The Globe and Mail reported today that Microsoft is again talking to Yahoo. Get the full article here.

Seen largely as a way to counter any potential Google and Yahoo advertising partnership, a new Microsoft relationship would bolster their rating and access to the market while giving Yahoo shareholder value without raising too many regulatory eyebrows around anti-trust.

The long term play

Although still relatively small compared to the desktop web market, partnering with Yahoo now means Microsoft can also get access to their leading mobile platform.

Within two years mobile advertising in Canada will include inventory for marketers that will reach beyond Carrier on-deck portals. Already we are seeing early versions of mobile search (with proximity capabilities), mobile video, and mobile social networking sites with built-in ad-serving abilities. This market is going to be massive.

It also sets up the possibility of another takeover attempt in the not so distant future.

Many people buy Apple products because they are great fashion accessories.

The ultimate fashion accessory was big news last week as Steve Jobs announced the much anticipated SDK (software developer kit) for the iphone which will allow developers to create applications, utilities, and games leveraging the same platform Apple used to create their own widgets. Starting in June of this year, consumers won’t have to “jailbreak” their phone in order to customize it.

Also starting this June, enterprise users will no longer have to beg their I.T. / technical support department to open up the corporate email server to hackers and SPAM attacks in order for them to access their email from their nifty iphone.

The iphone will be getting some proper business chops.  

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As rumoured since 2006 and reported this morning by Engadget, Microsoft formally made an offer to buy Yahoo today. There is a long way to go from making an offer to actually acquiring & integrating Yahoo into Microsoft, but the concept of the two Web 1.0 companies getting together to battle the new world online order is intriguing.

The fact that Yahoo’s shares have also dropped around 15% year to date also means Microsoft probably saved around 5 billion by making an offer now.

Acquiring Yahoo is clearly a strategic play to counter the growing dominance of Google on the interweb which now includes an impressive lineup of “office” like applications available for free.  

Given Yahoo’s relative success in the mobile space and Microsoft’s investment in facebook last year, it looks like they have armed themselves for a good fight… but the question is, are they too late? 

Will the new Micro-hoo really be Micro-who before long? 

In the past few months we’ve been watching as Google, AOL, Yahoo, and Nokia have been making moves to extend or enter the mobile advertisting space.

Microsoft has decided to also join the party and has started placing ads on their U.S. MSN mobile page to follow efforts already made in Belgium, France, Spain, Japan, and the U.K.

The Bank of America will be one of the primary buyers of ad space - supporting their innovative mobile banking website and experience at bankofamerica.mobi. Paramount Pictures and Jaguar are the other two primary buyers.

Microsoft also plans to bring new features such as astrology, movie tickets through movietickes.com, ringtones, wallpaper, games and video clips on MSN Mobile via an agreement Microsoft has with Thumbplay.

Although Microsoft is late to the game, the mobile advertising space is still young and relatively small.  This is not like the nineties when Microsoft had to catch and kill Netscape who already dominated the browser market.  

I was catching up on my RSS feeds tonight and came across an update from a live blogging event, where it was announced that in addition to the fantastic iphone specific site, facebook has now released an application for BlackBerry. The application goes beyond the browsing experience and leverage’s the RIM platform. If you have neither an iphone nor BlackBerry (shame on you), you can still have a great mobile browse experience by going to m.facebook.com on your mobile device.

I went fishing for more information on this announcement and came across several announcements of pending platform improvements. Get ready for this - the three top items I’ve blogged about here and elsewhere are coming soon!

1) Newsfeed for your groups! You’ll be able to get content updates on your groups without having to visit them individually. This also likely means we’ll be able to send such updates as an RSS feed to our newsreaders - much like what the current netvibes module does today for your main profile page. I predict group participation and growth to explode as a result of this. 

2) Organize your friends (and colleagues)! Soon you’ll be able to categorize your friends and therefore have more control over what they see and how they interact with you. For those of us who have wished for a separation between personal and professional contacts, this is it. I know a few people who actually have two facebook profiles - one for their friends, and one for their professional network. This move will make it easier for people leverage the social graph for work and play.

3) Mobile platform - facebook Platform for Mobile is here allowing developers to extend their applications to work on mobile phones and devices as well.  I can hardly wait to see how developers and marketers will extend their applications to mobile.

Additionally, multi-language support is coming - which should allow the platform to finally catch on in non-English speaking countries.

Today was also an announcement that Microsoft has invested $240 million in facebook at a valuation of $15 billion (or 2% stake). This extends their existing relationship and  gives Microsoft the rights to sell ads on the facebook platform.  I wonder if they’ll extend the ad serving platform to the Mobile platform too….now that will be interesting!

Will this also give Microsoft the first right to buy facebook next year? Speculation will mount…but in the mean time i’m looking forward to some long-overdue platform updates.