The full transcript of Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer’s withdrawal of his company’s offer for Yahoo follows:

May 3, 2008

Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

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Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) today issued the following statement in response to the announcement by Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) that its Board of Directors has rejected Microsoft’s previously announced proposal to acquire Yahoo!:

It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full and fair proposal  to combine our companies. Based on conversations with stakeholders of both  companies, we are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a  transaction is in the best interests of all parties.

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Microsoft, the world’s top software company could boost its online presence dramatically if Yahoo accepts a $44.6 billion bid to be purchased.

Microsoft has offered Yahoo shareholders a 62 percent premium on their shares to sell the company. Yahoo’s latest disappointing earnings announcement helped to depress the stock price, making it a renewed target for a takeover.

“We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement.

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As complex as Google’s PageRank may be, search experts at Yahoo seem to think it’s not complex enough. Based on patent filings, Yahoo is dabbling in ranking algorithms that incorporate more user behavior data in advance of the company’s next run at toppling Google’s haloed relevance.

Seeing will be believing when it happens, of course, as Google is highly secretive about how its search engine calculates PageRank. If history is any indication, they’re already way ahead on behavioral factoring.

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Popularity: 15%

Blog Remix is an experimental desktop application from Yahoo!’s Media Innovation Group that lets you remix your favorite MP3 blogs. Spend a couple hours immersed in the world of music blogs, saving your favorite posts and building up your own personal mix along the way. When you’re done, you can save the result for future reference or export it as a playlist, podcast, or feed (RSS or Atom) to share with your friends.

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Popularity: 14%

Very good news for Facebook and My Yahoo users, that My Yahoo! now has a Facebook module available!

Once you add it, you’ll be able to see if you have new messages, friend requests, pokes, or invitations right from your page. Looking for more? Check out the Facebook RSS feeds. You can add a feed to your page and see your friends’ status messages, notifications, and posted items without leaving My Yahoo!. Read More »

Popularity: 20%

A beta test of Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo opened for publishers, offering placement and tracking of contextual ads alongside Portable Document Format content.

PDF has been an appealing format due to its ability to preserve the look and feel of a document, while providing it to others in an easily accessible way. The free Adobe Reader became a fixture on computer desktops as adoption of PDF increased.

Yahoo has managed to score a significant win by beating ad competitors like Google and Microsoft to the opportunity to mine the PDF space for advertising revenue. Adobe and Yahoo announced the new program for delivering dynamic contextual ads in PDFs this morning.

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Popularity: 16%

Yahoo launching a social networking community site called KickStart which is a professional network to connect college students, recent grads, professionals and alumni to discover internships and jobs, or get career advice and mentorship. The site states that KickStart is in its preview release with no mention of a general availability date. The service allows you to create a profile, browse company profiles, network with your peers, professors, alumni and potential employers, source new hires, give back to your college, and re-connect with fellow alumni and past colleagues. And the kicker is “Yahoo! will donate $25,000 to the alumni association of the college with the most profiles“.

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Popularity: 9%

Just as the commotion died down over Microsoft’s Live Search update, Yahoo comes forward with some thunder of its own, unveiling its new Search Assist feature, an interface also focused more on user intent (the new buzz word in search, apparently), with a healthy dose of user-generated content thrown in for good measure.

Like with Live Search and Google’s Universal Search, Yahoo’s more robust approach to query refinement signals a new era in SEO/SEM; more options in the search results means more opportunities to be discovered. Read More »

Popularity: 10%

BlueLithium has agreed to be acquired by Yahoo!, the world’s largest global online network of integrated services.

With more than 100 employees, including computer scientists and researchers, BlueLithium is known for providing powerful data analytics to help customers get the most out of their campaigns as well as impressive behavioral targeting capabilities. They provide the dashboards and insights our performance customers have been asking for — capabilities that have been a bit of an Achilles heel for us.

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Popularity: 8%