Gum, breath mints, maybe a couple of games of old school Galaga (if you’re lucky) – there’s not much you can buy with just one of the objects pictured at left. But this year, you can pay off the salary of Yahoo!’s CEO with just a buck, says Barry Schwartz, a discount of $599,999 over last year. Terry Semel joins the likes of the Google co-founders in knocking his base salary down to the level of a Trading Places bet, but of course he’ll still see plenty of green from a “bonus and retention plan with options for nine million shares.” More here, from Bloomberg.
In other Yahoo! developments… Y! unleashed extensive changes to their MyWeb social bookmarking product yesterday, about a year after its initial launch, and it looks like they sank quite a bit more than a dollar into it.
First off, they lost that pesky “2.0″ appendage; it’s just plain old MyWeb now (at the rate they’ve been going, calling a Yahoo! offering “2.0″ just seems almost redundant anyway – thank you, here all week). Second, search is much improved. Instead of being limited to bookmarks of your own or of your contacts, search now scours all of MyWeb’s public pages.
Briefly, the rest: you can export bookmarks in any browser format, see what’s popular with new Top Tags and Interesting Today sections of the front page (even if you’re not logged in), and use the Most Popular Tags search to find a list of people who tag with a given term in addition to tagged articles. For a comprehensive review, may we suggest Danny Sullivan?
It’s interesting that Yahoo! seems to be using their del.icio.us acquisition to improve their own branded competing service. Are they planning to release del.icio.us back into the wild once they’re through learning from its most useful features?
