Rumors have circulated that Google and Dish Networks will announce a deal to organize a focused advertising model. The Wall Street Journal shows that Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has cited the value of focused advertising.

“Advertisers in particular will pay much higher rates for ads that are targeted than ones that are untargeted.”

Google’s advertising would target certain programs, making those ads more relevant to the viewing audience.

Yahoo stock dropped more than five percent on Friday. AT&T plans to renegotiate a co-branding agreement for selling Internet access. Although Yahoo dismissed a report on this as ‘rumors and speculation’, investors chose to knock Yahoo down throughout the day.

Facebook received a strong testimonial in favor of the site from a U-K-based Goldman Sachs trader who spends far too much time there. Tech-Crunch reported how the trader referred to as ‘Charlie’ had been warned about spending over 500 hours on the site in a six-month timeframe. ‘Charlie’ has spent the equivalent of about four hours a day on facebook and fears losing facebook.

“It’s a measure of how warped I’ve become that, not only am I surprisingly proud of this, but in addition, the first thing I did was to post it here, and that losing my job worries me far less than losing facebook ever could.”
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Charlie’ worries about his addiction to facebook.

Microsoft continues to dream of moving up to second place, or even first, in search engine market share. Live Search Senior product manager Justin Osmer said in Business Week that Microsoft plans to market their search more heavily to the 465 million unique visitors Microsoft gets each month.

“We want to eventually be in second place and even first place. We are going to slug it out.”

Live search will have a new leader, since current Vice-President Christopher Payne plans on leaving Microsoft.