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Yahoo’s “all hands” meeting from last week created a huge stir when someone inside the meeting, likely a disgruntled laid-off employee, snapped photos of the “Sunset Slide” (below).  The meeting was about the company’s plans moving forward and included several current acquisitions and spinoffs that are slated for “sunset” (corp. speak for “dumped”) and others that will be merged and “featured.”

Yahoo owns several properties that are both popular and unprofitable and has acquired a lot of Web real estate that is definitely not within the company’s focus.  Assuming it has one, which many would doubt.

Yahoo has been fighting for market share (and losing) on just about every front.  They aren’t the Internet’s most popular search engine, Web analyzer, advertising venue, or anything else.  Nevertheless, they have a lot of popular sites and properties that own their categories and need only be monetized – Delicious (the social bookmarking site) is one of those.

That doesn’t seem to be interesting Yahoo, however, who has all but confirmed that they’ll be dumping Delicious and several other brands to “streamline” their offerings.  Yet again, their strategy makes no sense.

According to Alexa, of the half a dozen or so services to be killed, Delicious is by far the most popular.  Yet of the services to be merged (including Foxytunes and Sideline), none of them are anywhere close to the traffic snaggers that Delicious and AltaVista are.

Further, the “Make Feature” column of the list of things to be added are, well, ripoffs.  Replace “Yahoo!” with “Google” on that list and you have the current swatch of Google add-ons for various services like Gmail and Docs with only a couple of exceptions.

It appears, by this list, that Yahoo’s big plan is to compete with the Google Giant.  A competition that, frankly, they’ve tried and lost already.  Yahoo appears to still e desperately searching for its life’s quest and flounders in the attempt.

comScore is reporting that U.S. retail e-commerce sales on Black Friday (Friday, November 26th) were up 9% over last year’s Black Friday sales figures.  For the season-to-date, online sales are up 13%, totaling $11.64 billion so far.

According to comScore’s numbers, Black Friday sales this year were at $648 million, up from $595 million last year and sales in the season as a whole are up $1.322 billion over last year at this time.  Sales on Thanksgiving Day were way up, 28% higher than last year at $407 million.

Retailers have been wary this year after being heavily disappointed last year when holiday sales failed to bring them out of the serious slump the economy had thrown them in during 2008-09.  Despite politicians claiming that the “recession is over.”

The National Retail Federation reports a bigger shopping weekend this past Thanksgiving weekend than last year, with about 6% more money being spent for the weekend.  So the gains aren’t just for the online markets.

Back to comScore, the numbers show that search patterns and user behavior was heavily influenced by Friday-only deals offered by several online merchants.  Black Friday-specific sites, like Black-Friday.net, lead the pack in huge, one-day traffic bursts and sales.  Three sites analyzed (all with “Black Friday” in their names) netted more than 6 million visitors in total – all in one day.

Amazon, of all the retail sites analyzed by comScore, however, came out on top.  As it did last year.  The other three top sites were all brick-and-mortar online branches: Walmart, Target, and Best Buy.

Great news for the retail market and hopefully good news for the economy as well.

Traditionally, it’s been considered a 50-50 gamble to predict the stock market’s fluctuations with any accuracy.  Some traders have made a name for themselves by consistently getting slightly better odds than this, but few can claim an 87% or better prediction rate.  Except for Twitter.

Yep, Twitter.  Well, more accurately, the Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) can.  That is, if some people at Indiana University are right – and their study of over 10 million tweets from 2008 shows that they might be.

GPOMS has six “mood states” it pulls from the live Twitter stream: happiness, kindness, alertness, sureness, vitality, and calmness.  What Johan Bollen and friends at Indiana University were interested in was the “calmness” stream.

Going through 9.7 million tweets from March to December of 2008, extracting the moods, and correlating that with the stock market, these researchers found that the calmness index matches a change in the market between 2 and 6 days later.  They were able to predict changes (up or down) in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with an 87.6% accuracy.

Let’s see Merrill Lynch pull that off.

There are some questions about the data used by the team, however.  First, Bollen’s team used global tweets instead of filtering down to U.S.-only tweets.  This may, however, mean that they could be even more accurate rather than less so; and, as most people should be aware, the stock market isn’t really local anyway.

The big one, though, is how this mechanism actually works.  What is the reasoning behind the apparent correlation between Twitter moods and the market?  There’s no hard-and-fast answer, but I have a suggestion.

Most people who trade stocks are, in all likelihood, also socially connected through sites like Twitter.  Since it’s been well-established by economists and even sociologists that the public mood often dictates the movement of the market more than any other factor, it would make sense that these moods, as translated to social media, would go along with market changes.

What I can’t understand is the long delay between the Twitter mood and the market itself.  2 to 6 days is an eternity in Wall Street, where the average stock is held for a whopping total of 11 seconds.

So who’s to know, really?

The Web lit up with a buzz this weekend over TechCrunch’s story about Facebook building a branded phone.  It didn’t take long for others, like Engadget, to latch on and spread the news.

Very quickly, though, Facebook issued a denial (via Mashable), saying that they had no phone plans and, but were working on “deep integration” with existing mobile phone platforms.

Of course, the news was too savory to ignore, so more was posted, including a fake mockup of the phone (made as a joke, pictured at right) by Sean Percival.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s denial was countered by TechCrunch with the obvious: Google, Microsoft, and Apple all said they weren’t working on phones either.. Then they released them.

So the question remains: is Facebook building a branded phone and if so, why would they do it?

I think Dan Frommer at Business Insider has that answer.  Currently, Facebook is the most-visited website on the iPhone.  This doesn’t mean much for Facebook, since those visitors are just more Web users as far as they’re concerned – right now.

But if Facebook were to build a platform and really engage users through proprietary access or uses through that mobile platform, they’d be a powerful force to recon with in mobile.

The bad news for Microsoft is that the reported background for this Facebook phone will be Google’s Android, trumping both Apple and MS. This would be obvious thanks to Facebook’s recent recruiting of ex-Android man Erick Tseng.

Being its own platform, and based on a relatively open operating schematic like Android, Facebook could not only easily build phones for every cellular network, but they could cash in on the huge mobile market by co-branding their phone offering with their already-hugely-popular social networking site.

Finally, as the icing on the cake, Facebook doesn’t have any real partnerships with any of those who would be negatively affected by a Facebook phone.

So despite the denials, it’s pretty obvious that Zuckerberg and Co would have a lot to gain from a Facebook-centric smart phone.  So don’t be surprised when its’ released.

Fans of Reddit, the social news website, say that traffic volumes of the site have been unfairly reported at low numbers. The likes of Compete, Nielsen and Quantcast have been reporting that Reddit on average receive less than 1 million unique visitors a month. Reddit says otherwise. According to a Google Analytics screenshot the site actually enjoys over 8 million unique visitors a month.

Clearly Google Analytics will give more accurate statistics than outside analysts, but nobody is sure why there is such a big difference. Unfortunately for Reddit, advertisers choose to look at the analytics from the aforementioned companies, and as such advertising revenue for the site is less than it deserves to be.

Reddit has seen tough times. The website has been relying on its fans to find a way to keep the site going, pleading for financial assistance from its users. This decision has actually proven to be a success, following suggestions that the site has decided to switch to a ‘freemium’ business model. Users hope that this will provide enough revenue for the site to continue operating.

Of note is that Reddit says its traffic is still growing, with a vibrant community as active as it has ever been. The fact that the company could leverage the loyalty of its fans to raise money is also a good sign. But Reddit will need to rely on future innovation and will need to find a way to prove that a social media site where users themselves curate and create most of the content has a financial future.

Two separate reports released this week appear to indicate that the U.S. online advertising business is experiencing some degree of growth. According to ComScore the total number of impressions for U.S. online display advertising reached 1.1 trillion in Q1 of 2010 which is a 15% increase on Q1 2009. The ComScore report says that the average price per 1,000 impressions was around $2,48 with a total spending of $2.7bn for the first quarter of 2010.

Separately PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Internet Advertising Bureau says that internet advertising expenditure for Q1 2010 reached $5.9bn, an increase of 7.5% over Q1 2009. According to the joint report the figure for Q1 2010 is a record for the first quarter. However, the number for Q1 2010 is much lower than that for Q4 2009 which was at $6.3bn.

The apparently conflicting numbers do align in one respect – online advertising expenditure is on the way up, if not by much. The drop in expenditure during the worst of the recession seems to have stopped as companies again extend their marketing budgets.

Some interesting statistics were included in the reports. For one, ComScore claims that their latest figures show that Facebook was ahead of Yahoo in terms of banner ad impressions, displaying more banner ads to its users than Yahoo. Facebook had a gigantic 176 billion ad impressions, 16.2% of the market, as opposed to Yahoo with 132 billion impressions… a mere 12.1% of the market. Clearly, the ability to keep users on your website for extended periods has unavoidable benefits.