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***mandy*** · 11-23-2006, 10:53 AM,

Quote:10. Hotmail - acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) in 1998 for about $400 million. Hotmail was a second-tier free email service when Microsoft bought it and the acquisition did little to improve Microsoft's internet portal ambitions.

9. Skype - acquired by eBay (EBAY) in September 2005 for $2.6 billion. While it's early to call this one an absolute dud, eBay does not seem to have a plan - or at least a plan that would justify the acquisition price - for how to integrate Skype's calling service with the core auction business.

8. MySimon - acquired by CNET (CNET) in 1999 for $700 million. The price comparison site mySimon was supposed to launch CNET into lots of non-tech verticals - not a bad idea at the time. Unfortunately CNET had no idea how to effectively integrate mySimon and it's now withering away, surpassed by newer, shinier price comparison engines.

7. BlueMountain.com - acquired by Excite@Home in 1999. $780 million for an online greeting card site. 'Nuff said.

full article and top 10 list: http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/21041

Quote:SeekingAlpha's James Nicholson has in interesting post on the 10 worst Internet acquisitions ever. The biggest surprise: Yahoo's purchase of Broadcast.com was ranked at No. 1 ahead of even the Time Warner acquisition of AOL. See the list for other clunkers.

Nicholson's list puts a nice perspective on the recent spate of merger mania, but hindsight only goes so far. It is far more entertaining to predict what mergers are going to fail a few years from now...

full article: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3999

thentavius · 11-23-2006, 06:53 PM,

Remember when Yahoo bought Webring and screwed up all of the huge, well-established webrings but introduce a new SSNB instead of the old coding system? Then they kicked webring back out?

Bleh.

bargainbloodhound · 11-23-2006, 08:45 PM,

[quote author=thentavius link=topic=6064.msg33293#msg33293 date=1164308010]
Remember when Yahoo bought Webring and screwed up all of the huge, well-established webrings but introduce a new SSNB instead of the old coding system? Then they kicked webring back out?

Bleh.
[/quote]

I remember. Geocities bought Webring then Yahoo bought (overpaid for) Geocities and later sold Webring back to one of its founders. I've never used webrings.

thentavius · 11-24-2006, 01:36 AM,

I remember the crap with Geocities. What a bummer it was. I always liked the cute little "neighborhoods" with house icons. LOL.

I used webrings a lot in the past to generate hits for my content only websites. They worked well. I don't think they work that well for retail websites. I also think they haven't been that popular since 1999 or so.