Internet portal Yahoo! has announced plans to buy eGroups, a
privately owned company, in a deal worth $430m in order to raise
its community profile. eGroups is an e-mail group communication
service that aims to make sharing interests, collaborating, and
exchanging ideas among many people via email easy and
efficient.
Some commentators believe that this transaction signals a
developing trend of large internet companies buying out smaller
ones as the value of dot.coms falls.
Yahoo! plans to incorporate eGroups, which has 17 million
members and over 800,000 active e-mail groups, into its existing
internet applications which include Yahoo!Mail, Yahoo!Messenger and
Yahoo!Clubs.
Goeff Ralston, general manager of Yahoo!’s communications group,
believes that “E-mail groups is an application which is really core
to the way people communicate on the internet”. In a statement,
Yahoo! said, “The acquisition combines the web's largest on-line
community with a leading provider of e-mail group communications.
The combination of these two companies supports Yahoo!'s goal to be
the only place anyone has to go to find and get connected to
anything or anyone”.
