All Things Digital

“There’s a reason why we’re the only fortune 500 company with an exclamation point at the end of our name,” Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said yesterday. “And now is the time to demonstrate what that exclamation point stands for.”

Today investors are doing just that. Sadly for Yang, it’s with criticisms and epithets, not calls to arms. Seems Yahoo (YHOO) investors’ view of what that exclamation point stands for post-Microsoft (MSFT) differ just a wee bit from Yang’s. What follows is a selection of reader comments on Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s “OK, So Now What?” blog post:

• Dear Mr. Yang, You had the opportunity to provide your shareholders and dying company with a somewhat respectable exit. A 70% premium sat in your lap and you had the ARROGANCE to ask for more.

• I don’t doubt that the pro-Microsoft crowd is celebrating right now. I’ll bet no one in Redmond wants to go through the pain of integrating with a company that has undergone an engineering talent-exodus and is becoming irrelevant in its core technologies. So as a Microsoft shareholder, thank you for acting in my best interests. Had you accepted Microsoft’s offer it would most certainly have crippled Ballmer and company.
• Hi Jerry, Nice job. … Now will you please buy my 500 shares at $31. I mean it’s a great deal for you since your stock is worth $37 as you say.
• How are you going to turn this aging hippy around? How about coming out and announcing Yahoo’s new strategy. You can start by appointing Sue Decker CEO.

The ability to control how much information is available to the public has long been one of Facebook’s core principles. It was this very feature, for example, that Facebook used to distinguish itself from other social networks back when it first launched.

Of course, the ensuing years proved that protecting the privacy of its users was not exactly Facebook’s strong suit–especially when it came to digging up the advertising revenues necessary to justify its fantastical $15 billion valuation. There have been privacy issues with Facebook’s news-feed service, with its controversial Beacon advertising system, and with its terms of service, which granted popular applications access to far more personal user data than is necessary.

And now there’s another. A bug in permission restrictions in Facebook Groups allows members to upload content without first receiving permission from a Group admin. I know this firsthand, because over the past few days videos, photos and blog posts have been appearing on the All Things Digital Facebook Group, and neither Walt, Kara nor I–the only three people with admin privileges to the group–put them there (see screen below). Worse, while I was able to delete the photos and blog posts, I was unable to pull the videos off the page. There was no mechanism to remove them.

Worse still, the bug that makes this possible is not specific to the All Things Digital Facebook Group alone. It affects all Facebook Groups, site-wide.

We alerted Facebook to the issue and the company quickly identified the bug. Said spokesperson Brandee Barker: “Engineering has pushed out a fix that should go site wide shortly.”

UPDATE: Facebook engineers fixed the permissions bug, and we were able to remove the rogue videos from our page.

Having blown its chance to develop LiveJournal into what could well have been an early Facebook, the site’s owner, Six Apart, agreed yesterday to sell it to Moscow-based online media company SUP.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed, though Kommersant reports the deal to be worth some $30 million. The sale comes about a year after Six Apart and SUP allied to bring LiveJournal to Russia, where the platform quickly gained a lot of traction. Today www.livejournal.ru accounts for 28% of LiveJournal’s overall audience. As SUP CEO Andrew Paulson once said, “LiveJournal is the ‘blogosphere’ in Russia.”

The acquisition, then, would appear to make perfect sense. Six Apart unburdens itself of a tiring distraction and SUP gears up to transform LiveJournal into what its previous owners could not. “This is pretty cool because [SUP is] ridiculously excited about LiveJournal, and [has] been for a while,” writes LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick. “They want to throw a lot of resources at LiveJournal in terms of product development and engineers. ‘LiveJournal.com, Inc.’ now stands alone again, focusing on nothing but LJ. “

Yahoo’s scooped up another small software company to poorly integrate into its product and service offerings. The Internet company has acquired content aggregator BuzzTracker and named its founder, Alan Warms, general manager and vice president of Yahoo News. Purchase price: a reported $5 million. “The decision to sell the business and move to Yahoo! was relatively simple,” Warms wrote in a post to the company blog. “As anyone playing in the online space understands, online media is all about scale. The ability to garner real CPMs, the ability to sell ads directly, the ability to provide innovative solutions to advertisers, all depend on having tens of millions of unique visitors. As the Publisher of BuzzTracker.com and before that RealClearPolitics.com, that point has been drilled into my consciousness over the past two years.”

OK. That explains BuzzTracker’s decision to sell. Now how do we explain Yahoo’s decision to buy? After all, BuzzTracker isn’t exactly leading the market for blog aggregators. In fact, it’s essentially a poor man’s TechMeme and an even poorer man’s Megite. Why buy an also-ran? Apparently, the price was right. “Yahoo had looked at other better-known competitors in the space,” sources tell AllThingsD.com’s Kara Swisher. “But those trendier (and more popular) start-ups apparently had too lofty valuations.”