Category Archives: aol

Digg Acquisition Rumors

Who will acquire Digg? Michael Arrington from TechCrunch claims that Digg has been in acquisition talks with News Corp. and other companies: “However, the company was unable to land an offer in the price range they’re looking for – at least $150 million – and will likely close a Series B round of financing instead.” (TechCrunch Quote)

I am curious who those “other companies” might be. Here are a few random guesses (pure speculation):

  • AOL / Time-Warner: Calacanis might be interested in an attempt to merge Netscape with Digg (bad idea in my opinion).

  • Yahoo: The rumor is that they were in discussions for YouTube and FaceBook, and they have already acquired a number of web 2.0 companies. Digg might be an interesting fit for Yahoo.

Who should acquire Digg? Maybe Google. Due to the recent, and large, YouTube acquisition, I doubt that Google is currently in discussions to acquire Digg. Digg would be a great way for Google to get more involved in the collaborative, user generated content space to expand their web 2.0 offerings, and Google could probably add quite a bit of value in helping to optimize Digg’s promotion algorithms. Digg has sometimes struggled with attempts by users to game the system to promote their own stories using all types of devious mechanisms. Designing creative algorithms to prevent people from artificially inflating search results has been one of Google’s strengths.

Personally, I think that Digg will stay independent for now, but then again, I am frequently wrong about acquisition predictions. (I’m still waiting for Borland to be acquired – I predicted an imminent acquisition back in 2002 / 2003).

Class Action Lawsuit Against AOL for Privacy Violations

In classic AOL fashion, when receiving complaints about privacy concerns related to the release of search results for 600,000 customers, AOL responded by offering them a free month of AOL … a service that is already free. Interesting.

Here are the details from John Paczkowski at SiliconValley.com:

Filed Friday, the suit accuses AOL of violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, of fraudulent and deceptive business practices, and beyond that of a peerless ineptitude in its handling of the matter. “As of the date of this complaint it is the understanding of plaintiffs and their counsel that AOL has not done anything to help the members whose personal sensitive and confidential records were released to the public by AOL,” the complaint alleges. “AOL members who sought assistance from AOL about the disclosure of the Member Search Data were not offered any assistance. AOL’s only response, if any, was to offer the victimized member a free month of AOL service, a service which AOL is now offering for free.” (Quote from SiliconValley.com)

As we move more and more of our lives online, we need to spend more time thinking about privacy and security concerns, especially when we start to centralize our searching, email, calendars, blogs, chat, etc. with a single provider (AOL, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.) At the minimum, people need to better understand the risks of what can happen when our private information is made public.