Don’t believe the skeptics, 2009 was not a bad year for Yahoo. Well, at least not worse than the previous ones…
And looking ahead Yahoo and its investors might have a reason to pop open a bottle of champaign late 2010. Here are our predictions for the coming year!

Turmoil
Oh yes, there was a lot of turmoil indeed: a new CEO, massive lay-offs, the plummeting ad market, the closing down of loads of services and the amputation of Yahoo! Search. But let us look beyond that…

Redesign
2009 saw Yahoo’s homepage get a fresh new look with some daring choices. Less ads, more external links and apps!
Launched with a lot of fanfare, the redesign received a lot of criticism and headscratching from would be experts. Just like any of the previous changes Yahoo! made to their homepage.
But now the numbers are in and they’re not bad at all!

Time spent on Yahoo!’s homepage increased 20% while pageviews increased an impressive 9%. The clickthrough on the front ad increased a sweet 10% while the Today Spotlight clickthrough increased a massive 76%!
Though admittedly Yahoo could do a lot more exciting things with the apps integration and hopefully will soon.

Another bright spot?
Hands on CEO Carol Bartz is doing some smart cost cutting: axing lavish employee parties, closing Yahoo! offices from Christmas to New Year and yes closing down a lot of ill ventured money-losing services.

The list of casualities?
Yahoo! Geocities, video service Maven Networks, social networks Yahoo! 360 and SpotM, Yahoo! Go, Search Submit Pro, Karaoke & contest site Bix, MyWeb Bookmarking, Yahoo! Briefcase, Adsense rival Content Match, Yahoo! Chatrooms and early 2010 MyBlogLog will cease to exist.

Were those services critical for Yahoo!? Hardly, it would have taken loads of effort to make them best of breed and some focus was hardly needed.
Meanwhile Bartz is also trying to sell some crown jewels to the highest bidder like Hotjobs and Yahoo! Personals.

Ka-ching & Bing?
And then there’s the huge search deal with Microsoft off course!
Although the deal may not be so smart in the long run it’ll reap a lot of cash for Yahoo during the next few years. Outsourcing search to Bing will lower costs and could be worth as much as $500 million annually according to some analysts.

A warning for Carol though: cutting away the fat is ok, but please keep clear of the limbs!

Luckily Yahoo also signaled it might do some smart targeted acquisitions and Yahoo! keeps experimenting with in house talent. Resulting in the 2009 lauch of Yahoo! Meme, a surprisingly nice Twitter/Facebook alternative and the acquisitions of e-mail start-up Xoopit and the popular Arabic portal Maktoob.

Besides all that an advertising comeback wil surely lead to a Yahoo! revenue windfall in the nearby future and Yahoo!’s ever growing, massive userbase can only help with that.

Now where’s that champaign? Cheers!

> Will Yahoo! find its mojo in 2010? Will the Microsoft search deal be Yahoo!’s death stab or savior? And are you a fan of Yahoo! services?
Share your opinion!

For the purpose of full disclosure & fairness: I do own YHOO stock. Yes, I put my money where my mouth is!

Emmerich uses the famous ‘Earth crust displacement’ theory written in the 1950s by Professor Hapgood. His theory could explain the story of Noah’s Ark and the great biblical flood as scientists have become more and more certain that this massive disastre did actually happen.

Also the Mayan calendar was an inspiration for this movie. The Mayan calendar just ends abruptly on 12/21/12.

All this makes up a promising movie! 2012 is unleashed in cinema’s worldwide on November 13 and stars John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton and Oliver Platt in leading roles.
Make sure to bring your inflatable jackets and survival kit with you!

Enjoy this exclusive Yahoo! trailer in the meantime!

Watch the fantastic Stargate Universe “Frantic” trailer here too!

Even though Yahoo! and its 17 months interim CEO and origininal founder Jerry Yang have been kicked and called names at by popular media in recent times… Yahoo.com still is a profitable internet powerhouse of enormous proportions.

And many might not have noticed the silver lining in all of this. Yahoo! is still growing its huge reach even further and making huge inroads on several fronts.

An overview of Yahoo!’s spectacular and unexpected wins and why the economic downturn can help the plagued company.

Yahoo! scores BIG!

120 million users, three years after its launch Yahoo! Answers is a well known success story… In a moment of brilliance, Yahoo! has been able to copy the success formula recently with Yahoo! Buzz. A service which has proven to be a smashhit overnight.

Yahoo! Buzz use has exploded with monthly growth surpassing 70% since its launch in August 2007. In just seven months Yahoo! Buzz dethroned its biggest competitor Digg.com both in visits and spent time.

The service provided unseen gunpowder growth to several sites as following examples show:

• Yahoo Buzz sent 16 million visitors to outside sites its first two weeks!
• US Magazine had their second highest traffic day thanks to Yahoo Buzz, with 32% of visits that day coming from the Yahoo home page.
• Salon.com had 1 million unique visitors on February 28th after getting on the home page of Buzz. A record for the twelve year old site!
• Huffington Post reported 800,000 unique visitors from a Yahoo-linked story.
• Sugar, Inc. sites have had nearly 1.8 million unique visitors sent from five different Buzz stories on the Yahoo home page.

In short Yahoo Buzz is a successful example of Yahoo!’s network effect if Yahoo! integrates smartly. Yahoo! Buzz isn’t a one off story either, Yahoo! has shown more empressive feats recently.

Yahoo! takes on Youtube?
Both Yahoo! Video and Yahoo Finance’s Tech Ticker have seen impressive growth spikes in recent months.

Tech Ticker – a modest reiteration of the illfated Yahoo! Financevision – brings you webcasts featuring news and interviews about tech companies and the financial markets. No wonder its viewage has spiked during the financial crisis and the economic turmoil.

Yahoo! Video – the headon competitor to Google’s Youtube leaped to the second place in the Video Webbrands popularity numbers.

While Youtube video streams “only” grew 12% last September, Yahoo! Video showed a spectacular 56% increase. Its userbase grew 35% in the same time frame.

A smoother integration with other Yahoo! sites like Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance are likely to credit for the healthy growth. It also bodes well for Yahoo!’s main page redesign (currently in beta).

Have a look at Yahoo!’s new homepage beta!

In the meantime Yahoo! TV‘s weekly webcast “Primetime in No Time” reached the 100 million streams milestone in a record timeframe of only eight months since its March 2008 launch. This makes “Primetime in No Time” one of the most successful original programs in the history of the Internet.

Created to provide Yahoo! users with a daily comedic, rapid-fire recap of primetime TV’s most water cooler-worthy moments, “Primetime in No Time” reaches TV fans exclusively on Yahoo! TV at http://primetime.tv.yahoo.com. It is hosted by comedian Frank Nicotero and brought to users by Verizon. The webcast reaches 4 million users each week.

Yahoo’s big chance in a downward economy
Yahoo is a company with great potential. Even, or especially since the stock has taken a huge beating.

Due to the economic crisis Yahoo! suddenly isn’t the only internet company in distress.
Yahoo! already has several cost cuts in effect or on their way while others suddenly are scrambling too.

This could also be the perfect chance for Yahoo to line up some new seasoned and experienced talents in their ranks, including a replacement CEO.

Although CEO and Chief Yahoo! Jerry Yang will soon be replaced, Jerry made some smart and efficient decisions during his reign at the company.

As a techie himself Jerry Yang knew improving the workings of Yahoo!’s programmer teams all around the world could cut costs and shorten the launch timeframe for new products.

That’s why Jerry implemented a new way of working. From now on Yahoo! programmers worldwide are working together 24 hours a day, taking over tasks from eachother as time passes by. Instead of the old 9to5 time scheme where Yahoo! UK programmers only worked on the local Yahoo! UK & Ireland sites, Yahoo! France only on their French services,… etc. Each team now works on a global base.

Hang on, Yahoo! makes a profit??
Due to all the it’s cool to beat down Yahoo! press coverage, one would almost forget Yahoo! still is a profitable internet company with no debt and 3,3 billion dollars in its treasure chest. Coupled with a continuous user growth (17% Year on Year) and a massive half a billion users a month(!).

Jerry Yang and co shouldn’t feel bad, after all it’s a popular media sport to create heroes for the sole purpous to kick them down later. But the media also loves a great comeback story!

And in the meantime, why not try out Yahoo!’s latest innovation called Yahoo! Glue (beta).

Sources:

• Yodel Anecdotal! A fab Yahoo! blog!
• YHOO on Yahoo Finance
• Dear Jerry Yang, You Should Be Proud
• Yahoo! Original Program Primetime in No Time Surpasses 100 Million Streams
• Yahoo BUZZ: More traffic you can Digg up, Stumble upon, Mixx and eat Delicious (ly)!
• Yahoo Buzz is a Game Changer for Social Media; And Spells Trouble for Digg!

> Have your say! What’s your favorite Yahoo! service? Are you a Yahoo! believer?

• Get noticed
• Increase visitors
• Earn money!

And yet it’s “feelgood”.. Why?

Getting noticed
One of the huge pro’s of Blogsvine is you can get featured on the main page quite easily. Only five people need to favorite your link and WHAM! The nice folks at Blogsvine put you on their index page.

Hypedworld has had great results with Blogsvine thanks to those featured articles.
But there’s more!

Increasing visitors
Getting your links and posts on Blogsvine is a breeze! Thanks to its inclusion in bookmarklets like bookmarkify and their own WordPress plugin.

And while Blogsvine hasn’t quite reached critical mass yet, their users are quite active.
Browsing through their listings and making friends really is rewarded as we’ve noticed ourselves. But more on this later!

Earn Money!
If there ever was a dealmaker, this one is it for those in need of pocket money. And honestly, who isn’t?:)

Blogsvine shares 65% of advertising profits with their users! Do your pages create ad revenue? Then you receive a part of it. The only thing to do is create an AdSense account (if you haven’t allready) and fill in your AdSense ID in your Blogsvine profile.

You won’t become a millionaire over night, far from it! But as the site grows in popularity, early Blogsvine birds will be a step ahead of the rest.

Great features, aren’t they?
Yet those are not the main reasons we love using this site.
To put it a bit bluntly, Blogsvines looks like an also ran in some fronts compared to the HUGE Digg.com or Technorati on the internet. But that really is one of their biggest assets!

It’s userbase is a small but close community. Your Blogsvine friends actually feel like friends or neighbours! Do you favorite one of their posts? They’ll quickly return the favor.
There are few spam profiles or lazy “get as much friends as possible” egotrippers on Blogsvine (yet)!

Blogsvine just feels good because your efforts are appreciated both by its users and the Blogsvine creators. Because lets be honest, do you believe you’d be featured on Digg or Yahoo! Buzz with five or so votes?

Blogsvine does, because size doesn’t matter but the stories and people do. And yes, that really does feel good!

Try out Blogsvine for yourself!

> Share your thoughts! Have you tried out Blogsvine? Let people know in our comment section below!

Have some spare time on your hands? Discover a new take on the oldtime favorite arcade game TETRIS! Diggtris powered by social bookmarking site Digg.com.

The falling pieces represent the stories; the color and size of the pieces depend on the category the story belongs to and the total number of diggs the story has.

Enjoy DIGGTRIS!

> Share your high scores in our comment section below!

TypeRacer gives you and your opponents a movie or book quote that you’ve got to type as fast as possible. It sounds simple but it’s heaps of fun.

Play TypeRacer!

You’ve even got a good excuse for your mum, partner or boss! You’re improving your typing AND learning great quotations at the same time.;-)

Have fun Typeracing!!

> What do you think of this game? Share your opinion in our comment section!

If you like some crazy cool and nifty web applications… have a look at Yahoo! next.
The guys at Yahoo! still haven’t lost their cool (and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise!).

Have a look at the Newsglobe!

If you’re a blogger, programmer or webmaster Yahoo! Next is definately worth checking out!

The results are powered by Google, but the search results are featured in a nifty 3D presentation.

Hopefully we might see a similar 3D version for Yahoo! Search because their results have been going from strength to strengt time after time… (contrary to the parent company itself.)

Why not try it out for yourself, it’s really cool!

It’s weird how things turn out. When Google CEO Eric Schmidt joined Apple’s board of directors experts hailed it as a great move.

Apple might be enriched with Google’s working culture and many even dreamt of an Apple-Google-Disney combined Microsoft terminator.

But by the looks of it, it’s quite the opposite. Both companies actually have started competing on multiple fronts…

Google’s recently launched apps are noticably much more slicker and userfriendly then before … a famous Apple trademark and something we can only applaud.

And even Google’s marketing is getting more and more innovative, announcing their browser “Chrome” with a comic book!”

Just a coincidence?

Apple

* On June 11th 2007 Apple launched their browser Safari to the Windows masses.

* June 29 2007, the launch of the original iPhone.

* June 2008, Apple launches the iTunes App Store featuring downloads for the iPhone.

T-mobile's promising Dream cellphone running Google Android.

Google

* 2 September 2008, Google launches its (superb!) browser beta version “Chrome” for windows.

* The first pictures of the G-phone powered by Google’s Android software pop up on the web.

* Google is currently working on “Android Market” a Google competitor for the iTunes App Store.

Both companies also seem on track to offer similar products online with Apple’s 99$ a year “Mobile Me” offering and several online “Google Apps”.

Off course Google’s, “Applefication” shouldn’t come as a suprise as half of the company’s executives previously worked for… Steve Jobs.

The ex-Apple employees and their current function at Google:

* Jonathan Rosenberg – Senior Vice President, Product Management

* Dave Girouard – President, Enterprise

* Kai-Fu Lee Vice – President, Google Inc.; President, Greater China

* Megan Smith – Vice President, New Business Development

* Francois Delepine – Vice President, Financial Planning and Analysis

* Mark Fuchs – Vice President of Finance and Chief Accountant

> What do you think of Google’s new products? Downloaded the “Chrome” browser yet? Have your say in the comment section below!