I never thought that I would ever say this, but Dan Farber is wrong and the New York Times and Henry Blodgett are right. Microsoft has wasted billions of dollars, and many years, trying to succeed on the web. Buying Yahoo won’t help them get better. Instead, as Blodget writes, they should swap their internet division for a stake in a combined web company, and concentrate on the enterprise market. Yahoo won’t fit into Microsoft, but a combined unit could be a competitor for Google.

UPDATE: Scavo thinks buying SAP would be a mistake. He’s probably right, but I still say it is a smaller mistake than buying Yahoo.

If you are a blogger, and want to get a real idea of your significance, then add that Feedburner badge that shows the number of your RSS subscribers to your blog. My ego really took a hit when I went from 8 subscribers to 6. It’s going to be tough to recover.

According to Reuters, it is rumored that Google will buy CNET. I find this almost impossible to believe, since Google has never shown any interest in content companies, but it was good enough to lift the stock seven percent.

Google has announced a new local news option on Google News that allows you to type in a zip code or city name and get news from that locality. So, let’s compare the coverage! On TechCrunch, we have a restatement of the press release, accompanied by a prediction that Topix is all done. While on Between the Lines, Larry actually tries the new service, and find that it doesn’t work worth a damn. Which do you think will get more play? Sometimes, I have to ask why we even bother doing analysis?

This has been coming for a while. Jerry Yang had close to a year to put Yahoo back on the right path. He never seemed to get started. His hundred days came and went, and nothing happened. Losing products weren’t cut. Nothing was rationalized. Hard decisions weren’t made. Now, Yahoo will pay for his lack of urgency. You want to know why it happened, then read The Peanut Butter Jar is Empty by Rich Skrenta.

In this post, Matt Mullenweg has announced a WordPress theme, called Prologue, that provides a Twitter like feed for all registered posters on a blog. Like all wordpress.com blogs it can be password protected, so the stream can be limited to a small group. While a cute idea, I don’t think it really has anything to do with Twitter. In my view, the most important part of Twitter (in my view) is the wide-spread social network it creates. It’s that voyeuristic element that has been key to Twitter’s success. And, if you do want Prologue like capability from Twitter, just protect your updates, and form a small group.

I have a guest post up on Between the Lines about Facebook’s recent release of a JavaScript API. It’s entitled Facebook unleashes wave of new development with JavaScript client library. I think it’s pretty good, but let’s see what the talkbackers say.

UPDATE: The post is on TechMeme. Since this is probably going to be the only time my name appears there, I have grabbed a screenshot:

In a post entitled Belt-Tightening in Corporate IT Will be Good For Web 2.0, Eric Schonfeld argues that the projected recession in IT spending will be good for Web 2.0 companies. He claims this, because he thinks companies will increasingly switch from expensive enterprise applications to web-hosted, web 2.0 applications to save money. I think there are two main problems with this argument:

1. Most web 2.0 companies aren’t application companies.
2. Most web 2.0 are highly reliant on advertising revenue.

So, when I see a good argument why the coming recession in advertising won’t hurt web 2.0 companies I’ll listen. Right now, though, I expect a shake-out in 2008. Of course, none of this applies to Google who everyone agrees will grow revenue forever.

UPDATE: For Dan Farber’s much more polished and reasoned take on this issue, see Tech Spending Taking a Dip (Naturally) in 2008.

So, I installed the Yahoo Powered Shortcuts Plug-in. So far, its suggestions have not been that impressive, but maybe this post will get some if I write about Google and Flickr. I will leave it to the reader to say if it’s useful.

I just heard from Mager that Uncov is shutting down. That’s a huge loss, and I wish he would reconsider.