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Just An Online Minute... Yahoo Changes Major Players While Challenges Continue

As Yahoo scrambles to revamp its business in a Web 2.0 world, the company continues to make key personnel changes. Yesterday, the company said that head of sales Gregory Coleman plans to exit.

Hilary Schneider, hired from Knight Ridder in September, will replace him. Yahoo originally brought Schneider in to lead a newly formed Markeplaces unit, under which Yahoo consolidated autos, Hotjobs, personals and other classifieds categories.

The shake-up follows a long series of executive departures at Yahoo including, notably, former CEO Terry Semel, who was ousted in June, and COO Dan Rosensweig, who announced plans to exit last year.

Despite heavy investments in its paid search platform, Yahoo clearly is still struggling. The company gets traffic, but its biggest strengths, like its popular e-mail program, date back to the pre-Web 2.0 era. Even that program, while obviously strong, faces a threat from increased use of texting. In fact, just this week, the company unveiled new email-to-cell-phone capabilities in an attempt to keep people from eschewing e-mail for text messaging.

What's more, the company still doesn't have the kind of social networking presence that would allow it to compete with MySpace or Facebook. And it also faces increasing pressure from video sites. Not only does Yahoo have to compete with Google on search technology, but also for eyeballs drawn by Google's YouTube. That pressure will only increase in the next few months, as start-up Web TV companies Joost, and Hulu, the News Corp.-NBC venture, get underway.

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