I wonder how much money Yahoo is wasting by trying to sue Facebook? 

The strange priorities of a dying company… 

Mark Zuckerberg turns 28 on May 14. That is a Monday.

Yahoo should buy them to bolster their bullshit lawsuit against Facebook. There’s probably some patent in there about the use of the color blue within online systems. 

lilly:

I’ve been thinking about the situation with Yahoo suing Facebook regarding some older patents, and observing the reactions online in blogs and on Twitter. I’ve been struck by how unanimous it’s been, and the emerging narrative that Yahoo has somehow crossed a line, that Internet companies don’t…

A smart take on the Yahoo/Facebook patent situation by John Lilly. I think he’s right, there’s more fueling the outpouring of hatred directed at Yahoo than just their patent maneuvers. BUT, I also think their maneuvers are particularly bullshit in this case. Look at what it is they’re suing Facebook over. It’s things that nearly all social services use. It’s obvious things. Things that existed before Yahoo patented them. 

Lilly is right that many other patent lawsuits are bullshit as well — particularly in software. But Yahoo is being unreasonably evil and stupid here. Why didn’t they sue, say, 5 years ago? Why aren’t they suing 200 other companies “infringing” their silly patents? 

It’s because, like Kodak, they’re dying. And these are the actions that a dying company resorts to. With Kodak, it’s obvious — they’re bankrupt. And people feel sort of sorry for them as a result. Yahoo is not bankrupt, so it’s not-so-obvious. But they are still very much dying. And they clearly know it, hence, the lawsuit.

Maybe we should feel bad for Yahoo here too. But we don’t yet. But we will someday in the not-too-distant future. The saddest thing now is that they probably really think this lawsuit will help save them. It won’t.

Fred Wilson:

I am not writing this in defense of Facebook. They can and will defend themselves. I am wrting this in outrage at Yahoo! I used to care about that company for some reason. No more. They are dead to me. Dead and gone. I hate them now.

I have yet to read anyone not in agreement that Yahoo’s move here is total bullshit. They’ve really, truly (and probably irreversibly) fucked their reputation in the tech community here. That will be fatal. 

Just remember this when they’re chopped up and sold for parts in a few years. Or — more poetically — when Facebook buys them just to turn out the lights.

Ouch.

A quote from that site I refuse to link to:

Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between last September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage.

3 minutes versus seven hours. I mean, 3 minutes!

The sad thing is: I bet when mobile usage is counted, the gap is actually worse.

We keep hearing over and over how Google+ is on the up-and-up — from Google. 10 million sign-ups here. A billion more there. So many fucking sign-ups.

The reality of the situation sure seems to be the opposite. The only people I know that use Google+ regularly are people who work at Google (and Robert Scoble). 

It’s just not working. For fundamental reasons. Millions more in TV ad spend won’t fix that. 

Put a fork in Yahoo, they’re now officially done.

As relayed by Michael J. De La Merced of The New York Times:

“Yahoo has a responsibility to its shareholders, employees and other stakeholders to protect its intellectual property,” a Yahoo spokesman said in an e-mailed statement. “We must insist that Facebook either enter into a licensing agreement or we will be compelled to move forward unilaterally to protect our rights.”

“We must insist”. It sounds a lot like one of those foreign leaders in the video game Civilization that is clearly losing and starts to make empty threats. 

But what’s really weird here is how much Yahoo now relies on Facebook for integration points and traffic. Is new CEO Scott Thompson insane, or just a huge ass? Or both? Hard to tell right now.

As a side note, remember five and a half years ago (!) when Yahoo almost bought Facebook for $1 billion? Best move Facebook ever didn’t do.

Sarah Lacy talking about Google+ on PandoDaily:

We simply don’t need another social network, no matter how great your circles are or how badly Larry Page wants to have one. 

Agreed. The problem, which Google really, truly does not seem to understand is that at the end of the day, they’re solving a problem which has already been solved. They may think it hasn’t, but it has.

It’s the same problem Bing faces in search against Google. It’s a fine product, but in order to get people to use it, it has to be far better than the incumbent. Bing isn’t, so it will never beat Google (despite Google’s best efforts to back that thang up). Google+ isn’t, so it will never beat Facebook (or Twitter, for that matter).

But Google is trying to cheat this system. By shoving Google+ in our faces, they think that they can make their product catch on without the need to be above and beyond better than the incumbent.

I think we’ll see that this approach still won’t work. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter work because they evolved based on how users were naturally using them. Google+ is trying to make the users evolve to fit into the network they created. It’s unnatural.

Eric Eldon of TechCrunch takes down a weak column by Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times.

Sorkin’s post seems to want to say: “Facebook is lying about their traffic and screwing their advertisers and would-be public investors!!!!” But instead it says something more along the lines of: “Facebook is maybe slightly overstating their numbers. But then again, maybe not because they’re actually more honest about such things than anyone else. Also those people not visiting the site are valuable too. And Facebook will probably monetize even better in the future regardless. So actually, we’re all good here.”

Speaking of Facebook acquisition gold, Kim-Mai Cutler of Inside Facebook has a great run-down of the various deals listed in the S-1 and which companies they likely line up with.

When Facebook acquired FriendFeed in the summer of 2009, it was widely-reported to be a fairly straightforward “acqui-hire” deal. The price was more complicated.

$50 million sounded good on paper, but it was believed that only a small amount was in cash, the rest was in Facebook stock. It was Facebook stock which was just valued at $6.5 billion thanks to the DST investment. Some felt that it was overpriced, and as such, not a great deal for FriendFeed.

Boy were they wrong.

Looking at Facebook’s just-released S-1, Alyson Shontell of Business Insider noticed that in August 2009 (the month of the FriendFeed deal), Facebook issued just over 11 million shares of Class B common stock to ten individuals and one entity — this is most definitely the FriendFeed team, their individuals investors, and probably their lead VC firm, Benchmark Capital. 

Today, leading up to their IPO, Facebook is worth just shy of $100 billion. Those FriendFeed shares are now worth around $330 million as a result. In other words, their August 2009 acquisition has shot up just about 7x in value since that time.

Certainly, some of the players have since sold off those shares in subsequent Facebook raises or on the secondary markets and have done well as a result. But those that didn’t have been rewarded very handsomely. 

A 10x exit on paper magically turned into a 70x exit. And counting, by the way…

Now I’ll use this opportunity to once again link to the first post I ever wrote for TechCrunch in April 2009, four months before the deal: You Will Be Using FriendFeed In The Future — But It May Be Called Facebook