nealrodriguez - 3:21 pm on Mar 19, 2009 (gmt 0)

"I do not believe we can invent the next Facebook," Bartz said.

well said. they should focus on the position that they hold in the mind of internet surfers; they are a portal - mostly syndicated news pieces. i see hundreds of people on the social networks sharing their content daily. if they can find a way to monetize that activity they'll have a start.

maybe something along the lines of what reuters offers, where companies pay to have their news syndicated on the reuters' domain. i don't think reuters offers links back to the original stories; yahoo! may want to add the capability to link back to the original stories and sell companies on the fact that they can increase their link weighting across the search engines. they could probably also use all the metrics showing the amount of traffic they generate from the social networks as a result of so many social media users sharing of their content.