If so, the only relevant question is what they will name the third independent incarnation of this service after Yahoo runs FourSquare into the ground, as Google did with Dodgeball.
Destroying value with ill-conceived M&A is one area where Yahoo can beat Google!
Talk about great investment opportunity, drop me a note when you need some seed money for the third go around. Flickr is the only Yahoo acquisition that comes to mind that they haven't run into the ground and then abandoned.
Y! seemed to make some good buys a looong time ago in the mid 90s.
Then they bought broadcast.com and geocities. Those are a few log10 larger purchases and were total failures. So even if there were successful small acquisitions they are hidden by the scale of their bad M&A decisions. M&A is probably still trying to make up for the losses they incurred in 1999.
More recently they bought delicious which I love and continued to use without even noticing that they were acquired. After that the next "success" I can think of is rivals.com which seems like a good buy and good match.
Yahoo still has some great niche (maybe that's a misnomer) markets like fantasy sports and investing. So when they strengthen an existing strong property it seems to work better than bringing in something new.
Am I the only one which really does not see location in the sense FourSquare implements it becoming a mainstream thing in the next few years. Perhaps I'm being naive but I juts don't see it as something people want that much.
EDIT: Removed "as facebook comes", dunno what it was doing there, made no sense!
It's interesting how the article doesn't mention Google's purchase of his last location service, Dodgeball, which it eventually ran into the ground after letting it flounder for a couple of years.
I know it's just speculation but I'd hate to see this project get run into the ground just as his last one (and other Yahoo! acquisitions).
Sure, nor the others (except maybe Flickr), Yahoo's problem is that they seem to acquire and then do nothing but rarely have they run acquisitions into the ground as such.
Flickr's on life support. From what I can tell peering in from the outside, the service is down to a skeleton crew. Too bad, really: I love Flickr, and don't look forward to seeing it croak.
The sad thing about Flickr is that it's being killed by Facebook and their massive picture uploading. And the only way that's a superior service is in sharing with friends, it falls way short in every other way. I suppose the sharing aspect is just what consumers have decided to value most.
I fancy myself as belonging to the prosumer/dedicated amateur photographer segment, and Flickr's still the best bet for me due to its social features and willingness to let me upload high-res photos.
But I'd jump ship in a heartbeat if I could find another service that gave me a large community of like-minded photographers looking to improve their craft, AND the ability to securely store all of my RAW files.
Seriously, I cannot overstate how important it is to me to be able to stuff all of my RAW files and finished products somewhere secure (in the data backup sense).
This seems like it would be a dangerous move on Yahoo's part, aside from the acquisition of talent. This is only my gut feeling, but I don't see users being so vested in the FourSquare service, that if they're unhappy with the direction it is taking, just jumping ship to Gowalla. A lot of people already check in through multiple services, and it wouldn't be too hard a decision to stop checking in with one if it's flavor turns sour.
Hopefully history does not repeat itself this time around. I can see no compelling reason to sell (unless you count wealth and having an exit under your belt as one [or two]). What would they gain from selling this service to Yahoo, or anyone for that matter? Doing that would likely start the countdown to another great service destroyed by M&A.
Yahoo is focused on local and so this makes some sense. Twice Jerry Yang vetoed an offer to buy Yelp. Yeah twice. Internally there was some bitterness about missing that deal.
Yahoo needs some M+A action to boost stock momentum and that's a multi-billion dollar move that needs to be carefully planned.
Yahoo also needs to counter the google 'what's nearby' feature.
Yahoo is focused on squandering money on overhyped, flash-in-the-pan products, in order to hasten its demise. Words like "stock momentum" and "focused on local" are apparently euphemisms for "lost in the woods".
Destroying value with ill-conceived M&A is one area where Yahoo can beat Google!