Grady Laksmono

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet, if Hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it, therefore, the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

~ Edgar Allan Poe ~

2His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

3“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.

CARLSBAD, Calif. -(Dow Jones)- News Corp. (NWS) Chairman Rupert Murdoch predicted Wednesday that activist investor Carl Icahn’s proxy fight to control Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) will fail, but it will “make him a few hundred million dollars.”

Icahn recently proposed a slate of directors to run against Yahoo’s current board after the Internet company rejected Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) $44 billion bid to buy Yahoo.

“Icahn? That’s not serious. It’s just a lot of helpful noise,” Murdoch said during an onstage question and answer session Wednesday at the All Things D conference. “If I were a director of Yahoo I wouldn’t be worried.”

Murdoch also said that at one point, Yahoo and his company tried to work out their own deal. He said the two companies talked about adding MySpace, News Corp.’s social network, to Yahoo’s portal. But it never came to fruition, he said.

Even without the Yahoo deal, Murdoch said News Corp.’s Internet advertising revenues haven’t suffered. He said News Corp. is likely to pass $1 billion in revenues within the next three to four years. What gives him optimism is “we have some big advertisers come in over the last few months,” among other developments, he said.

Murdoch also heaped praise on Google Inc. (GOOG), whose dominance of the Internet ad revenues was the impetus behind Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo.

He called Google “the greatest company in the world,” and the reason why Microsoft is worried. “They see the danger of Google turning on them,” he said. “Yahoo has a hard job ahead to just holding onto their” search market share.

Turning to newspapers, Murdoch predicted that many have a limited future, perhaps as little as 30 years given how their readers and advertisers are turning to the Internet.

What will be left are major national papers, like The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, while the traditional local daily will become Internet-only, he said.

News Corp. owns Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal and this newswire.

By Ben Charny
Dow Jones Newswires
415-765-8230
ben.charny@dowjones.com

Walt Mossberg just finished interviewing Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker (my real time notes are here, see Peter Kafka’s notes as well).

The two key topics of the interview were the failed Microsoft merger, and Yahoo’s core focus as a company. And while Yang never actually said the words quoted in the title above, his tone and body language screamed “We’re Done.” He was resigned. Beleaguered, even.

Yang dutifully recited PR-supplied sound bites. He said things like “We didn’t walk away from the Microsoft deal. They did.” At one point he said “I like Google” (he still doesn’t realize that they’re Yahoo’s enemy, not Microsoft). He talked about the future, sometimes stringing together four or five unrelated statements about their how they are coming together as a team and focusing on the future. He talked about how outside perception of Yahoo is very different from what’s actually going on internally (although the execs I’ve spoken with say the outside perception is pretty much right on the money).

Yang was not prepared for perhaps the one question that every CEO should be ready to answer at all times: ?What is the business of Yahoo?? He was all over the place. He said their core focus included “home page, mail, search, and mobile.” He also said “We can?t be all things to all people. We have become much more focused,” before taking about other areas of focus at Yahoo, including advertising, social networking and their new open strategy.

Decker stepped in and tried to distill their core message, repeating “we focus on homepage, search, mail and mobile” but then went on to talk extensively about advertising, including a new display advertising product that the company will launch in Q3 this year.

From where I sit, I saw no core focus and no clear product or corporate strategy. Yahoo has no idea what they want to do or who’s going to do it. I saw no charisma, excitement or leadership at all (things I’ve seen regularly from Yang in the past). I saw, simply, failure.

“I will never be a CEO again,” Yang said near the end of the interview. Based on what he’s going through, I can understand how he feels.

23” ‘If you can’?” said Jesus. “Everything is possible for him who believes.”

Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible – meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.

Bebo already licenses the Facebook Platform, which allows third parties to make their Facebook applications work on Bebo, too. With the new announcement, social networks won’t need to go through the hassle of doing a deal with Facebook. They’ll simply map their existing APIs to Facebook Platform (which isn’t trivial) and go. Expect to see the four major technical pieces of Facebook Platform – FMBL (markup language), FQL (query language), FJS (Javascript library) and the Facebook API to be open sourced and made available to anyone.

If they mirror the Open Social approach, third parties will be free to change the Facebook Platform components for their own use and deploy them on their own sites. To have those changes be incorporated into the official versions of Facebook Platform, however, would require Facebook’s approval.

This is a nearly inevitable response to Open Social, which is backed by Google, MySpace and Yahoo. Open Social is also an open source platform, run by the Open Social Foundation. Facebook has been looking more and more like a walled garden of late, and they are being regularly out maneuvered by competitors. Time to fight back.

I’m looking forward into what license and limitation that they’re going to put for the use of their Open Source platform. Is it limited for commercial use? If so, how much is it going to be limited?

Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it.

~ Thomas Fuller ~

12I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.