Yahoo has announced it is purchasing Right Media (a company in which it already owns 20% of) in an effort to compete against Google’s purchase of Doubleclick earlier this month.

Right Media is a marketplace where publishers and advertisers negotiate prices and lends itself to a more transparent form of business than Google’s AdSense does. This could give Yahoo the upperhand, as publishers seek the ability to earn more money by playing a more active role in the selling of advertising space on their websites.

Right Media was launched in 2003 and purchased for $680 million.

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Google announced today the launch of their Web History product. If you have a Google account with Search History activated you can review every search you’ve conducted across all Google products (Web, Video, Froogle, even Sponsored Links you’ve clicked).

Google is also trying to push their toolbar - if you use the toolbar you then have access to your entire History, not only searches.

One of the interesting features is the ability to Bookmark a page you visited - it appears as if Google may try to step on Yahoo’s deli.icio.us‘ toes a little with this product as well. One of the things I would love to see is a way to flag a result as the intended website for a specific search. This would give Google the ability to leverage the “knowledge of the masses” and strengthen their search results.

For those of you wearing your tin-foil hats, the thought of Google tracking all of your activity is a bit scary. But, as long as you don’t activate Search History (or install the toolbar) those queries are never linked to you.

Personally, I find this tool to be very powerful - I quickly scanned all the way back to when I created my Google account and found a lot of interesting tidbits I have since forgotten. I rarely remember a URL anymore and reference websites based off of the query I submit to Google - the bookmarking feature will allow me to further leverage my history and ultimately decrease the number of queries I send to Google’s pigeons.

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The big news today is the launch of MySpace News, the digg-like news service built off of Newroo, a company Fox acquired in 2006.

MySpace News pulls its information from trusted news sources, via RSS, and then categorizes articles into one of the 25 main categories and 300 sub-categories. Similar to digg, the order of articles is determined by user votes; but, unlike digg, users have a bit more to think about other than “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Users will rank articles on a scale of 1-5, with 5 representing “I Love It!”

Bloggers who would like their articles submitted to MySpace News can submit their site here. MySpace says blogs should be topical, that it should publish regularly, that it has a high core audience, and that other news sources link to it.

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In a surprising twist - Google has decided it will compete with StumbleUpon, which is most likely being acquired by eBay.

Google’s Toolbar will now feature a “dice button” that will direct you to a page that Google believes you will be interested in, based off of your Search History. This is virtually the same functionality StumbleUpon’s Stumble! button offers.

In addition, if you add a tab named “Recommendations” to your Google Home Page, Google will offer News, Searches, Websites, Videos, and more, that it believes you will find interesting.

Unfortunately, from what I can tell - Google’s Recommendation tab sucks. I’m logged into my Google account at all times on both my work and home computers. My suggested Searches are all related to Fox News, simply because I search for “early bird” once a day, every weekday, at 0600. Has Google failed to take into account the millions of technology and gaming searches I have conducted from my home computer? It will be interesting to see what recommendations appear there - but logic would tell me, one Google account would render the same results - regardless of the PC.

I do find the link between “Early Bird” and “FOX News” as quite remarkable - the Early Bird being a daily newsletter highlighting the top stories our military should be aware of (and only accessible by the .mil domain) and FOX News being the only channel available on TV’s purchased by any branch of our government (</sarcasm>).

Google’s Recommendations are definitely an interesting feature and I am looking forward to playing with it some more and seeing what Google recommends for me. But, if it’s going to be all Fox News I’ll be deleting this tab very quickly.

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StumbleUpon, the toolbar used by thousands of people to share sites they find interesting, may be in acquisition talks with eBay. The rumor mill has suggested Google and AOL may also be interested, but Mike Arrington from TechCrunch says a term sheet with eBay has already been signed. Estimates from Mike and Om Malik place the price between $40 and $75 million.

StumbleUpon allows people to rate websites and learns what type of sites particular users enjoy. In a moment of boredom, any user can click the “Stumble!” button and they will be directed to a page that the system believes they will enjoy. StumbleUpon has a strong following from it’s users and very few competitors.

Mike Arrington has been trying to reach someone at StumbleUpon to confirm this acquisition but they have yet to respond (which leads him to believe it’s golden).

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TwitHot was launched yesterday, developed by Dan Williams and based off of an idea from Steve Poland. The basic premise behind TwitHot is to take the URLs that appear consistently within Twitter user’s messages and display them in a digg-like format.

TwitHot in and of itself isn’t that interesting - it’s basically a counter for the times a URL appears. It doesn’t include any algorithms to determine current popularity (that I saw, I could be wrong) so something that is virally popular will remain at the top all of the time (even if that popularity was from months ago). Another feature that has already been requested by others is the ability to comment on URLs featured on TwitHot.

What is interesting about TwitHot is the fact that it confirms that Twitter can be an amazing backend for some really cool services. TwitThis was featured on quite a few different blogs and it achieves the same - it offers a useful service based off of the Twitter backend.

As excited as Steve Poland is about this technology, it’s hard not to get involved in the hype myself - even though I hate text messages with a passion. The monetization models are out there, we just need to take advantage of them.

Update: There does seem to be some popularity control within TwitHot - I just reloaded the page and some of the URLs with the most mentions have been bumped down by a less mentioned, but newer, URL. Regardless, URLs alone are pretty pointless - I don’t feel the need to click on any of these or visit the sites because I literally have no idea what they are about.

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Joost.com just let us know they have launched version 0.9, which includes new channels as well as some new procedures (such as logging in with a username). This new version requires a download so beta testers - check your email for the link.

In addition to these changes Joost has provided Betaflow with 5 invites, so the first 5 people to comment will get them.

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