Top Items:
Betsy Schiffman / Epicenter:
Status Update: Facebook Is Letting Users Drop the "Is" — Facebook has caved into popular demand and will make the "is" in status updates optional, effective tonight, according to allfacebook.com. — The much despised "is" has been a mandatory component of the status update …
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Nick O'Neill / All Facebook:
Facebook Removing "Is" From Status Updates? — Well it looks like it has finally happened. The dreaded "is" present in status updates that people have complained about for the past few months is now finally being removed. Well, it appears that it will become optional. According to Facebook's platform status feed:
Philipp Lenssen / Google Blogoscoped:
What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft? — Today I want to ponder the question: what if Microsoft, not Google, had created Gmail? What would be the differences in that web mail client for users today? What if we apply some of the same design rules that brought us Hotmail, for instance?
Beltzner / Mozilla Developer News:
Firefox 3 Beta 1 now available for download — Please note: We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 1 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only. — Firefox 3 Beta 1 is now available for download.
Discussion:
Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog, Read/WriteWeb, Ars Technica, TECH.BLORGE.com, Wired News, Mozilla, MacDailyNews, Web Worker Daily, PaulStamatiou.com, The Tech Report, Ryan Stewart, dailytechrag.com/news …, Mashable!, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, BetaNews, Compiler, CyberNet, Lifehacker, Between the Lines, PalmAddicts, Open Source, TechBlog, Boing Boing, The Mozilla Blog, RIApedia and Digg
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Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
The Google Set-Top Box (Think Android For TV) — Deep in the Googleplex there is an engineering team thinking about how to extend Google's reach into your TV. Its work goes way beyond the Google TV ads currently being tested by EchoStar (and targeted with help from Nielsen).
Inside CRM:
The 20 Worst Venture Capital Investments of All Time — Catastrophic collapses and classic crashes in the high-tech business world. — Some things were just never meant to be, but that doesn't mean that investors won't pile millions of dollars upon a bad idea — or even a good idea gone bad.
Discussion:
PE HUB, Threat Chaos, HipMojo.com, Epicenter, John Cook's Venture Blog, VentureBeat, Valleywag, Seth Levine's VC Adventure and Digg
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Clickable Raises Another $3 Million, Officially Adds Jonathan Miller to Board — Advertising technology startup Clickable has raised another $3 million from its lead investors Union Square Ventures and Pequot Ventures, in a follow-on round to the $3 million it raised last July, confirms CEO David Kidder.
Discussion:
WebProNews, alarm:clock, VentureBeat, paidContent.org, Silicon Alley Insider and AttentionMax
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Caroline McCarthy / CNET News.com:
MoveOn.org takes on Facebook's 'Beacon' ads — Online activist group MoveOn.org is poised to announce a campaign targeting Facebook's "Beacon" advertisements, which post information about users' activity on partner sites (movie rentals, purchases from online retailers) onto their friends' News Feeds.
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider, Master of 500 Hats, Facebook Observer, All Facebook and Mashable!
heise Security:
Apple Mail in Leopard with the same old error — In March 2006 Apple defused a security problem in Apple Mail that made it possible to inject disguised malignant code. In Leopard, the patch was apparently forgotten. This means that you can inadvertently start an executable by double-clicking …
Discussion:
eWEEK.com
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Jaron Lanier / New York Times:
Pay Me for My Content — INTERNET idealists like me have long had an easy answer for creative types — like the striking screenwriters in Hollywood — who feel threatened by the unremunerative nature of our new Eden: stop whining and figure out how to join the party!
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Open Letter To Senators Hatch & Kohl About Google-DoubleClick — Today, US senators Herb Kohl and Orrin Hatch published a letter (PDF) urging the US Federal Trade Commission to carefully consider the proposed Google-DoubleClick deal. Sure, who doesn't agree with a careful review?
Discussion:
Digital Daily, WebProNews, hatch.senate.gov, FT Tech Blog, Search Engine Watch Blog, The Open Road, Rough Type, Valleywag and Mashable!
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P2P Blog:
Mediadefender hack costs company 825,000 USD — Those 6000 Mediadefender emails that leaked onto the web in September cost the anti-piracy outlet dearly: A recent SEC filing of Mediadefender parent ArtistDirect reveals that the company lost at least 825,000 dollars due to the hack …
ResourceShelf:
Google Transfers A LOT of Domains to Google Name Servers; Is A Google Tax Prep Service in the Works and What Might GoogleSecret Be All About? — All of these domains were transferred to Google name servers in the past week or so. They are also all registered to Google Inc. You'll see lots …
Edward Wyatt / New York Times:
Webisodes of 'Lost': Model Deal for Writers? — On the picket lines, striking television and film writers adamantly claim that studios are refusing to pay for the use of writers' scripts on the Internet. — But ABC Studios is doing just that. Over the next three months fans of the hit show …
Eric Bangeman / Ars Technica:
Broken DRM scheme: $45 million; trampling fair use: priceless — Macrovision, the DRM firm perhaps best known recently for creating security holes in Windows with its SafeDisc DRM, has purchased the intellectual property surrounding the BD+ DRM scheme used by Blu-ray to thwart attempts at copying.
Discussion:
Gizmodo
Lori Grunin / Crave: The gadget blog:
Good vibes for Nikon's 18-55mm lens — Nikon AF-S DX Nikkor 18-55mm F/3.5-5.6G VR lens. — (Credit: Nikon) — As an increasing number of competitors add sensor-shift image stabilization to their consumer dSLRs—Olympus and Pentax, to name but two—OIS diehards Nikon and Canon have to keep …
Discussion:
Gizmodo
