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 revenue at the Silicon Valley Internet giant was down, also as expected–both owned-and-operated search and display advertising saw big declines, 19 percent and eight percent–cost-cutting by CEO Carol Bartz and the sale of the company’s stake in China’s Alibaba.com seem to have more than made up for it.

You can read BoomTown’s liveblog of the conference call by CFO Tim Morse here, but please also enjoy Yahoo’s (YHOO) financial highlights presentation, as well as its condensed financial documents, full of more numbers than you will ever want to crunch.

And, yes, Tim Morse, because I know how little attention the work of accountants get, I have actually read them all!

Here they are:

YQ3_Q309EarningsPresentationFINAL –

YHOO Condensed Financial Documents –

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.

To grok this, you’ll need to view the two charts below from Flurry Analytics, a mobile analytics and monetization tools start-up in San Francisco, from a blog post titled “Mobile Apps: Models, Money and Loyalty.”

Flurry used a sample size of 2,000 live applications and 200 million user sessions on the IPhone and iPod touch from Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) Android, Blackberry from Research in Motion (RIMM), and other platforms.

In Quadrant I are reference, news, and weather apps, which are frequently accessed and retained longer.

Quadrant IV is also good, with high retention rates–education, social networking, medical–but less frequent weekly use.

Here are the charts (click on them to make them larger):

As a new weekly feature, BoomTown is calling all those who make cool graphs, charts and stats done prettily about tech to send them to me pronto.

I am–truth be told–a secret stats fanatic. A bargraphaholic. Yes, even a closet pie-charter.

Last week, it was graphs comparing app stats for the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and the Google Android smartphone.

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

When you do this, you find that while the new Bing search engine from Microsoft (MSFT) is showing some impressive growth–up a half-point in July from June to an 8.9 percent share, as you see below (click on images to make them larger)–the software giant still has a long way to go to get some true love from consumers.

That’s because, according to an earlier report, while some think Google (GOOG) is just a habit, it turns out to be an obsessive one.

As you can see from another bunch of recent comScore data in the table below–comparing search penetration, share of searches and searches per searcher in the U.S. in June–even combining Microsoft and Yahoo (YHOO) is unimpressive compared to Google.

The search share for Google is much higher and its users do double the searches, even though penetration levels are closer among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Plus, the Googley ways seem to prompt more loyalty, as the next table shows. In fact, even users of Microsoft and Yahoo sites conduct double their searches on Google.

And, while Microsoft search execs will tell you off the record that this kind of stickiness is hard to dislodge–sort of like gum on your sneaker–given Bing’s recent search gains, it’ll be interesting to see them try.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

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

Facebook, which had tried to buy Twitter late last year, 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.

Still, Twitter’s becoming the digital trend of the moment, especially in the what’s-hot-today media, has to have last year’s golden child, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, more than a just little irked.

Here’s the chart (click on it to make it larger):

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?

No really well-known Web 2.0 shooting stars are in the piece, although it really feels like a long time from when BoomTown penned a piece in September titled “Dear Web 2.0: It’s Still the Economy, Stupid!”

It still is, and here is a not-so-lovely pair of charts to show you why:

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 show a lackluster picture of growth and momentum in general, but also that glimmer of the promise of what Yahoo (YHOO) could be again, just as new CEO Carol Bartz kept underscoring–actually, jack-hammering–at the analyst conference call about the earnings results.

Here are some of the Yahoo charts (click on them to make them larger), or go here to see them all:

Quarterly Revenue Trends (minus traffic acquisition costs, called TAC)

Adjusted Revenue Growth (GAAP, or generally accepted accounting principles)

Operating Cash Flow Trends and Adjusted OPC

Free Cash Flow Trends

Non-GAAP Net Income Per Share Trends

Key Operational & Balance Sheet Metrics

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 (MSFT) is so eager to hand a pile of money over to Verizon Wireless (VZ) 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 (GOOG), of course.

According to another Journal story recently:

“Under the terms now being considered, Microsoft would share revenue with Verizon from ads shown in response to cellphone Web searches, with guaranteed payments to the carrier of approximately $550 million to $650 million over five years, or roughly twice what Google offered, these people said.”

Why so much of a premium, especially since the widgetization of smartphones makes it easier for all players to compete?

The chart tells the tale:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

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 link to a video of an appearance I made on ABC News last night about the danger of Google getting too powerful. (Naughty ABC does not allow embedding; here also is the text post.)

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

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!).

While this is great news for my 3- and 6-year-old boys, it still makes grumpy old me dubious.

Because, as I wrote in a post called “The Children’s Hour: Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers (There, We Said It)” that was published last October, I still assert that businesses based on Zombies and apps called Pop Ur Zit are questionable models:

But, so far, as popular as those apps have become, what Zuckerberg and the widget-makers have wrought is mostly silly, useless and time-wasting and the kazillion users of these widgets are pretty much just acting like little children.

I never thought I would call the often frivolous AOL (TWX) back in the day–very simply, a Neanderthal version of Facebook–a mature offering in comparison…

And if that is all there is, can Facebook really build a viable and long-lasting business on what is essentially a bunch of games that will ultimately become wearying for users? Doesn’t it need more robust apps that actually are useful and relevant and make Facebook the service that Zuckerberg has often told me was a ‘utility’?

While Facebook–with a cleaner and more strict look and a better navigation–is surely less goofy than rival MySpace (NWS) for anyone over 12 years old, and its video, photo and email features are nice, the vast majority of its apps are still mostly as dumb as a box of hammers.”

Unfortunately, that’s still the case and today, we have a nice chart below from FlowingData to help our little case along from a visual point of view (click on the image to make it larger).

Case, unfortunately, not closed.

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.