Yahoo vs Facebook

[Scribbly]

So for a while now, Yahoo has been flailing around trying to find some way to become a viable business again. They've been on a pretty steep downward trajectory, their search and email services beaten out by Google and fewer and fewer people using them at all.

A little while ago they elected a new CEO, and a radical new strategy has been implemented - sue Facebook for violating their patents!

I read this on the FT but they are funny about sharing articles, so this is the best other source I could find in thirty seconds: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2012/02/28/yahoo-threatens-to-sue-facebook-over.html

The paper quoted a Yahoo spokesperson as saying, "Yahoo has a responsibility to its shareholders, employees and other stakeholders to protect its intellectual property. We must insist that Facebook either enter into a licensing agreement or we will be compelled to move forward unilaterally to protect our rights."

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt, however, told The Times, "Yahoo contacted us the same time they called The New York Times and so we haven't had the opportunity to fully evaluate their claims."
It isn't clear how much Yahoo thinks it is owed by Facebook but the fight comes at a sensitive time for both companies. Facebook is getting ready to go public in the next few months and Yahoo is trying to establish its new identity under recently named CEO Scott Thompson.

The FT had an additional quote from Yahoo basically saying that it has nothing to do with Facebook's upcoming initial public offering, and instead is purely a new strategy by Scott Thompson to try and turn Yahoo around.

Really interesting that it is even possible Yahoo could threaten this legitimately. Apparently Facebook has secured 58 patents and has another 410 pending.

[AFK]

I believe this is what they call "death throes".

Yahoo is beyond irrelevant at this point in the game.  Unless you count trolling Yahoo Answers for some meager entertainment value. 

I don't see this working and I don't see where they fit in the internet universe. 

[bds]

I hate all this patent lunacy. It seems like they're just used for huge corporation power plays, not for legitimately protecting IP, and I'm fed up of it.

[Triple Zero]

For Software Patents, there is no "seems", because that it exactly and exclusively what they're used for. For other patents it's different though.

It's a shame because Yahoo has quite a few useful projects going for the web development community. There's Pipes, Y!Slow, the YUI libraries for Javascript (though they're getting a bit obsolete), CSS templates, all sorts of stuff.

It's just that Yahoo on the inside is a really sucky company, their internal structure for managing projects and divisions is really competitive and stunted by corporate politics. Most small web companies that get bought by Yahoo stop development and disappear in a year maybe two. The most tragic of these is Delicious, the social bookmarking service that basically started off the whole web2.0 mashup era, it's nearly dead now and there's no really good replacement elsewhere (there are similar services but they're not as good).