I’ve been reading a lot of news lately about this Yahoo / Microsoft deal that fell through. Now the latest is that some big share holders are trying to force the deal to go through by replacing Yahoo’s board. It just goes to show how Wall Street misunderstands the situation. Stocks increased on the run up to the deal deadline. After it fell through, Yahoo stocks slipped. Anyone with half a brain would have picked up a few shares after the slip which is exactly what I did. Of course I’m not a 5% stake holder in the company but a few shares I do own and I felt like venting my frustration at the other vocal shareholders trying to force the deal with Microsoft.

Yahoo has long been in battle with Microsoft even from the early days with Hotmail. A deal with Microsoft would essentially devalue the Yahoo brand and have it lose respect among the geek community. Over the past year or two Yahoo has been growing its web business in the right direction. Its acquisitions of Flickr and Del.icio.us are just 2 examples off the top of my head. Those two names alone boost Yahoo’s appeal as a company which is why Microsoft is after them in the first place.

More importantly is their search technology. Despite Google’s dominance in search, Yahoo’s search engine has gotten extremely better over the past few years. Its results are typically much more accurate than Google’s in my opinion and they’ve been growing more and more appealing as an alternative to Google’s mythical magic search engine. Anyone who watches search engine rankings will tell you that Yahoo’s search results are much more consistent over time which makes it even more appealing. Not only that but SEO for Yahoo versus Google is more scientific and less voodoo. Its just another reason why Yahoo has been looking like its positioning itself more and more to become an extremely formidable online presence. Microsoft recognizes that and wants to low ball them before they secure their footing and get a steal on a buyout bid. The stockholders are on Microsoft’s side because they see a potential short term gain in stock value.

What they fail to see is that a Yahoo - Microsoft merger would essentially ruin any chances of a truly successful online presence for Yahoo and Microsoft. Microsoft has proven itself incapable of bringing anything worthwhile to the online arena even with past acquisitions of online businesses. Its ultimately a dooms day deal for Yahoo that’s being pushed by a few big stockholders who want some quick cash and have little interest in the long term success of Yahoo’s technology. I’m behind their technology and support them but selling out to Microsoft is likely going to sour the support Yahoo’s built up in recent years and ultimately fail as usual in the hands of Microsoft. Microsoft is a has been. Ask any kid who’s used a Mac before. They’re desperate and see the writing on the wall. They want to prolong their demise by purchasing promising web companies.

My guess is that Microsoft has wooed these stockholders privately in a lobbying type effort. Their thinking is that instead of raising their bid that they’ll woo a few big stockholders to replace Yahoo’s board and get their low ball deal for the company. Its typical Microsoft at its best. Either way, Yahoo’s stock is destined to go up whether they sell or don’t sell. No sale means they continue their forward progress and continue to build their momentum in a positive direction. I’ll likely keep my shares in that case. Sell and I’ll likely sell my shares shortly before the acquisition so I don’t end up with a loss at the end of the day. I’m no day trader but those are my thoughts as a web developer who’s seen these two companies have their better days.

Its been a long time coming but we’ve finally got our new site design finished for Onomojo. We’ve also expanded our services to include graphics design, logo design, web design, and a whole slew of other graphics related services. That’s in addition to the services we already provided which were primarily programming, seo, and marketing related. Here’s a screenshot of the new design.

I’ve been working on a link exchange management service lately and its now ready for production. There are still things that need to be done on it but its now operational and ready for public consumption. The service is called, LinkLuna, and you can use it to manage your link exchanges. Best of all its a free service that anyone can use. It integrates easily into your existing site using our simple api and I even had a Wordpress plugin built to save you time integrating it into your blog. Try it out for free and let me know how I can improve the services.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite a long time but somehow never seemed to get around to it. I started a SEO, online marketing, and web development company called Onomojo a while ago. I’ve just been so busy since its conception that I found it hard to find the time to blog about it. I’ve decided to take a break from the hustle and bustle of the routine and say a few words about us.

We offer a complete marketing package for online businesses who are looking to increase their exposure and increase their revenue. A lot of businesses throw money at expensive marketing firms and end up with little to show for it. We found that in most cases the marketers weren’t developers and the developers weren’t marketers. Onomojo is different. We are all programmers, designers, and marketing professionals. This gives us an edge and the ability to offer complete marketing packages that complete the necessary learning loop to achieve success.

Any successful business must learn from what it does right and learn from what it does wrong. When your marketing agency has to communicate their wishes to developers the intentions are often lost. Programmers aren’t typically interested in the marketing aspect of development. Marketers usually have no clue how to program or design. We are different. Our developers have a passion for SEO, marketing, graphics design, and everything else it takes to make a company successful. Our feedback loop of what works and what doesn’t is extremely short with a complete package. We learn from the marketing and SEO and we directly apply that learning to your site design and content. We take learning from CPC ads and traffic analysis and we apply those lessons learned to make your site more effective. Onomojo offers complete online marketing packages for business looking for a competitive edge. Visit our site at http://onomojo.com and fill out the contact form for more information on what Onomojo can do for you and your company.

I’ve been searching for a free uml diagramming tool for Linux for a long time. There are plenty of options but nothing really stable or good enough for what I need it for. I stumbled on Gliffy today. Its an online diagramming tool written in Flash. Best of all you can use it free given some minor limitations. I tried it out and its exactly what I’ve been looking for to help collaboration between remote developers. I definitely suggest you check it out.

I’ve started doing more web design work lately and as such am in frequent need of decent color palettes for my sites. Unfortunately I’m not keen on developing them myself. I can tell which ones I like and which ones I don’t but creating the palette is difficult for me. Luckily there are people out there that are good at blending colors together so they look good. I did a quick search and came up with a nice site that I really like. Its not spammy and it has tons of palettes to choose from. They are searchable and easily display the hex for each color in the palette so its a simple matter of copy and paste into my css file. Colour Lovers is the site and I suggest you take a look if you’re interested in finding some good color palettes.

I’ve been working hard lately to get my latest creation off the ground and here it is: Beep Shot. You send picture messages from your cell phone to the Beep Shot number and they get posted on the site where people can comment and rate them. Try it out for yourself at http://beepshot.com and join in on all the fun.

I was working on a site design for a project of mine and had a specific font in mind for part of it. I googled around and had some trouble finding a decent site with free fonts until I found DaFont.com. This site has hundreds of free true type fonts you can download. It was painstaking to manually searching through all these fonts for what I was looking for but I eventually found it. At least this site had enough fonts for me to look through to find what I was looking for and they’re all free too.