361 Patent was the brainchild of Bill Gross, founder of IdeaLab who had this great idea of monetizing search results by showing the users advertising based on the keywords they type, he though of it as an Yellow Pages on the Internet where users could search what they want and they were ads too. This idea was shamelessly stolen by Google who before this made zero revenue. Bill Gross who later found Overture Services (formerly GoTo Inc), which was bought by Yahoo and in turn Yahoo had the right’s to this crown jewel “361 Patent”.

Once Yahoo got the rights to ‘361 Patent’, it started enforcing other companies who were licensing it from Overture Services to follow its rules. One of the biggest licensers from Overture was Microsoft who were paying hefty fees for it. Now Yahoo started making life hell for MSFT when it came to Paid-Search advertising. This made Microsoft less innovative in search because no matter how good their search was, they always had to toe the Yahoo’s line when it came to monetizing the search and paying most of the money to Yahoo for using the “361 Patent”. It just didn’t seem practical for Microsoft to innovate when they can’t make money of their search or pay most of the money to Yahoo.

Whereas Google got the patent licensed in a very shady deal where nobody clearly knows how much they paid and it gave them an edge in Paid-Search advertising. The reason they got a good deal from Yahoo might be because of their Stanford roots or because of common VC’s. It was a clear conspiracy by Yahoo to make the battlefield uneven and making Microsoft insignificant in Paid-Search model. It is a payback time for Microsoft and boy are they doing it at the right time. Microsoft is known to come late to war and be the last one standing, will they do it again.

You can read more about 361 Patent and its repercussions in Usman Latif’s website here. He has written a detailed and well written article on this.

Monopolies are bad for users, mainly because there is very less room for innovation and corporations who are monopolistic tend to exploit users. Google is a publicly traded company and it has shareholders to satisfy every quarter, No matter what their motto is be it “Don’t be evil” which Sergey Brin coined or the parody of it “Do less evil” which Bill Gates coined in reference to Google self-censoring its search to enter Chinese Market. Google has to show profits every quarter to keep up its market value. With the way things are going in Search Market, there is no room for any start up to compete with Google because they are too big and if Google sees a threat from the start up, they buy it and let it rot in their stables. Here is the list of the companies Google bought.

Haven’t we all seen how monopolies destroy the market and stagnate innovation. It is currently happening in Operating System Market, when was the last time we saw something amazing on our desktops and laptops with the exception of Mac OS X. Wouldn’t it be great if Microsoft had some real competition in Operating System’s where it would have pushed them to innovate rather than churn out under tested and over funded Operating Systems.

The other reason i want Microsoft to buy Yahoo is because when Google has competition, it might have better privacy policies in place than what it has now. Privacy International goes on record saying Google has been placed at the bottom of its rating for its privacy policies. Even Microsoft has better rating than Google when it comes to privacy. You can read more about it here. Is it not scary when a monopoly like Google holds the users personal data for whatever reasons. Maybe they are not exploiting the users now, but what if in the future they do when they don’t have any competition and we users don’t have any other alternative to go to.

So when Microsoft buys Yahoo, fields would get more even for a fight in the search and online advertising market which only helps the users. Believe me, there would be more innovation in the Search now then we have seen in past 3 or 4 years. Competition is Good for the market, and the only company in the World which has a chance of even competing with Google is Microsoft.

Twitter is more like a on-demand search from friends, relatives or the people who are following you. Let me give you an example on how this works, If you want to know which is the best restaurant for chinese food or which is the best movie for the weekend, google does not tell you that, it just throws tons of sites on your face which gives you reviews about this things.

Now you are asking how does twitter help me with these? What happens in twitter is when you tweet “Which is the best movie for the weekend”, people who are following you get a immediate message on their phones, IM windows or any tool they are using. So most of the people who are following you would be glad to help you out with your weekend movie problem and they would also give you a review which is less than 140 chars(yes 140 chars is the limit for a tweet). This is a new search called Human Powered Search, Instead of asking a website, you just ask humans who are your friends.

Twitter is social bookmarking service too, Now you are asking how does this work. We all tweet links in twitter, mainly because we want to share it with our friends. Now wouldn’t it be nice if we could just bookmark links and read it later. Yes you can do that with twitter, you can tweet your links and also favorite them and you can read it later. If you have too many links, just use tweetscan to search for the links. I personally don’t use twitter to bookmark but if you bookmark a lot, you can try it out.

Twitter can be used to share your joys, sorrows, monday morning blues and also your recent salary hike. That is the reason it is so addictive, people listen your tweets and reply back.

Twitter can be used to follow websites and celebrities too, if you follow websites, you will be notified when their new story is updated or if there is some breaking news, kinda like RSS feed but more faster. Here are some of the news websites you can follow but be warned some of them update a lot and it might feel like they are spamming you. There are some Minor celebrities and Fakers too.

Twitter can be used for marketing, just ask Jason Calacanis of Mahalo fame and how he is getting more than 20,000 people to his site from twitter. It can also be used to look for Jobs.

Last but not least twitter can be used to tell people “what are you doing”?, This is the most fun thing too, you might be in coffee shop with your friends, you might be cooking, gardening, in a meeting or just watching your favorite movie, just tweet about it and let your followers know. This creates a sense of importance to what you do and also helps people know what you are doing.

Twitter has become a part of many people’s lives and it is addictive too. This is surely a technology which will stay for a long time(ya much longer than facebook). Twitter has remained simple and easy to use and the community is great.There are tons of great application’s based on Twitter API too, I will talk about more about them in my next post’s. So if you are using twitter already, add me else Join twitter, don’t miss out on the fun.