When they’re not shutting down Delicious, Yahoo is apparently being awesome and installing large movie-poster-sized touchscreens at twenty bus stops in San Francisco, on which people waiting for the bus can choose from and play a variety of video games, which include online multiplayer with people playing in other bus stops. The “Bus Stop Derby,” as Yahoo calls it, will pit pre-bus passengers from twenty different neighborhoods against each other, through trivia, puzzle and other genres of games, and the neighborhood that has the most points when the competition is over will receive a free block party featuring OK Go.

Our post yesterday on a leaked Yahoo presentation slide about services being shut down or merged generated a lot of concern among Delicious users, who saw their beloved social bookmarking site in the dreaded “Sunset” category. A lot of other sites went ahead and declared (on insufficient evidence) that this meant that Yahoo was for sure going to kill Delicious, and even went so far as to provide lists of similar services for users who wanted to jump ship.

Not so fast, says Delicious in a blog post: While they acknowledge that “there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!,” they write that “there’s no reason to panic. We are maintaining Delicious and encourage you to keep using it.”

In the wake of Yahoo’s layoffs of 600 employees, it makes sense that the company would tighten its belt; if the above leaked slide is for real, that tightening will kill off a few of Yahoo’s established services. Eric Marcoullier, the co-founder of MyBlogLog — one of the sites purportedly affected by the shutdown — tweeted a picture of what appears to be a presentation slide from a Yahoo products all hands presentation, dividing various Yahoo web products into “Sunset,” “Merge,” and “Make Feature.”

Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving seems to have all but confirmed the authenticity of Marcoullier’s slide with a threat to fire whoever leaked it: (h/t Liz Gannes) “@bpm140 @joshu Really dude? Can’t wait to find out how you got the web cast. Whoever it is, gone!”

Among the items on the sunset list: Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, and Altavista.

We largely passed on reporting on last week’s Big Tech Rumor Story: Deals site Groupon was allegedly talking with Google about being acquired. Early reports valued the company at $2-3 billion, later revised to $5-6 billion; ultimately, though, Groupon walked away from the money, staying independent. (The fact that they reportedly make $800 million in annual revenue, distinguishing them from many a cashless online startup, no doubt played into their decision.) We passed on the story because the rumors weren’t really substantiated, and whether or not they were leaked by Groupon to aid in their negotiations, as has been speculated, they certainly seemed to have that effect.

In the humorous infographic below (found on TechCrunch), Azhar Bande-Ali imagines how four of the hot tech firms rumored to be in talks with Groupon would have incorporated it into their respective businesses.

The buzzier likes of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have their every move obsessively scrutinized, but it’s worth highlighting when a less trendy old Internet vet pulls off something forward-thinking and gets it really right. Yahoo has quietly launched a new homepage for tablet computer users, which you can check out at http://www.yahoo.com/tablet. If you’re on a non-tablet computer, it loses something in translation, but viewed from the 9.7-inch screen of an iPad, it not only looks pretty, but provides a touchscreen-savvy functionality that’s still lacking on most of the web.

Also cool and new from Yahoo: Its recently launched Yahoo Clues application, which lets users track trending search terms, with an additional layer highlighting the demographics among whom different searches are most popular.

Facebook routinely gets flack for not letting users easily access their contacts’ email addresses in bulk; even their supposedly more user-friendly Download Your Information feature, released in October, doesn’t touch upon it. Plenty of techy types have come up with Greasemonkey scripts and the like to successfully pry email addresses and other personal data from Facebook, which Facebook has in the past argued constitutes a violation of its Terms of Service — never mind that it’s the users’ own data.

Fortunately, there’s a much easier way to mass export Facebook contacts’ email addresses, although it might be counterintuitive to tech geeks for one reason: It requires you to create a Yahoo email address.

Not only has Zynga recently repaired ties with Facebook, but now it’s quickly accelerating its mission to conquer the world. Today, Zynga has announced a partnership with Yahoo. That’s right. In the coming months everyone’s favorite Zynga games, including the dark behemoth that is Farmville, will inundate the Yahoo network. TechCrunch estimates that Yahoo has about 600 million users. That means that almost ten percent of the global population will have to see when their friends adopt a cow or whatever the hell you do in that game.

Specifics aren’t in yet, so there’s no telling whether Zynga will make the Yahoo home page, but Yahoo is confirming that games and updates will be available through Yahoo Games, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Messenger. The gaming will begin in the U.S. before making its way to an international, unsuspecting audience.

(Before we dig too far into this, you may want to visit the 56k Modem Emulator, to establish the proper sonic mood. Ah, that beloved squeal.)

A colleague (who is handsome and wise) recently discovered an old Media Metrix report delineating “World Wide Web Audience Ratings” for December 1998. It’s a remarkable study, categorizing thousands of sites and conglomerated web companies.

This thing is like finding election results from 1880; like coming across the original Billboard music chart. It looks familiar, like you should know all of the component elements, but it’s unrecognizable. As though they’re all brands made up for movies.

The Rankings
Home and Work, Combined
We’ll start where the report starts – at those sites most popular when combining home and work visits. (Please see above diagram for clarification.) Before I list them, I want you to try and think up what the top fifty websites were in 1998. Got it?

Yeah, you’re wrong:

Weird.

Is something brewing at Yahoo (YHOO)? And what? The Internet stock is still struggling to find a way to grow while competing with Internet giant Google (GOOG) — no changes there. Meanwhile, Yahoo shares have basically done nothing for investors through tech rally, starting the week at the same price they were back in June. There’s just not a lot to get excited about.

But get this: Billionaire financier George Soros has been quietly snapping up Yahoo stock in recent months, tripling the size of his position from 726,000 shares to 3.5 million. Mr. Soros, known for his Midas touch, is one of the few hedge-fund bosses to rack up gains in 2008 and 2009. So some investors will no doubt copy his Yahoo investment.

Read on...

Cryptome, a whistleblower site that regularly leaks sensitive documents from governments and corporations, is in hot water again: this time, for publishing Microsoft’s “Global Criminal Compliance Handbook,” a comprehensive, 22-page guide running down the surveillance services Microsoft will perform for law enforcement agencies on its various online platforms, which includes detailed instructions for IP address extraction. You can find the guide here (warning: PDF). not anymore.

Microsoft has demanded that Cryptome take down the guide — on the grounds that it constitutes a “copyrighted [work] published by Microsoft.” Yesterday, at 5pm, Cryptome editor John Young received a notice from his site’s host, Network Solutions, bearing a stiff ultimatum: citing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), Network Solutions told him that unless he takes the “copyrighted material” down, they will “disable [his] website” on Thursday, February 25, 2010.

So far, Young refuses to budge.