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Is this cyberspace week or what? First we learned that Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) has acquired TechCrunch. The next day we discovered that Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is acquiring Auction.com. Now, for the third day in a row, another high-profile internet company has announced, not only a new acquisition, but a radical change it’s interface relationships. The share price of Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) has risen by 1.11% in early trading as it flirts with the $40.00 mark for the second time this year.
Twenty years ago, this generation was saying that we had witnessed the greatest advances in technology in two millennia. Twenty years ago, we had no idea how much more rapidly things would advance. We have gone from walking to warp speed in two decades. We are in a phase now where it is almost impossible for average people to keep up with the speed of things, especially with the pace of internet leviathans like Facebook, Google and Yahoo. Within the time it takes to think that the world is changing, it has already changed again.
Yahoo’s New Acquisition
Yahoo announced yesterday that it is or has acquired Vizify, a relatively small, startup company with what is, at this point, a relatively unique offering. Vizify takes quantitative information and transforms it into an infographic format. Ostensibly, Yahoo will soon be able to visually identify you, not just with a photo, but a graphic representation of all of the information it has been able to gather about you. This could have a great deal of social impact, which could be either good or bad, depending upon how you perceive it, and, of course, on how it is used. According to Yahoo, the addition of Vizify is intended to improve user experience. One Yahoo spokesperson described the acquisition like this: “We have found in Vizify a company that shares our passion for visualization technology and the user experience.”
The purchase of Vizify brings the total number of Yahoo acquisitions in the past 20 months to 37.
Yahoo’s New Announcement
CEO Marissa Mayer also announced this week that Yahoo is in the process of discontinuing its login links with Facebook and Google. This move, which may sound like user inconvenience, is actually a solid, financial decision that will help Yahoo increase revenues whilst enhancing user experience. In fact, Yahoo explained that they want to provide “the best personalized experience to everyone.” This is investor-worthy information because it indicates that Yahoo is attempting to better monitize its services by tailoring them to individual users. The easiest way for them to do that is through the use of cookies.
Cookies identify your personal information and preferences, both explicitly and implicitly, so that what appears when you log in, whether it is news or advertising, matches your personal profile, regardless of which IP address you are using. Cookies are unique to you and specific websites. When you log into Yahoo using Facebook or Google, Yahoo is unable to capture your profile data collected and stored on those sites.
Dropping the login feature from other sites may seem like a bit of an inconvenience, but from a Yahoo growth perspective it is an excellent strategy that should pay handsome returns.
