A few days ago, Business Insider had a post on what they thought Yahoo should buy. They mention 5 different possibilities, most of which I disagree with:

• Twitter – If the Twitter team is having problems with stability again, and they need to start worrying about monetization, it is not a good idea for Yahoo to buy them. The main reason to buy Twitter would be to make a huge impact on the social media and real-time scene. Yahoo needs something a little more stable given their own current instability.
• Gawker Media – I find this one interesting, but probably not a great idea. Gawker as a whole is not something that Yahoo really wants. Yahoo is strictly mainstream, and some of the Gawker properties are a little edgy. The one site that could be of interest would be Gizmodo, but I am not sure if Yahoo would make a smaller content purchase right now.
• Zynga – This would be a good idea if Yahoo did not already have a massive investment in their own games. Yahoo games will likely make a push into the social platforms in the next year, as it makes a lot of sense, but buying a social games company feels like a stretch.
• Yelp – I love this idea. Yahoo already has a lot of local stuff, but it really never took off. Yelp gives them a good property in the social and local spaces. They could also give Yelp the backing it needs to fight off silly issues like people suing for bad reviews.
• Loopt – Yahoo already has its own geolocation software, just not a real application of it. They could probably build a service like Loopt quicker than trying to integrate Loopt into the Yahoo applications.

Given that I only like the Yelp idea, I am sure you are wondering what I think they should buy. Obviously, I have an opinion so here are a few ideas that I had:

• FriendFeed – Yahoo has been trying a bunch of things that do not seem to really take hold. FriendFeed already has a devoted user base, and they would get a great team at the same time.
• Twine – The traffic for Twine is growing rapidly, so now would be a great time to purchase them. There is a lot of overlap with Delicious, but Twine is more than just a bookmarking service.
• Facebook – Given the size of the valuations for Facebook, this would almost be a merger. This would instantly put Yahoo in the lead of social networking, and they could link their users into the Facebook world as well. This would be a decent idea for Facebook as well because they can hook into one of the most popular content sites in the world.
• Pandora – Yahoo has struggled with various music services on their own. Pandora gives them a proven social music brand that has revenue. Pandora gets the potential user base of Yahoo which is huge compared to what they are used to.

I am sure there are some smaller technology buys they could make as well, but I was trying to focus on something larger. If they are really interested in smaller buys, they could always buy me, this blog and YackTrack as I am sure we could come up with a good price 🙂