Personally, i hope that techcrunch is dead wrong.
First off, i can't even imagine us wanting Myspace. No offense to those of you with Myspace pages, but it's the Web 2.0 trailerpark. Yahoo! went that route several times in the past, and it never, ever went well. Heck, we bought the Web 1.0 trailer park when we got GeoCities, and while i really admire what the folks at WebHosting have done with that product in the intervening years, it's not exactly setting the world on fire, and possibly still giving it an occasional epileptic fit. Seriously, people ain't having i Knows Me Some Ugly Facebook contests.
Myspace may have once been "the place" buy much like that nice little coffee shop in Seattle, it ain't n'more. Bands have pages there because the non-creative marketing drones are behind the times, not because it's a viable way to get in touch with their audience. Well, possibly if they're targeting pre-teens and pedophiles, but that's neither here nor there.
Seriously, the target demographic is currently using Facebook and LinkedIn. Hell, i use those. Although i don't live on Facebook like some folks do, and i have a LinkedIn page pretty much because i very much doubt i'd get hired somewhere without one.
But, the audience isn't really the reason i think this rumor has "dumb" written all over it. There are HUGE reasons i'm against this deal.
1) Rupert Murdoch. The man that brought us Fox News, The New York Post, The Star Tabloid and a great many other journals of questionable merit. He'll own 25-30% of the most regularly visited news and financial information site on the planet. Mull that one over for a second or two before the screaming willies hit.
2) We've got something better than MySpace. It's our long neglected and (for still unknown reasons) highly trafficked Groups. Give that section even a tiny fraction of the love it so desperately needs and we could kick MySpace's ass seven ways 'til C'Thulu comes home.
3) If Murdoch wants to ditch MySpace, there's got to be a reason. Maybe it's the declining numbers. Maybe it's the growing legal issues. Maybe he actually visited a few of the pages and figured out that he got ripped off pretty bad. Either way, he doesn't mind not controlling it anymore.
All kidding aside (as if there is any), MySpace would be Broadcast.com 2.0.
It would be us repeating a legendary mistake that should have been taken behind the cafe and beaten with bats until the pavement beneath it is turned to dust. It is such a horrifically awful idea that i would ask the board members for urine samples.
Sad thing is that while i quite obviously have an opinion, i really do know absolutely nothing about any plans that may actually be in the works. Danny is right, i'm very much a mushroom and often don't find out a lot of these things until i read about them from the financial news.
i have faith in my new management. Faith that says they're smart enough to notice a familiar sense of terror that comes with doing staggeringly dumb things.
i hope they know to run screaming from this.
Once again proving how much wiser you are than me most of the time, Alice.
You may want to change the first couple of references to MySpace instead of Facebook - the post doesn't make too much sense at the beginning.
Cant say I blame Murdoch — he'd be trading a trashed dorm room for a 25% of a majestic west-coast resort. I hope your big cheeses can see that, though.
Marc Andreeson recently wrote a post about turning around big companies. I couldn't help but consider Yahoo!
One suggest he made was to "Identify the 3-5 things that are working surprisingly well in your business, and double down on those." It sounds like groups is one of those things.
Also, every time I read about price tags for some of these crappy sites, I'm blown away Yahoo got flickr for $30 mil. What a deal! Maybe Semel was worth it ;)
Absolutely Bazbax. Yahoo! has always been about people. (Heck our original directory was created by folks with deep interests who went out and found cool stuff so you didn't have to.) Damn near everything we do right involves helping people. Even our hack days are more about what everyone else does with our stuff rather than what we do with it.
The internet is not about just pure data. It's full of people. And that's not a bad thing to like to deal with.
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How many times has Microsoft been buying us?
That said, I've conditioned myself to neither look at blogs covering rumors like this or read the comments on said blogs (specifically when they're talking about us). Mostly so I don't get so upset I go on rants like this one on my own blog.