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Just reading Robert Scoble and his fears of the internet becoming a closed entity by buying yahoo search and then Facebook. Not sure if I agree with his conclusions but here is how he lays it out.

Microsoft buys Yahoo search and has a big search engine, then walks down the street (they are both in Silicon Valley I am guessing) and buys Facebook. Facebook is closed to Google so Google can’t index any of the Facebook content and then the Facebook part of the internet is closed to only the Microsoft search engine Msnyahoolive! or whatever they end up calling it.

Scoble wants to start an online protest and start using friendfeed as a Facebook alternative.

OK, so there is the scenario as Robert puts it up there. I know that Robert knows way more than me about the search engine wars past and present and he knows all ofthe players at the tops of these companies so I have to think that he is not just paranoid. I am not sure though that this is the biggest problem to worry about. Read the rest of this entry »

I am always very slow at buying technology but I live with my wife and kids and my wife will make a purchase very quickly. My problem tends to be that I will overanalyze about anything for instance it took me a week of research to get a pair of home stereo headphones and I still have not upgraded my video card on my main home PC.

Anyway my wife a couple of weeks ago secided that she wanted a laptop for herself around the house, asked me what she should get and was on the phone with Dell in about 20 minutes. I was able to slow down the buying process to shop around a bit but that afternoon she was the proud owner of a Dell Inspriron 1525 laptop but still had to wait for it to be built.

We had tried ordering a Dell before, a desktop a couple of years ago and the customer service from India trying to get our 3% corporate discount killed the deal. They got our home address wrong in transit three times with three different addresses and we finally told them to shove it.

This time I hoped for better customer service and we did get it. Read the rest of this entry »

I am a packrat, I keep everythign or at least try to keep everything and that of course includes any computer stuff. I have a folder on my home computer called Bills Business and I dump anything to do with online marketing in there, it is sitting at 4.5 gigs Anyway at work I currently have 3371 read messaages in my inbox (not very GTD) and a ton more in my Outlook PST files. That backgrounder will kind of tell you why I care about indexing.

I have tried lots of apps to try to do quick searching of my Outlook because the built in search for Outlook is horribly slow. I have tried the built in Microsoft Search, Google Desktop Search and a couple of others but I always get performance issues. There never seems to ber a way to index stuff on my PC without it slowing down everything on my computer.

Xobni seems to have changed that. Xobni is a free plugin for Outlook that Microsoft is apparently trying to buy that will index all of your mail as well as data mining your people and conversations so that you can know more about your conversations and easily get a chance to have contact info related to your Outlook contacts / email.

Xobni is just in public beta right now but it seems to be really stable and is very unobtrusive, Xobni just sits as a compressed sidebar in the right side of your Outlook available by one mouse click. Xobni also has indexed all of my email really quickly and has not slowed down my computer at all and with a simple search window at the top of Xobni I am able to search quickly and instantly get results.

So Microsoft is nice and civil in saying that the deal is dead. There were talks this weekend between Steve Ballmer with Microsoft and Jerry Yang with Yahoo. There is apparently a difference of Microsoft willing to go to $33 per share and Yahoo only accepting $37 a share.

So they are close but not close enough. Steve Ballmer does not look like he will bother trying to steal Yahoo by buying up all the shares so I have to wonder what Microsoft is thinking.

Is Microsoft really just walking away? Are they looking at some other companies? Some people have said that Microsoft should go after Ask.com or AOL but they are not really in need of marketshare, what Microsoft really needs is online apps and the love of web users.

This next week should be interesting. If Steve Ballmer has some kind of deal in his back pocket I am sure we will see it soon. I feel bad for those stockholders of Yahoo, I would imagine the shares will plummet on Monday morning.

Stay tuned for all of the news. I know that I am watching Tech Crunch close as they broke this story before anyone.