Yahoo has great organization for its service with great relevancy. I think it's going to definitely help build them up for people looking for that kind of content.

AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo did not violate the privacy of any user by handing over this information. No private data was revealed. Nevertheless, by not pushing back against such a bad request for data, it leaves open the real fear that they might not push back if the US government decided to go on a real fishing expedition in the future. Privacy may not have been lost but trust was.

If you are unsure whether or not a site can support a subdomain on its own, it can't,

They definitely have a market, because they have the traffic. Search marketers can't seem to get enough traffic. I don't know anyone who is not going to try MSN.

SEOs will be much more fragmented on different platforms within social networks. It'll help eliminate a lot of the search spammers, but is going to impact on anyone who gets rankings on search engines without having good content.

I think MSN has some features advertisers will gobble up, but it's too early to say whether it will be a superior experience. They have a sizable amount of traffic. Advertisers will want to reach that audience, and buying through MSN is going to be the only way to do that.