Yahoo Inc has bought itself more time to evade Microsoft Corp’s $41 billion buyout offer by extending the deadline for director nominations to the Web company’s board.

The original deadline of March 14 could have catapulted the two sides into a proxy battle next week, as Microsoft was widely expected to nominate its own slate of directors.

Now, Yahoo has postponed that potential battle to 10 days after the announcement of the date of its annual shareholders meeting. Yahoo’s last annual meeting was on June 12, 2007, and it can go up to 13 months without holding another one, according to the New York Times.

As Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang puts it in a letter to employees, “In light of the current circumstances, this change removes an imminent deadline. Microsoft, of course, could still choose to name directors, but our objective here is to enable our board to continue to explore all of its strategic alternatives for maximizing value for stockholders without the distraction of a proxy contest.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal says Yahoo has stepped up talks with Time Warner Inc, centering on the idea of folding AOL into a combined entity that the media conglomerate will take a sizable minority stake in. People familiar with the matter tell the WSJ that Time Warner is finishing up a proposal that Yahoo could take to its board. Hmm…wasn’t that what News Corp was supposed to be doing last month?

Keep an eye on:

• Facebook, like MySpace, is in preliminary talks with the major record labels about launching a music service. The online social network named a new chief operating officer yesterday: Sheryl Sandberg, who was Google Inc’s global sales head (Financial Times, Reuters)
• Ask.com will cut about 40 jobs and rethink its product strategy after finding that about 65 percent of its users are women, with a high concentration of users in their late 30s in the U.S. Midwest and Southeastern states (Reuters)
• Demand Media, run by former MySpace Chairman Richard Rosenblatt, has bought Web media syndication company Pluck Corp. The deal is said to be valued at up to $60 million (Reuters)
• At the CeBIT technology show in Germany, Vodafone Group Plc’s demonstration of an image-based search engine seemed to backfire as the system was unable to identify Germany’s most prominent woman Chancellor Angel Merkel (Reuters)
• While Apple Inc says it has no plans to pay a dividend or buy back shares, it is promising to launch the iPhone in Asia this year to help it reach its 10 million sales target (Reuters)
• Verizon’s offer of free TVs aimed at luring cable customers to its FiOS video service seems to have hit a glitch as many of the TVs have yet to arrive (Wall Street Journal)

(Photo: Reuters)