Yahoo’s released its second quarter earnings report, and the news isn’t all that great.  While the company pretty much managed to match and/or beat analysts’ official expectations, some discouraging numbers came out, as did some less than pleasant predictions about the future.

Let’s start with the positive points, at least.  Analysts thought Yahoo might post $1.55 billion in gross revenue and earnings per share of $0.08.  Instead, it managed to post $1.57 billion and $0.10, respectively.  Net income actually rose by 8 percent year-over-year.

More than 20 percent of commercial, permission-based email does not reach the inboxes of intended subscribers in the United States and Canada, according to email management firm Return Path.

The study found emails reached only 79.3 percent of inboxes in the United States and in Canada during the first half of 2009. With the undelivered email, 3.3 percent is routed to a junk or bulk email folder and 17.4 percent is not delivered at all.

Companies have long had problems putting numbers on social media marketing results. Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group have now released a study looking at how engagement with consumers through social media correlates with financial performance.

comScore Media Metrix released its top 50 web properties for the month of June. It’s no surprise that Google sites remain on top with Yahoo and Microsoft in the second and third positions respectively.

Facebook has moved up 2 positions to number 6 though, giving the social network its highest ranking to date. Twitter actually just made its first appearance on the list, coming in at number 46 with 20.1 million visitors.

There has been a lot of talk about the DiggBar and its handling of URLs this week, after the company implemented some changes in its service. To clear the air, Digg has addressed the situation.

Digg CEO Jay Adelson issued the following statement on Digg the Blog:

This past Wednesday it was made public that 300+ confidential documents from Twitter had been stolen. While most industry related sites chose not to post these documents, a few did, most notably being TechCrunch.

It looks like Microsoft may be narrowing its focus in the field of video-sharing.  MSN Video will live on, but Soapbox is bound for the trashcan.

Soapbox was often referred to as a YouTube clone with stricter views on copyright.  It was responsible for only a small percentage of Microsoft’s overall video streams, and of course even that total doesn’t compare favorably to the numbers posted by sites like YouTube, MySpace, and Hulu.

Tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger. Microsoft says it has become the most widely used free instant messaging service in the world, with 330 million users.

A spokesperson for Microsoft shared some interesting findings with WebProNews from a survey about Windows Live Messenger: 

Firefox 3.5 has only been around for about a month now, but Mozilla is currently working on version 3.7

What do you think about the new design changes? Tell us.

Recently during his Worldwide Partner Conference keynote Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s COO, informed partners of an interesting development. Apparently Apple has taken notice of Microsoft’s Laptop Hunter ads… and really don’t like them.

Apple doesn’t like them to the tune of having their lawyers contact Microsoft, telling them stop running the ads.

Google has added the ability to include tables in presentations in Google Docs. The feature has apparently been in high demand, and the company says they really wanted it too.

Users can insert a table into their presentation, then easily add, select, and resize rows and columns, format and align text across the table, and set background colors for cells and borders. Rows will resize themselves to fit content.  Google provides the following example table:

Google announced today that it is expanding availability of local currency reports to AdSense publishers in Denmark and Norway. Switching to these new reports means that all earnings generated from advertisers paying in other currencies will be converted to the publisher’s local currency each day.

Skype has released a new version of its VoIP software for Mac users.

The new version, Skype 2.8, allows callers on Skype to share what is on their screen by calling another Skype users and showing all or part of their screen to the other person.

"Screen sharing is all about bringing people closer together and having conversations around what people want to share," said Neil Stevens, Head of Consumer for Skype.

Google has released an update to Webmaster Tools, with the code name "Summer Shine." The update comes with several new features.

The first new feature is that the site selector now lists all verified sites that the user owns. It also allows the user to search as they type.

On the heels of a study indicating that social media can significantly impact a brand’s bottom line positively, another one has come out saying that Facebook is costing companies productivity.

To be more specific, the new independent study from Nucleus Research is saying that Facebook costs companies 1.5 percent of total productivity, and that one in every 33 employees has built their entire profile during work time.

The number of people online globally is set to grow more than 45 percent to 2.2 billion users over the next five years, according to a new report from Forrester Research.

Asia will account for 43 percent of the world’s online population by 2013, with 17 percent residing in China.

Growth rates in the U.S., Western Europe, and nations in Asia Pacific such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea will slow to between 1 percent and 3 percent.

LookSmart announced a new tool called SmartRotation today. It is a cost-per-action (CPA) driven tool that automatically serves the best-performing ad creative in an ad group based on conversion data from a tracking pixel.

Yahoo is in the process of rolling out its new home page design. The design has been widely discussed since last year, but is finally making its way throughout the US.

While the design does not appear to be available to all of us yet, some have been fortunate enough to experience it, and consider it an improvement.

Be careful when sending AIM messages with your unlocked or jailbroken iPhone, anyone with a similar hacked device could be receiving your messages.

Are you concerned with the security of iPhone Push? Tell us.

As a sports fan I don’t get to write much about sports and Internet marketing. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure why that is but I’ll work on that later. What we have covered extensively here at Marketing Pilgrim is the decline and fall of the Printed Empire; the newspaper. Today, in fact stands to be a rough day again as the Boston Globe workers agrees to more cuts to keep the paper in print.

For at least the next three years, Google will play a significant role in the delivery of New Zealanders’ mail.  The Postal Services Group of New Zealand Post has entered an agreement that’ll have it putting Google Apps in front of 2,100 employees.

This counts as Google’s largest commercial deal yet in New Zealand or Australia.  It’s supposed to save New Zealand Post (which is a state-owned enterprise) in the neighborhood of $2 million over the course of three years.

Home based telephone providers should be quaking in their boots today. A rumor is floating around that Apple is quietly prepping the new iPod Touch, which comes with a built in camera and microphone.

LiveStream, which counts Gannett Co. as a shareholder and investor, has introduced what it is calling the first service to stream live video on Twitter. This would be called Twitcam.com.

In the past Gmail has hidden images in email messages by default. If a user wanted to see images contained within a message, they had to click "display images below" to get them to show up.

This policy is still in place for messages from unknown recipients, but now images will automatically be displayed if they come from a contact. More specifically, if you have emailed a person at least twice, you will see images from them without having to click the "display images below" link.