Yahoo reported its third-quarter earnings earlier today, a pretty good performance in which it soundly beat Wall Street expectations with a stronger net income than expected.

While advertising revenue was down at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, also as expected, cost-cutting by CEO Carol Bartz and the sale of its stake in China’s Alibaba seem to have more than made up for it.

Here are Yahoo’s financial presentations, full of more numbers than you will ever want to crunch.

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This week, BoomTown has found an interesting chart to peruse about the loyalty people have for their smart-phone apps.

The takeaway for developers: Try to stay in Quadrant I!

In other words, Sally-Field-at-the-Oscars territory–it’s where they love you, they really love you.

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This week, BoomTown decided to mash up two different and interesting surveys, both from comScore, about the search market.

When you do this, you find that while the new Bing search engine from Microsoft is showing some impressive growth–up a half-point in July from June to an 8.9 percent share–the software giant still has a long way to go to get some true love from the consumers.

Obsessive love, actually.

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Here is a great chart, posted on Flickr by Facebook third-party app maker Narendra Rocherolle, that shows the rising popularity of the search word “Twitter” on the social-networking site’s Lexicon.

Facebook’s Lexicon counts “occurrences of words and phrases” on its Walls over time.

Interestingly, Facebook has recently done a redesign that some critics are saying is too much of a panicked reaction to the hype around the microblogging service, although Twitter’s audience is just a tiny sliver of Facebook’s.

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Here’s a chart from a not-entirely-unexpected story in The Wall Street Journal today chronicling how the “deepening recession is speeding up the shakeout in Silicon Valley, forcing droves of start-ups to shut down or sell themselves at fire-sale prices.”

You knew that was coming, didn’t you?

And here is a not-so-lovely pair of charts to show you why.

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Look, don’t just take BoomTown’s word for it–here are some of the slides Yahoo put out yesterday on its financial performance for the fourth quarter.

And who doesn’t love a good bar chart?

Using comparisons from a year ago, they shows show a lackluster picture of growth in general, but also that glimmer of the promise of what Yahoo could be again–just as new CEO Carol Bartz kept underscoring–actually, jack-hammering–at the analyst conference call about the results.

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Here is an amazing chart from a story in The Wall Street Journal recently about mobile phone search preferences, which says a whole lot about why Microsoft is so eager to hand a pile of money over to Verizon Wireless to become the default search on its many devices.

Well, as in the PC market and on social-networking sites, because of–wait for it–Google, of course.

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A stark visual of the situation–courtesy of The Wall Street Journal–with regard to the competitive Internet advertising and stock situation.
These two charts look at the performance of the major players–Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO) and Google (GOOG) (and AOL [TWX] in the ad chart)–from 2004 to 2008.
What more can we say?
So we won’t.

Also, here’s a [...]

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Last year, BoomTown caused a tempest-in-a-Web-teapot by asserting that Facebook apps were, for the most part, inane.

And, while many said the market would develop from the frivolous to more useful–making Facebook a true “utility,” as promised by Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg–that day is not today for the social networking site or its third-part widget makers.

Instead, it’s still Pinocchio at Funland (and we know how that turned out!).

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Here is a great chart from The Wall Street Journal that kind of says it all.
Start stacking them up in your mind like your kid’s Legos and it gets interesting (click on the image to make it larger):

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

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