While in Washington, D.C., BoomTown can’t just visit the policy wonks from Internet companies, so I paid a visit to Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group that works to promote privacy and protection online.
In other words, a professional–and much needed–thorn in the side of Facebook, Google and these days, MicroHoo.
Yahoo and Microsoft are poised to finally sign the definitive agreement that will govern the complex and far-reaching search and online advertising partnership they struck in late July, said sources close to the situation.
If all goes well, the various Microsoft and Yahoo execs–who have been ferreted away over the last weeks, busy dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s in the massive document–could even turn in the delayed deal homework to their bosses for signature by the end of the week.
The new MSN homepage debuts tonight and you would be completely correct in thinking the recipe Microsoft has cooked up to inform its design ethos–white, clean and hiply modern–has definite echoes of a certain longtime tech rival.
That would be Apple, of course, with a big dollop of Twitter and Facebook tossed in, and finished off with a generous sprinkling of Microsoft’s new Bing search service.
For those who care: The MSN butterfly logo remains, although it appears to have lost a lot of weight.
In a stunning one-two punch, Microsoft will announce separate nonexclusive deals today with both Facebook and Twitter to integrate their real-time feeds of status updates into the Bing search service.
According to sources, Microsoft digital head Qi Lu will announce the deal onstage in a few hours at the Web 2.0 Summit.
BoomTown reported earlier today that the Microsoft data-mining deal with Twitter was poised to be announced.
The first-mover deal by Microsoft, needless to say, is a solid blow to Google, which has also been talking with both companies about a similar arrangement, because–for the first time–data will be available on Bing that are not available on the search giant.
According to sources, Microsoft is close to striking a nonexclusive data-mining deal with Twitter to integrate the microblogging service’s full feed into the results of its Bing search service.
News of the deal, which was still being worked on by engineers and execs at both the software giant and the start-up as late as yesterday, could even come as early as today at the Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco.
But sources close to the situation caution that the deal could still run into a snag and was not yet complete, although it seems more likely than not that a deal will soon be struck with Microsoft first and then Google, which is the other company Twitter has also been talking to.
Yesterday, BoomTown wrote about the status of the regulatory investigation for the Microsoft-Yahoo search and online advertising pact, which most expect to get approved.
One of the few vocal critics of the deal, though, is Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a public interest group, who lobbed MicroHoo some important questions.
Here are the answers.
The former head of Google Health, Adam Bosworth, officially unveiled his much anticipated health-care start-up today at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco, showing off a site that will offer step-by-step and personalized “care plans,” as well as many kinds of online tools to better understand the data and tips on how to stay healthy.
It’s perfect timing, given the health-care debate now raging in Washington, which is about how people make health-care decisions–or, more precisely, how they usually do not.
Here’s a video interview with Bosworth.
Unlike the gripping back and forth of the fight over Yahoogle last year, the approval process for the search and online advertising partnership of Microsoft and Yahoo is chugging along slowly but surely as the Justice Department has deepened its investigation by reaching out to a broad range of publishers, advertisers, public interest groups and rivals for comment recently.
But, so far, there is still no significant external challenge to the MicroHoo deal, even from Google, the likeliest company to try to scuttle or, at the very least, slow down the deal.
In other words: Zzzzzzzzzzz…
This week, in its annual survey of consumer technology attitudes and adoption, titled “The State of Consumers and Technology,” Forrester Research found that…wait for it, wait for it…the kids love the Internet!
As for the olds–they like their traditional media stories and they’re sticking to them.
It’s only at the Weather Channel where online and offline media live together under blue skies.
It looks like the local market is heating up even more, with MSNBC.com announcing the acquisition of Chicago-based EveryBlock.
Sources said MSNBC.com–a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal–paid several million dollars for the “hyper-local” information site, which is up and running in 15 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Boston.
In June, Time Warner online unit AOL paid about $10 million to buy Patch Media, a platform that does deeply localized coverage of communities on a range of topics.
This morning, BoomTown was on the very terrific National Public Radio talk show, “On Point,” along with Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain.
The program, moderated by Tom Ashbrook on Boston’s WBUR station, was titled “From Desktop to the Digital Cloud” and dealt with the increasing move of data of all kinds online and into the so-called “cloud.”
In other words, eventually, a completely virtual life for music, photos, records and more, and the end of packaged software.
This morning, in a blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone gave more of an explanation for the outage that the microblogging service endured due to a denial-of-service attack.
Fortunately, BoomTown can read between the lines in order to decipher the secret message herein!
Biz wrote: The Adventure Continues.
Translation: By “adventure,” I mean yet-another-friggin’-Twitter-birdie-crisis.
Like grandmother, like grandson.
Yesterday, I told my No. 1 son, Louie, that Twitter was down, after a denial-of-service attack.
He was–shall we say–not very sympathetic, as you will see in the video following the jump.
Interestingly, Louie’s response was similar to my mother’s, who mocked the microblogging service at a gas station on the way to my interview with its founders at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.
As it turns out, though, data actually back them up.
(Plus, see their videos too.)
Multiple sources close to the situation said that the online search and advertising deal between Microsoft and Yahoo has been struck and will be announced within the next 24 hours.
While it is not clear if the actual papers have been inked or approved by the boards of the two companies, sources said it was a formality and that negotiations are complete on a deal that is less sweeping than originally conceived.
In any case, making any partnership is likely to be the cause of much relief at both companies, since they have been trying–without success–to join together to mount a better offense in the search sector against the dominant Google.
The edging-ever-closer-to-consummation deal talks with Yahoo about an online advertising and search partnership and the aggressive marketing of its new Bing search service aren’t the only things going on for Microsoft’s online services business.
MSN, Microsoft’s online portal, is also preparing a major redo of what U.S. and, possibly, international consumers will see, as it doubles down on five key content verticals, while cutting back on others.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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