Teknovis

I do not think so, but there have been some very interesting development this weekend!

Firstly, Facebook and Yahoo have come to a mutual agreement to share and cross license their patents! See Facebook and Yahoo settle patent and form ad alliance for more details.

Secondly, the UN has decided to intervene by hosting a summit for some of the companies currently involved in the patent wars. I do not know how successful this will be, but I think that it cannot hurt to try to improve the current situation! See Patent war talks to be hosted by UN agency to protect innovation for more details on this story.

Tags: Facebook, Yahoo

I read an interesting article today describing how Yahoo basically killed Flickr since taking it over! The article is How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.

I never liked Flickr due to its old-fashioned interfaces, and its lack of usability. Also, I associate it more with low quality and high volume photo sharing. Everybody whom I know that is serious about photography uses other newer photos sharing web sites!

Tags: Flickr, Yahoo

I was aware last February that Microsoft had made an offer for Yahoo, and that this offer was subsequently rejected because Yahoo felt it was too low.

I was not aware of the specifics of the offer, and I certainly was not aware of how it compares to the current market value of Yahoo. Then I came across the figures this afternoon…

Microsoft offered Yahoo approximately $31 per share, and this was rejected. Fast-forward to today, and Yahoo shares are trading at approximately $11 per share!

I am guessing that Microsoft must be feeling that it was very lucky, but I wonder if Yahoo is lamenting its decision!

Tags: Microsoft, Yahoo

I read three articles on TechCrunch today regarding Internet traffic on election day of the US election.

• The top news websites are ranked in Hitwise Ranks Election Traffic To News Sites. Yahoo News was the most popular, although I think they are actually a news aggregator. It is also interesting to see that some news websites actually had a decrease in traffic!
• The top news websites also received a significant amount of foreign visitors, as described in News Sites Attract Record Audience on Election Night. It is estimated that at the peak time there were more than 8.5 million visitors per minute! This is a new world record according to the linked Net Usage Index for News article. This article also lists the previous 14 world records.
• The viral effect of the candidates’ videos is described in How To Make Your Video Go Viral: Become President. The official version of Obama’s victory speech on YouTube has already been watched over 2 million times, and I expect this figure to keep growing! Furthermore, many people have already uploaded their own recordings of this speech. (On a side note, I am not really convinced that this is a viral video!)

I do not expect that websites outside of the US experienced significant increases, because there is less interest in the US election, and the time differences made it a bit impractical!

Finally, Twitter also had an extremely busy night, as described in OMG, That Was A Big Day. It is a pity that this post does not give some more general statistics. For example, are any of these statistics new records?

I think that it is very impressive that all of the major websites that experienced heavy traffic were able to cope with it. I particularly like Twitter’s approach:

Our technical approach over the last several months has been to find the weakest point of the system, fix it so it’s no longer the weakest, move to the next weakest point, and so on.

I also notice that the new president is a Twitter user! It will be great if he can continue to find time to maintain his online presence!

Tags: TechCrunch, Twitter, US Election 2008, Viral, Yahoo, YouTube