Chicago-based class action specialist Freed & Weiss — which had been collecting complaints from SuperPoke Pets users upset about the loss of their virtual goods and carefully cared-for online pets — notified the users today that it thought its chances of winning were slim.

That’s because, though players invested much money in the game and had been previously assured that it wouldn’t shut down, Slide and Google’s terms of service seem to cover their actions. Plus, after all the outcry, Google agreed to offer a standalone app called SPP Lite that allows users to keep their pets alive with some limited functionality.

“We have appreciated hearing from many of you and, while this is unfair and unjust, there are just some situations where there is not a likelihood of recovery in the U.S. Court system and we have found that to be the case here,” Freed & Weiss said.

Another law firm, Edelson McGuire, appears to still be collecting complaints from SuperPoke Pets users.

After a series of increasingly disappointing quarterly earnings announcements, Wall Street is hoping that Research in Motion will deliver better results today.

The Canadian phone maker — most famous for its iconic Blackberry devices — will be reporting its second-quarter earnings after the markets close later today.

Analysts are predicting earnings of 87 cents a share for the period, which is within RIM’s own guidance range of adjusted profit — between 75 cents and $1.05 per share.

Higher would be better, based on the hope that sales of its most recent smartphones with the Blackberry 7 operating system, and also its lackluster PlayBook tablet, will help its results after a downward slide that has been painful.

That’s been especially tough, since both Apple’s iOS and Google Android are surging ahead in the mobile market.

RIM hopes to also get a boost from the first phone using the QNX operating system it bought last year.

The news we broke last week that Max Levchin, Slide and almost all Slide products would no longer be a part of Google just a year after being acquired was not particularly emotionally evocative for many readers. But for active users of SuperPoke Pets, it seemed lame, fraudulent, and evil — and they told us so in our comments section.

SPP fans left scores of angry comments in venues like our site and TechCrunch. They were particularly angry that SPP, which is a Tamagotchi-style game where users nurture pets, had enticed them to spend money buying in-game gold that will presumably be worthless once the game no longer exists.

Slide employees — who themselves are not particularly happy about getting shut down — tried to reassure SuperPoke fans with a user forum post this weekend that downplayed the long-term value of virtual goods. It’s an interesting line of argument that highlights the fact that expectations around virtual ownership of items within an online game are not firmly set. Should SPP users expect a refund or a transfer of value? Should they realize that a virtual game can be terminated by its owner at will?

Here’s the key part about the value of virtual goods:

The closest real-life analog to SPP items is probably a Halloween costume. You purchase it to dress up and enjoy the experience, but likely don’t wear that costume day in and day out, or for every Halloween thereafter. Unlike a costume, there are still months ahead for you to make the most of the items in your inventory and we are working on tools to help you export some of your SPP content/items to keep and access outside of SPP. We are still in the process of working out the details of what these tools might be and will update you as soon as we have more information to share.

(For whatever reason, the forum post is only available to players at SPP level six and above. My poor little frog is still at level one so I got the full text from a Google spokesperson.)

Part of the reason Google is shutting down the Slide apps is because they are not hugely popular. SuperPoke Pets has about 130,000 active monthly users, according to Facebook application analytics service AppData, though the game does not require registration with Facebook so that measure is probably low.

It’s possible that if SPP fans are loud and convincing enough, Google — which is in the process of launching its own games platform — will figure out a way to keep the game around. Asked for comment on that front, a Google spokesperson referred us back to the user forum post (which is printed in full below).

Posted: Aug 27, 2011 02:27 PMQuote | Reply

SPPers,

We understand that the last few days have been difficult for many of you. We are reading your posts and wanted to provide more information about several of the themes and topics we’ve seen emerge.

Since stopping active development on SPP, we’ve seen quite a bit of speculation about Slide turning off SPP altogether. We want you all to know that, until this week, we did not have a plan to shut down SPP. In our June announcement about the changes, you can see that at the time, we saw very little reason to turn off SPP and intended to keep it running for the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, as all of us have experienced, the future is not very predictable. As you may have read in our recent Slide blog post or other articles, the Slide group will be splitting up to join other areas within Google. Unfortunately, this means that we will be shutting down almost all of our products, including SPP and several that we just launched. This is not something we anticipated or planned for when we made our announcements about SPP back in June.

Many people also brought up questions about the value of items on SPP and we want you to know that we have spent a lot of time thinking about this very topic. You can use and enjoy virtual items however much you want – and over the course of SPP, we’re sure that there are items you’ve used for hours, even months. While you can use SPP items in a number of different ways: trade, decoration, gifting, and collecting, one thing you can’t do is bring them home and keep them forever.

The closest real-life analog to SPP items is probably a Halloween costume. You purchase it to dress up and enjoy the experience, but likely don’t wear that costume day in and day out, or for every Halloween thereafter. Unlike a costume, there are still months ahead for you to make the most of the items in your inventory and we are working on tools to help you export some of your SPP content/items to keep and access outside of SPP. We are still in the process of working out the details of what these tools might be and will update you as soon as we have more information to share.

We know that the SPP community, and the friends you have made here, are incredibly important to many of you. We encourage you to transition the relationships you’ve built on SPP to an outside platform so that they may continue to grow and flourish. As an example, Nicole established a FB group for SPP users as a place where you can go to make these sorts of connections:http://www.facebook.com/groups/104602236311763/. I also anticipate that some of you will have groups of your own that you will wish to promote or invite your SPP friends to. We are also looking into whether we can find an existing public forum that might host SPP Community rooms so that you can continue your interactions there. If we are able to find something we can implement, we will communicate the details here. As I mentioned in my original post, we will not be shutting SPP down for about six months. One of our hopes is that this will provide you with plenty of time to re-establish these connections outside of SPP.

There is still a lot to plan and do as part of the SPP shut down, and as mentioned above, you will continue to hear from us. We are saddened by the eventual loss of SPP and committed to doing what we can to make this transition as smooth as it can be for you, the incredible SPP community.

Thank you,
The SPP Team

Google confirmed the departure today.

“Max has decided to leave Slide and Google to pursue other opportunities, and we wish him the best,” said a Google spokesperson. “Most of the team from Slide will remain at Google to work on other opportunities.”

After being acquired, Slide had operated as an independent unit out of Google’s San Francisco office, maintaining existing apps like SuperPoke Pets and experimenting with new ones such as messaging app Disco and photo-sharing app Photovine, which was released only last week.

The apps, none of which were extremely popular, will be sunsetted over the next few months.

The news was announced to employees at an all-staff meeting in San Francisco this afternoon, sources said. A source said that some of the Slide team is expected to land at YouTube, which is also operated independently within Google. Slide has about 100 employees, with not too much attrition in the last year, said that source.

Although Slide as an independent start-up had not matched its lofty expectations and valuations — at as much as $500 million in a 2008 funding round — its acquisition brought Google some key assets: Social Web expertise at a time when it was dearly needed, and Levchin, who famously founded PayPal.

But that was last August. Since then, Google has entrusted its social efforts to two of its existing executives, Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, who led the team that created Google+. Levchin was left on the fringes with Slide as an autonomous subsidiary, reporting to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

In addition, at the time Slide was bought, Google CEO Larry Page had not yet reassumed leadership of the company he co-founded. In April, Page consolidated and streamlined Google’s product structure into seven distinct units. And even though the social team may have been the natural fit for Slide, the two were not integrated.

In addition to Levchin, Slide head of product Jared Fliesler also plans to leave Google, and has accepted a position with former Slide colleague Keith Rabois at payments start-up Square, sources said. (Rabois had joined Google only very briefly after Slide was bought, before jumping ship to work with Twitter co-founder and creator Jack Dorsey at Square.)

Levchin has also been an active angel investor, is chairman of the board of Yelp, and — congrats to him and his wife — is expecting his second child next month.

Here are the slides Yahoo released about its second quarter earnings, in which revenue was down due to an unexpected drop in growth in its display advertising business, especially in the critical U.S. market.

As you can see on Page 8 of the deck, year-over-year display sales rose only five percent in the quarter, compared to much more significant increases in previous quarters. With declines in all other revenue sectors, this was not a good thing.

The 10 percent decline in the Americas region, which you can see on Page 9, is the culprit, as Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz underlined in the conference call with Wall Street analysts today.

Paging Ross Levinsohn — leader of Yahoo’s Americas region and its ad efforts — stat!

YHOO_Q2_11EarningsPresentation_Final

Yahoo turned in another weak performance in the second quarter, with yet another decline in revenue.

This time it was five percent, compared to last quarter’s six percent. In other words, at least things are looking up as they go down!

While earnings per share rose smartly, Wall Street is still looking for strong sales growth from the Silicon Valley Internet giant, which seems unable to provide it.

Blamed most this time for the revenue fall: Yahoo’s changes in its display sales operations in the key Americas region, reasons for which were largely unspecified in the initial company press release. (You can see the damage in this slide deck from the company here.)

Maybe Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz will explain it all in its upcoming conference call with analysts (or she could try the I-don’t-know approach taken by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch in PhoneGate hearings in Britain earlier today!).

2 pm PT: It starts with the usual regulatory blah-blah, which I always enjoy.

Bartz gets right into it, opening with the key problems with China’s Alibaba Group, as well as its display and search revenue weaknesses.

The fight with Alibaba is over its Alipay payments unit, which was spun out of the Chinese company without Yahoo’s say-so. Yahoo is a big shareholder.

Bartz says that the company was working on a settlement night and day.

But she quickly gets onto how display did not perform as expected in its key Americas arena. “Obviously, I am not happy,” she said.

Obvi! Neither are shareholders, Carol.

She says it was not about new competitive development. It was not about the economy. It was not about engagement.

So what was it? Changes in its sales leadership and organization, says Bartz, which has included talent walking out the door in droves.

A lot more than Yahoo expected, but no surprise to anyone who has been paying any attention to the brain drain at the company.

Bartz promises a new approach to sales, part of its endless turnaround, which is beginning to feel like a digital version of “Waiting for Godot.”

Search revenue, though, says Bartz, was better than expected.

2:11 pm: CFO Tim Morse is on now, running through the numbers and the display shortfall in the Americas region.

“We simply did not have appropriate coverage,” says Morse, noting consumer products, tech and autos as weak spots in the advertising market.

Thank goodness, then, for the guarantees from search revenue in the Microsoft partnership deal.

More numbers and then it is back to Bartz to talk about search, which is going better than the last quarter, when it was the culprit for the revenue decline.

She says that Microsoft and Yahoo were working together to improve the issues.

“We’d like to be further down the road,” says Bartz about the goal of search revenue per search growth, as well as settling all the other problems, such as the Asian issues.

And, by further, I am presuming she means actual forward movement, which is what roads are actually for.

2:27 pm: Q&A time, the part of our program where Wall Street analysts do not ask the questions that need asking (and where I win fancy journalism awards for pointing this delta out!).

Therefore, Bartz is first thanked for providing “color” about the display disaster and is not asked about more specifics of the disaster itself.

The second question still does not get to it either, but she does note Yahoo’s sales force has to sell beyond “Gee, we’re big” and come up with better ad solutions.

“The issue is we did not have enough sales people in front of the big clients,” says Bartz.

That’s because all those former Yahoos are now working at Groupon, LivingSocial, Facebook and on down the line and now in front of big clients for those hotter companies.

2:34 pm: Question about its Asian assets. Yahoo’s talks with Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba are separate, says Bartz, although I would add that they have non-movement in common.

And also a question about Yahoo’s interest in the acquisition of the Hulu premium online video service.

Bartz winks verbally and says nothing, which translates into: Of course, it is interested.

More on the reasons for the display fall-off, which Bartz makes clear is not due to big competitive threats, but internal issues.

Maybe she’s saving big competitive threats as the reason for a revenue decline in the third quarter!

I look forward to the quarter I get the finger pointed at me for causing revenue to fall, due to my snarky posts.

Now, we are into softball questions about improvements in engagement. It’s up, but no one asks why Yahoo is still not doing anything very cutting edge in product innovation compared to competitors.

I believe Google has launched at least 14 new social networks since this Sunday, along with its strong quarterly performance last week. And Apple, well, blew away its quarter today as it is about to release more cool new stuff later this week.

And that might be the crux of the issue for Yahoo, which might not solve its woes by throwing a more focused sales army at the issue.

That’s because Yahoo’s products are simply not nearly has social as Facebook or even Google right now, which might be the true problem as old customers move on to new advertising solutions.

Whatever the reason, Yahoo clearly needs a refresh of its ad products and how it sells them, especially in its fast-growing mobile, video and communications products.

Bartz talks about getting better expertise, a tighter regional focus and other issues of going to market, which is perhaps something she might have realized many, many quarters ago.

After all, she’s been in charge for a while, and these issues are not new.

In fact, in an earlier quarter, Bartz was stressing “tentpole” events and anchor media properties and the power of the size of Yahoo as a selling point.

This was in April, in fact, in the first quarter of this year.

As I wrote then:

“CEO Carol Bartz excited was the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s traffic gusher for big tentpole events such as the Super Bowl and the Oscars. In fact, Bartz practically sounded like a gushy “Entertainment Tonight” flunky when talking to Wall Street analysts about Yahoo’s Oscar news, games and other offerings. She proudly noted the site’s efforts generated more than a billion pages views.”

Now big is out! Moving on!

The last question is another about Yahoo’s talks with its Asian partners.

“It’s complex,” says Bartz.

You can say that again.

Yahoo turned in another flat performance in the second quarter, with $1.08 billion in revenue, which was slightly below Wall Street expectations.

Earnings per share were right on target, though, at 18 cents each, an increase of 18 percent. Net income was $237 million for the quarter.

Investors were expecting Yahoo to report revenue of $1.11 billion on earnings of 18 cents.

That means a revenue decline of five percent from a year ago, which Yahoo said was “primarily due to the revenue share related to the Search Agreement with Microsoft.”

More importantly, in a statement, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz also pointed to changes in its display sales operations, a key business of Yahoo:

“We experienced softness in display revenue in the second half of the quarter due to comprehensive changes we have made in our sales organization to position ourselves for more rapid display growth in the future.”

Whatever the reason, it’s not good news for Yahoo, especially considering Google’s strong results last week. Then again, it’s better than the first quarter’s six percent drop in revenue for Yahoo.

That said, Yahoo stock was down between one and two percent in after-hours trading.

Here’s the full press release to peruse, before I begin liveblogging the earnings call at 2 pm PT, as well as a link to my post on its slide deck of the results:

YHOO_Q211PressRelease_Final

What Google is doing today is making some careful tweaks to weave social signals into search: Most notably, bringing social search results up from the bottom of the page and parsing links shared by friends.

Google has tried to bring in new blood to help it “get social,” most prominently hiring the PayPal and Slide founder Max Levchin by acquiring Slide. Today’s social search launch was put together by another serial entrepreneur who came into the company through an acquisition: Mike Cassidy. His last company, an online travel guide called Ruba, was sold to Google last May.

Cassidy was a significant get for Google, though he’s stayed under the radar till now. Prior to Ruba, Cassidy had founded and sold three previous companies: Xfire, Direct Hit and Stylus Innovation.

While his title at Google–product management director for search–doesn’t have the word “social” in it, Cassidy noted in a phone interview on Wednesday that Ruba was a social company; it was specifically focused on recommendations by friends. In fact, he said, an early name for Ruba, which was backed by Benchmark Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, was “Friendstips.”

Back to Thursday’s launch: Google already has a “social search” product that turns up for a minority of queries in the No. 9 and 10 spots at the bottom of its results page for logged-in users who have connected their Google accounts to social services like Twitter.

Now those results will show up scattered throughout regular results. But that’s only for users who are logged in, and only when a social result is deemed relevant.

The other big change is Google will also now give higher ranking to URLs that are shared as links by friends on public sites like Twitter and Quora. Google will try to determine on a per-user and per-tweet basis if a link is relevant to a certain searcher based on which users shared it.

So, for instance, if an article was shared by a person you are friends with on multiple services, Google will think it’s probably more important to you. Or if a video has been shared by a lot of people, including your friends, there’s a good chance it will turn up high in your results on that topic.

Lastly, Google is tidying up some stuff so users can link social services to their Google accounts without displaying them for all to see on their public Google profiles.

Google’s search folks are not necessarily in alignment about the importance of social. Cassidy said Wednesday, “Recommendations from friends are some of the most powerful recommendations in the world. We’re trying to turbopower that. Google’s mission is organizing the world’s information, and this is an extension of that.”

But one of Google’s search scientists was recently quoted pooh-poohing the potential for social to change search. “Social is just one signal. It’s a tiny signal,” Amit Singhal told Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison from Search Engine Land about what social signals Bing and Google used as of December. Since then, Bing has upped its special integration with Facebook to include pages “liked” by searchers’ friends.

Investors hoping Yahoo might benefit from the same surge in online display advertising spending that drove Google to its recent big quarter are in luck–except for the big-quarter part.

Posting fourth-quarter earnings today after sacking one percent of its staff, the company reported net income of 24 cents per share on revenue of $1.21 billion. The Street doesn’t seem convinced, though. Yahoo shares are down 3.5 percent as I write this.

Analysts had been expecting earnings of 22 cents per share on $1.19 billion in net revenue–a big jump from the 11 cents per share the company reported in the same period last year, but a troubling decline from the $1.26 billion in net revenue that accompanied it. That said, display advertising did grow. For the current quarter, the company sees revenue in a range of $1.02 billion to $1.08 billion; analysts had been looking for $1.13 billion.

“We just completed a very encouraging quarter and year for Yahoo!, where we saw our plans to turn around the company gain momentum,” CEO Carol Bartz said in a canned statement. “For the year, operating income, margins, EPS, and return on invested capital doubled. Display advertising grew 17 percent. We completed the important North America Search transition to Microsoft on schedule and with high quality. We introduced new and updated products at a faster pace. And our content properties–like Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! Finance–continued to innovate and extend their massive lead.”

Look for more coverage of the earnings call at BoomTown later this afternoon. Meanwhile, here’s the press release in full:

YHOO_Q410PressRelease_Final

(Also, you can see a slide deck of the financials here.)

[Image Credit: Byzantin3]

BoomTown has always enjoyed–although I have not always agreed with–the ruminations of Fred Wilson in his must-read blog, A VC.

Today, the New York venture investor–heard of Foursquare, Twitter?–penned one that was flatly on point, simply titled “Chasing Returns” about a potential crisis in start-up funding.

It was all due to a new class of investors too focused on chasing returns, noted Wilson, “and some of them do not understand what they are investing in.”

Rut-roh.

Perhaps dumb moneybags are not the greatest worry of our time–but dumber justifications of questionable success certainly should be, which Wilson also called out recently in an article in the New York Observer about the bubbly start-up scene there.

Said Wilson:

“It’s not all going great. You know, companies are failing. A couple of high-flying entrepreneurs came crashing to the ground recently. Justin Shaffer of Hot Potato and Sam Lessin of Drop.io–both of those companies essentially failed. Both of them ended up ‘selling’ their businesses to Facebook, but those were really just–Facebook wanted to hire those people, and they wrapped it up in a ‘sale.’ But those companies were unsuccessful. They failed. So there is failure out there–like, right in front of us. We can see it.”

Many quickly cried foul after Wilson’s remarks, but many more secretly shook their heads in agreement at the reality distortion field around entrepreneurs.

This has happened a lot lately in Silicon Valley, of course–as evidenced by a series of just-in-time saves of once high-flying start-ups (Slide being bought by Google comes to mind) sold as wins.

Indeed, painting failure as another form of success is one of the favorite and endearing canards of tech, showing an ability to bounce back from any negative and pivot into a new direction.

But most pivoting, as Loren Feldman of 1938 Media recently pointed out, is just another word for covering up misdirection.

Perhaps misdirection–as it should be in any world that thrives on innovation and entrepreneurial instincts–is all well and good, but it is only that way as long as it is identified as such when it occurs.

So, good for Wilson for truth-in-labeling when it comes to start-ups, investing and chasing returns these days.

In the “open continuum,” Hesse places his wireless carrier nearer to the middle, while competitors are closer to the closed end.

The most open “anything goes” side is uncharted territory.

Still, in a Q&A with BoomTown after his speech, Hesse noted that among the handset makers, Google was on that wilder end, while Apple sat on the other pole completely.

These are exactly the kinds of key topics Walt Mossberg and I will be discussing with Hesse and others at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference, which takes place December 6 and 7 in San Francisco.

Other speakers include Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, Google’s Andy Rubin, Mike Lazaridis of Research in Motion and more.

You can get more information about the event here.

And here is Hesse’s slide (click on the image to make it larger):

The big picture: Google has spent at least $1.6 billion buying 40 companies during the first nine months of 2010. And if you assume the previously announced ITA deal goes through this year, you can tack on another $700 million.

Google breaks out a few of the bigger deals:

• Slide: $179 million
• AdMob: $681 million
• On2 Technologies: $123 million
• 37 other companies: $626 million

Bear in mind that these numbers very likely underestimate Google’s real M&A cost, since they don’t include big employment contracts it hands out to keep key talent it picks up. Slide’s Max Levchin, for instance, is going to do very well as a Google engineer for at least a couple of years.

Just weeks after acquiring social game and gadget maker Slide for a reported $182 million, the search company has purchased social game developer SocialDeck.

“We’re super excited to announce that someone found our social games as fun as you have–in this case, that ‘someone’ is Google,” the company said in an announcement splashed across its homepage.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed and Google isn’t saying much about its plans for the company, though presumably it will play a role in the broad social networking service it’s rumored to be developing. Also figuring prominently in that effort: Online game developer and Google partner Zynga, Slide and virtual currency outfit Jambool, also acquired by Google (GOOG) earlier this month.

The Los Angeles Times, which first reported the story, says Khare is sitting next to Slide founder Max Levchin, who sold his company to Google (GOOG) a few weeks ago, and now works there as a VP of engineering.

The LAT’s Jessica Guynn assumes that Khare will work with Levchin and Google’s Vic Gundotra’s efforts to roll out a “social”…well, we’re not exactly sure what it will be. But it will be something, and it will compete with Facebook. Right?

With his vision for an “open, interoperable social networks,” Khare’s a good fit for Google, which has championed that approach over Facebook’s “walled garden.”

Khare joined Google because he was sold by vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra’s pledge that Google is serious about social, a person familiar with the situation said.

“He has built a lot of interesting pieces that would be useful to anyone building a social network,” the person said.