the business. We will move fast in a focused way.”

The company definitely needs to address the direction it is taking, or more importantly, define the direction it is taking. With an amazing collection of users, the data that should be available to them should make them an obvious choice for advertising dollars. Each customer, once logged in, should be completely profiled so advertisements are catered to their specific habits and needs. Unfortunately, Yahoo! has been unable to capitalize on that potential. Perhaps it is the lack of clarity in what they actual are - a portal, a search engine, a news and information  site - that hinders their progress, but I believe that the strength of the company lies in its breadth and depth. Moving forward, it must solidify its current operations and form a strategy to maximize revenues based on what it currently has in place.

Perhaps a good strategy would be integrated innovation. Maybe it’s time for Yahoo! to take a page from the Darkside? Or, if Yahoo! continues to stumble, we might start looking back at idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, something we mentioned when Google and Apple became more closely aligned, but could easily be applied to Yahoo! and Microsoft in the search engine/online advertising arena.

A lot of press has been given to the social networking site lately. From the opening of the site to include non-college students, things have been going fairly well. Growth has been great, having reached the 30 million user mark recently, successfully released their API, and all indications are that the site is either going to be purchased for several billion dollars or move towards an IPO. The attention the site has gotten lately isn’t anything new, and the comparisons of Facebook to MySpace are reminiscent of the YouTube vs. MySpace comparisons that were taking place around this time last year.

Unlike YouTube, it is unlikely that Google will be heading up any purchase of the site, especially if Google really is afraid of Facebook. The price definitely limits the number of available suitors, but the opportunity and potential for Facebook is virtually limitless. Hopefully Mark Zuckerberg has moved past his ‘i’M CEO … bitch‘ attitude (but hey, for the right price I’d go be the CEO’s bitch). :) 

Just last week, Rob and I were discussing Google’s recruitment of individuals in the Vancouver area. He made a comment about the lack of presence that the major players, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, had in the area, comparing them to eBay, which does have an office on Vancouver’s doorstep in Burnaby. My argument was, ‘Why Bother?’ The companies all have offices back East, typical of the attitude towards Canada and Vancouver/the West, and with Seattle being such an important hotbed in Tech, it made more sense to have a presense there. Those interested would be more than happy to relocate, although not East or to Washington State; most likely all the way to California - it rains the same amount in Seattle and Vancouver!

Ironically, Microsoft announced they would be opening up a software development office but a few days after we had the conversation. Such a small opening in such an overlooked region barely made any ripples in the water with the media, but it’s probably something worth looking at more closely. Why? Well, the first question Rob and I had was, is this a way of tapping into Vancouver’s talent, or is this a way to migrate talent from other regions to Vancouver. It will probably be a combination of both, but the major factor is the migration of foreign talent to the area, or nearshoring, as it is described in this article.

The Vancouver area is a global gateway with a diverse population, is close to Microsoft’s corporate offices in Redmond, and allows the company to recruit and retain highly skilled people affected by immigration issues in the U.S.

In a move that will likely become more frequent, Microsoft, the savy business that it is, will be taking advantage of Canada’s more relaxed stance on immigration and avoid the negative aspects of off-shore outsourcing. They’ll simply meet in the middle, so to speak. While this will hopefully act as a positive driving force to improve the local software development community, That programming group Microsoft will set up in Vancouver won’t be staffed with many Canadians … you’ll find that the programmers in that group will be mainly people on work visas, not Canadian citizens or permanent residents.’

With relations between Canada and the United States strained on the issue of Canada’s immigration already, this is just another addition to the list of concerns that the United States has (or will have) with Canada’s current policies. And while I see the positive spin-off for the Industry, I also see the potential for local developers to find it more difficult to compete with their temporarily imported counterparts. Although the announcement was made quietly, this isn’t something we’ve heard the last of.

A year ago, we were writing about eBay and it didn’t look good. The company seemed to be afraid of Google, and was actively seeking partnerships to better align itself. We even linked to a post on Gigaom that Om Malik had written, 5 Things That eBay Can Do, which were his recommendations for the company. A year later, the situation seems to be significantly better for the online auctioneer, and as a staple on the Internet, I think that’s good news..

eBay has an online classifieds site, Kijiji, that has been available in Canada and parts of Asia and Europe, but only this week opened up a US version of the site. The site is a direct competitor to Craigslist, another of the old boys, and one that often stirs up controversy (the specific instance in memory is the Seattle Craigslist Sex Scandal, but this search proves its not the only instance). Kijiji is free to list on, like Craigslist, and already available in 220 cities. What’s more interesting is the eBay seems to have a 25% share of Craigslist (see Duncan Riley’s post on Techcrunch).

If opening up one of their properties to the US wasn’t enough, eBay has also released an eBay-edition of Firefox in partnership with Mozilla. From Duncan Riley’s post on Techcrunch:

Functions include
- An eBay sidebar that provides quick access and real-time updates on items users have bid on, are selling or watching
- Status alerts, including outbid notices
- Integrated eBay search
- Built in support for eBay’s Account Guard

Both moves seem to make sense, and seem to follow with our post about Value Added Services from last year.