*Everybody* uses Google maps. Ms. Bartz establishes her credibility by including herself in “everybody”. Besides, from the tone of your column, I think it’s likely that, had Ms. Bartz said she used Yahoo maps, you’d have tagged her for being a hypocrite.

I read the article and I understand that Yahoo is looking to get involved with social networking sites. I believe that Sportsmatchmaker would be a very good fit with Yahoo. Please check it out.

[...] But what’s overlooked, and has gone completely unremarked in all the frothy searches for “funny photos”, is that this is also a masterstroke that tightens Google’s near-complete monopoly on how we look for things. The executives at Microsoft and Yahoo, its would-be competitors in the linked fields of web searching and maps, must be grinding their teeth to dust. Microsoft has had 3D maps of cities since May 2007; even Amazon had done something similar. But they have all stumbled. Microsoft, aiming as ever to preserve its own monopoly, required you to download and install its own custom-written software to get its “Virtual Earth” view in the browser; Google, by contrast, relies on Adobe’s Flash technology, which is already installed in some form on 99% of browsers. Google wins by exploiting someone else’s monopoly; Microsoft fails by trying to exploit its own. And Yahoo is a distant third: the company is struggling, having made a loss of $278m (£192m) on revenues of $1.8bn in its most recent financial quarter. Worse, its new chief executive Carol Bartz has called into question the whole rationale of Yahoo’s own maps operation: she prefers Google’s. [...]