Yahoo and Intel built their success upon widespread use of personal computers, but the two companies hope products to be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show next week will mark the beginning of their Internet-fueled expansion to the world of TV as well.

The two companies have attracted several significant manufacturing and content allies in the attempt to bring new smarts and interactivity to a part of the electronics world that has remained a more passive part of people’s digital lives.

What exactly are they trying to achieve? For Yahoo, it’s establishment of the Widget Channel, a software foundation that can house programs for browsing photos, using the Internet’s abundant socially connected services, watching YouTube videos, or digging deeper into TV shows — and through which Yahoo will be able to show advertisements.

For Intel, it’s a foothold in an industry whose microprocessors have typically been cheaper, less powerful, and less power-hungry.

Yahoo is confident the products will catch on, in part because it’s set “very low” licensing requirements, said Patrick Barry, vice president of Yahoo’s Connected TV initiative.

Internet TV is becoming more popular now that most families have broadband access at home. However, the internet infrastructure in US still lags behind in bandwidth compare to some other countries. I believe as long as they prove Internet TV to be a cheaper alternative to Cable or Satellite TV, Yahoo should have no problem to promote it.

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Google is no longer suggesting that you should be listed in relevant directories. In fact, they’ve even removed the suggestion from their webmaster guidelines, as Brian Ussery noticed. The page used to have bullet points for:

- Have other relevant sites link to yours.

- Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Those points are now gone in what would appear to be a slap in the face of directories, but SEO folks are the ones really irritated. Google doesn’t appear to see it as a slap in the face so much, but more of simply a non-needed guideline.

Barry Schwartz points to a quote from Google’s John Mueller in a Google Groups thread:

“I wouldn’t necessarily assume that we’re devaluing Yahoo’s links, I just think it’s not one of the things we really need to recommend,” said Mueller. “If people think that a directory is going to bring them lots of visitors (I had a visitor from the DMOZ once), then it’s obviously fine to get listed there. It’s not something that people have to do though :-).”

Mueller also asks for feedback, “What do you think - does it make sense? What else should we change / add / remove?”

Regardless of what guidelines are on the page, a relevant link is a relevant link. There are still directories that don’t offer paid links, and keep the listings quality without getting flooded by spammy and irrelevant ones by using a strict human-edited approval process.

There is going to be a lot of outrage over this, but is it really necessary? Perhaps too much focus has been put on directories like DMOZ anyway.

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In one of the more bizarre responses in a three-way merger deal fracas since the Viacom/Paramount/Blockbuster deal of the early 1990s, a Microsoft statement this afternoon — ostensibly to refute some of the details described in a Yahoo statement early Sunday morning — also manages to separate Microsoft’s point of view from that of financier Carl Icahn. Specifically, the statement characterizes Icahn as exacerbating a deal that Microsoft was trying to put together at the request of Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock, not the other way around.

“The enhanced proposal for an alternate search transaction that we submitted late Friday was submitted at the request of Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock as a result of apparent attempts by Mr. Icahn [emphasis ours] to have Microsoft and Yahoo engage on a search transaction on terms Mr. Icahn believed Microsoft would be willing to accept and which Microsoft understands Mr. Icahn had discussed with Yahoo.”

This new statement makes it appear as though Icahn and Yahoo were working out the terms and that Microsoft worked to meet their demands, in a move which, like the others before, ultimately failed. In his own statement this morning, Icahn said he tried to broker a deal that would enable Microsoft to purchase a chunk of Yahoo, which contained its search business but which also contained its more valuable Asian business assets, for a partial deal Icahn valued at $33 per share. Yahoo flatly refused that deal late Saturday night, Pacific coast time.

“Microsoft’s proposal did not include changes to Yahoo’s governance,” reads Microsoft’s statement this afternoon. “At the time Microsoft submitted its enhanced proposal, Microsoft asked that Yahoo confirm whether it would agree that the enhancements were sufficient to form the basis for the parties to engage in negotiations over the weekend on a letter of intent and more detailed term sheets. This discussion has been mischaracterized as a take it or leave it ultimatum, rather than a timetable in order to move forward to intensive negotiations. Yahoo informed Microsoft on Saturday that it had rejected the proposal.”

Yahoo’s statement early Sunday morning included this: “The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would require the immediate replacement of the current Board and removal of the top management team at Yahoo. The Yahoo Board believes these moves would destabilize Yahoo for the up to the one year [sic] it would take to gain regulatory approval for this deal.”

Strangely, Icahn’s statement this morning agrees with neither Microsoft’s nor Yahoo’s presentation of the events, saying that the deal would mean changes to Yahoo’s board, but that CEO Jerry Yang would stay on as “Chief Yahoo” (which may not necessarily have meant CEO).

“Yahoo tells you in their press release that a condition of the deal was the immediate replacement of the current board and removal of top management,” Icahn wrote, directing his statement to Yahoo shareholders. “Yahoo neglected to mention we were willing to discuss keeping a number of the current board members and Jerry Yang as Chief Yahoo.”

Microsoft’s statement today did not say whether it would discontinue attempts to acquire part of Yahoo, after being spurned once again over the weekend.

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Yahoo formally rejected a proposal from Microsoft and Carl Icahn in a statement issued on Saturday.

They had been given 24 hours to reach a decision by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Friday night. They reached a decision, but probably not the one that Ballmer and Icahn were looking for.

Yahoo says that its advertising deal with Google offers “superior financial value, reports Kyung Bok Cho at Bloomberg.

Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock has said that the alliance between Microsoft and Icahn has “anything but the interests of Yahoo’s stockholders in mind…it’s ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a proposal”.

Microsoft had recently said that it could no longer negotiate with Yahoo’s current board, and it appears that this has been proven to be an accurate statement.

Ballmer and Icahn have yet to get the final words out on the matter. Nobody seems to be able to reach them for comment, though I’m sure that will change in the near future.

Meanwhile, Google should be happy with Yahoo’s decision not to sell Microsoft their search business.

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News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said it was “very unlikely” his company would reach any type of deal with Yahoo and said Yahoo and Microsoft will not be involved in any type of transaction.

On the Microsoft/Yahoo deal Murdoch said,” There won’t be a deal. There’s bad personal feelings.”

Microsoft was in negotiations earlier this year to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion but talks broke down in May after the two companies failed to reach an agreement.

“In six months, (Microsoft) will walk away,” Murdoch, said at the annual Allen & Co media and technology event, Reuters reported.

After Microsoft tried to take over Yahoo, News Corp was in talks with Yahoo to combine its MySpace social network with Yahoo and also discussed a deal with Microsoft to take over Yahoo.

Murdoch said Capital Research, a major investor of Yahoo and its portfolio manager Gordon Crawford, publicly criticized Yahoo for not being able to reach a deal with Microsoft and that Crawford would have been happy with a $33 per share buyout.

“He’s pissed he didn’t get $33,” Murdoch said, referring to Crawford.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang echoed what Murdoch said about a possible Microsoft/Yahoo deal telling Boomtown that allowing Carl Icahn to manage a deal would be bad for shareholders.

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You know what they say about work and play, so even as Yahoo gets eyed by Steve Ballmer, interrogated by investors, and generally abused by Carl Icahn, here’s a nice side project: it’s trying to offer a lot of downloadable games for free.

Around 400 of the things are expected to become available by year’s end. What players might view as a catch - and what Yahoo hopes they won’t - is the fact that the games will be supported by advertising.

“Top technology providers, Double Fusion and NeoEdge, will sell and integrate pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll video ads into the Yahoo! Games catalog,” according to a corporate statement.

For the sake of saving money and having fun, people will probably be able to get past this detail. The real problem (from Yahoo’s perspective) might be getting them to click on the ads - are folks who play free games really that interested in spending cash? - but any income will count as welcome income.

Now, to return for a moment to more serious stuff, it seems the gaming news didn’t do much for Yahoo’s stock - it’s currently down 2.18 percent for the day.

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To help make more of a dent in the Google-dominated search and ad markets, Yahoo is rolling out an initiative that will open the door wider to its search service, but mainly for developers and ISVs willing to host Yahoo ads on their sites.

“BOSS [Build Your Own Search Service]…is an API to tap into Yahoo’s prized search infrastructure. It allows developers, start-ups, and established consumer Internet companies to leverage the power of Yahoo,” contends a BOSS API Guide newly posted on Yahoo’s developers site.

According to the guide, BOSS extends Google’s existing Search API — designed for rapid development of search applications and mash-ups — by introducing the ability to create applications for commercial use without any restrictions around the presentation or ordering of search results.

“You can take BOSS results, blend in your own secret sauce, and build a search engine of your own design, all without required brand attribution,” Yahoo vows.

BOSS provides a RESTful API for use with most Yahoo Web services, which are based on so-called “REST (Representational State Transfer)-Like” operations. These RPC-style operations utilize HTTP GET or POST requests with parameters URL encoded into the request. Search results can be presented as either JSON or XML result sets.

In the first release of BOSS, developers can fetch search content for Yahoo Web, News, Image, and Spelling Suggestions. But other search verticals and data sources will be on the way soon.

There’s a catch, though. Along the way, BOSS will move to a revenue-sharing model, “It will be a requirement to host our ads on your site. We’re building this technology into our platform and it is coming soon,” officials acknowledge, in a Q&A on the site.

“Yahoo Search will share the revenue produced through these ads with developers. In the meantime, the API is open for free use without the ads.”

Yet while pitching a promise of shared ad money to developers, Yahoo is evidently aiming to use BOSS as a tool in its attempts to gain some ground on industry leader Google, while also generating revenues that will help to keep the company out of the clutches of potential acquirers such as Microsoft.

The latest numbers from comScore show that Google held a 62% share among US search users in May, in contrast to only 21% for Yahoo. Meanwhile, Google raked in 71% of search-related advertising in 2007, compared to merely 8.9% for Yahoo, according to eMarketer, Inc.

AOL, a company that trails Google in both areas even further than Yahoo, is also making revenue-sharing plays with initiatives such as AIM Money.

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A certain tradition involving Charlie Brown, Lucy, and a football began over 50 years ago. Now, as Yahoo has once again claimed it’s open to the idea of an acquisition, it’s beginning to look like Steve Ballmer and Jerry Yang might set some record of their own.

Lucy was never in danger of getting fired, of course, and since Jerry Yang and Yahoo’s board face that threat, that may explain why their latest press release sounds rather bitter. Even though Yahoo kept Microsoft from achieving its goal for a while, the company’s running out of options.

The release notes, “Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Icahn have teamed up in an apparent effort to force Yahoo! into selling to Microsoft its Search business at a price to be determined in a future ‘negotiation’ between Mr. Icahn’s directors and Microsoft’s management.”

As for what Yahoo’s doing about this, “[W]e again invite them to make a proposal immediately. And if Mr. Icahn has an actual plan for Yahoo! beyond hoping that Microsoft might actually consummate a deal which they have repeatedly walked away from, we would be very interested in hearing it.”

Still, with less than a month to go until Yahoo’s annual stockholder meeting, Microsoft doesn’t have much of an incentive to trust Yahoo instead of Icahn. We’ll see if Steve Ballmer can outthink the famous “round-headed kid.”

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Though some US legislators expressed concerns about Google’s growing power in online advertising, one big ad firm welcomed Yahoo’s search ad agreement with Google.

In the US, Microsoft and Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) publicly fretted about the increasing control Google possesses over contextual search advertising. High-ranking Microsoft executive Kevin Johnson complained in France about Google taking over 90 percent of the search ad market.

Another Continental concern expressed no concern about Yahoo turning to Google to possibly deliver $800 million in ad revenue in the first year of their partnership. The Guardian cited Maurice Levy, head of Publicis Group, who expressed a positive view of the deal between the former search ad rivals.

Speaking in Cannes as Johnson did, Levy put forth the idea that Google and Yahoo could share search data and come up with better ad campaign targeting for their clients. Publicis is a partner with Google on ad technology.

With Barton in the House and Herb Kohl (D-WI) in the Senate asking questions about antitrust and privacy concerns, the idea of Google and Yahoo mixing and matching user data to their heart’s content may pull sharper focus onto a deal the two companies believe has no reason to fall under regulatory scrutiny.

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Microsoft executives said the company does not plan to make a slew of Internet acquisitions since it ended its bid for Yahoo.

There has been speculation that Microsoft would possibly buy Facebook, which it has a small stake in or Time Warner’s AOL along with a number of other companies.

“People don’t understand what they’re talking about,” chief executive Steve Ballmer said in an interview with the Financial Times. “At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just any one of the applications.”

Kevin Johnson, head of Microsoft’s Windows and Internet businesses, said that the bid for Yahoo was part of Microsoft’s strategy to strengthen its advertising business, with the focus on the search advertising market.

After Microsoft dropped its bid for Yahoo last month it returned with an offer for the search business.

“The most important application for the foreseeable future . . . is search,” Ballmer said.

“I don’t think we can say, ‘OK, well, we’re going to be in the ad platform business and we’re going to do it just on the strength of non-search-based assets.’ We don’t have to dominate, but we’d better have a darn good chunk of the search market over time.”

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