GigaOM

You know the joke about Microsoft — they normally get things almost right on the third try. After failing miserably to get Yahoo in two initial attempts thus far, Steve Ballmer and Co. might be returning for yet another try, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Indeed, two weeks ago, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer called Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock to suggest they meet to discuss a new idea involving other partners, according to a person familiar with the matter…Yahoo remains skeptical about the viability of a deal that would break out its core search business. But the company remains open to discussing any proposal from Microsoft, people close to the company said.

This time they are looking to team up with News Corp. and Time Warner and bid for Yahoo, and essentially carve it up. That said, the whole story is full of caveats. Continue »

Update: Platform-A’s official statement on the breach. Original Story below the fold.

Platform-A has determined that the servers that host Third Screen Media’s corporate web site were breached during the weekend of June 6-8, 2008. The breach resulted in malicious code and web pages being loaded on the web server. Third Screen Media’s web site is supported by a third-party hosting provider, which is completely separate from its production ad-serving systems. We have confirmed that the company’s advertising systems have not been impacted and remain secure.

The site has been taken down and all malicious content has been removed. Platform-A’s technical staff is investigating the breach to determine the appropriate changes necessary to secure the systems. Once the appropriate changes have been made, the site will be made operational again.

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When it comes to the widget ecosystem, lavishly funded companies like Slide, Clearspring and RockYou hog the limelight. But it is Userplane, now a subsidiary of AOL, that seems to be revving up the money engine without much fanfare. The company that started out offering a web-based chat system has now morphed into a many-faceted business, including owning what might just be one of the largest widget ad networks out there.

At the D6 Conference this week in Carlsbad, Calif., I ran into Userplane founder Mike Jones, who sold his company to AOL in 2006 and now works for AOL. During our conversation, I marveled at the amount of money being pumped into the widget ecosystem while at the same time fretting about the paucity of revenue opportunities. My skepticism about the sector was outlined in an earlier post that focused on Clearspring’s latest round of funding.

While Jones generally agreed, he was quick to point out that when you serve a gigantic amount of ads in social media, you can actually make money. Userplane has been selling widget ads for a while, and Jones said that his company is doing about a billion widget-ad impressions a day. That makes it one of the top 30 ad networks as ranked by comScore. Continue »

The giant Time Warner implosion starts now with the move to split off its growing cable division and use the capital to buy back shares. While the cable business brought some stability to Time Warner’s bottom line, it’s an awkward asset for a content company to hold onto, especially if the content side of the business is thinking about divestitures. And so it begins.

The nation’s second-largest cable operator will be the first to go. CEO Jeff Bewkes said today that Time Warner would split off the remaining 84 percent of its cable division with details to be worked out later. Then we’ll look for a spin out or sale of the diminishing AOL access line business, which Time Warner plans to separate from the flailing Platform A advertising business.

The logical next step is a retreat from the publishing world with magazines such as Fortune, People and Time going on the block. What will be left are the movie businesses, including Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema, and cable TV properties such as HBO and TBS. Those units brought in sales of $5.5 billion during the quarter but are under continued pressure from the Internet. Like an aging matron, Time Warner appears to be taking refuge in the arms of old Hollywood.

Jajah, one of the many callback service providers, is slowly trying to transform itself into a voice platform, offering others the ability to use its network and back-end billing and fulfillment infrastructure. It struck up a partnership with Jangl back in November 2007. This managed services focus seems to have gotten a big boost, thanks to a deal with Yahoo. Yahoo and Jajah share a common investor: Sequoia Capital.Jajah co-founder Daniel Mattes tells our friend Alec Saunders that Yahoo will outsource voice services for their 97 million Yahoo IM users to Jajah. Mattes says it now has 10 million users, about 8 million of them joining Jajah over the past 12 months. I guess if you include widget users and people using services on other networks, the 8 million additional Jajah users starts to make sense.

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In a memo to employees aimed at addressing fears of an AOL/Yahoo tie-up, AOL chief Randy Falco today penned a truth for social networks:

But despite drawing large, engaged audiences, other social networks have not been able to make the experiences relevant to users and marketers alike.

That right there is the reason I’m hostile to most social networking and social networking-related startups that plan to rely on advertising: They’re depending on marketers to foot the bill while at the same tailoring their content to users that are generally hostile to or uninterested in marketing.

Falco believes that AOL’s future combination of Bebo and Platform A will solve this problem. He’s wrong. Buying more companies with cooler widgets or more users isn’t the direction the Internet is heading. We no longer need portals because we now can navigate the web for ourselves. The real opportunity for a startup in social media is making social networks relevant for advertisers — and making advertisers see social networks as an essential forum for their messages.

It might start with a technological solution, such as the one from startup ScanScount, which is trying to isolate relevant content so advertisers feel comfortable placing their brand on social and user-generated media sites, but it won’t end there. These sites, no matter how useful, need to make money. The company that figures out how to do that will be the Google of Web 2.0.