Some days, the blogospehere is full of itself…
Yeah - I know, big newsflash with that title, eh?
Some days it is just about ridiculous, though. Today is one of those days. The latest Twitter update from Robert Scoble, stirs the pot about a possible acquisition rumor about Microsoft wanting to acquire … Mahalo??!?
Scobleizer @jasoncalacanis is Mahalo selling out to Microsoft? Rumors are happening here: http://friendfeed.com/e/0aaefd0b-618e-4da8-9bdf-ae45408bcb95/Mahalo-com-Being-bought-by-MS/
…sigh…
So Microsoft fails in their bid to buy Yahoo! (mostly due to the apparent incompetence of Yahoo! management) and then releases a public statement about their position on the Carl Icahn proposal … in which Microsoft basically throws down the gauntlet and asks for an ousting of the current board and they’ll come back to the table.
“Despite working since January 31 of this year, as well as in the early part of last year, we have never been able to reach an agreement in a timely way on acceptable terms with the current management and Board of Directors at Yahoo!. We have concluded that we cannot reach an agreement with them. We confirm, however, that after the shareholder election Microsoft would be interested in discussing with a new board a major transaction with Yahoo!”
Pretty much sums up Microsoft’s positions right there, doesn’t it? Vote out the board, and we’ll buy some - or all - of the company. So clearly, they are interested in search. And audience.
Which make the latest “OMG! Rumor mill…” post - from what appears to be a relative nobody in the Twitter/FriendFeed space - all the more amusing (full disclosure: I am most definitely a nobody in that space, so I’m not putting down Fred any more than I would myself). If Microsoft wants search technologies, Mahalo does not seem to have any real technology behind their site (looks like a MediaWiki engine, and a bunch of copy editors). And if Microsoft wants audience - Mahalo doesn’t gain much for them:
That barely-perceptible red line at the bottom is Mahalo’s traffic … compared against Yahoo!’s at the top. Even more amusing than this, though (in light of a MSFT acquisition rumor) is the Compete “top keywords” that apparently get the most traffic to Mahalo:
So maybe Microsoft wants to buy search traffic for Grand Theft Auto cheats? I don’t know. But sure enough, someone in the A-List picks up on a rumor, runs with it/gets duped by it, and it becomes a giant blogosphere navel-gazing exercise within seconds. Sometimes, instant communication isn’t necessarily a positive thing.
In all fairness to Jason, Mahalo is a nice site and he’s a smart guy that deserves a lot of credit for Weblogs Inc. so I mean no disrespect to Mahalo here. Certainly, I’ve never built a site that brought even a million visitors - much less 2 million. But the noise in the echo chaimber that is the blogosphere really gets deafening some days … this is one of those days.
Just had to rant a bit. If it does turn out to be true, I’ll eat my iPhone!*
*not really, that’s toxic as hell!