Techmeme: Facebook Officially Begins Shutting Down “Questions” Product, May Refocus On Search (Josh Constine/TechCrunch)

October 19, 2012, 5:35 PM

Top News

Estimated prices on 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros: Starts around U$1,699 — Alongside the new mini/iPads, Mac Minis, and iMacs, Apple will reveal a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display on Oct. 23. We have now received pricing information on the base model and the “best” model.

More: LAPTOP Magazine, CNET, Ubergizmo, Business Insider, Mashable!, Apple Bitch, Redmond Pie, Los Angeles Times, MacNN, MacRumors, iClarified and Edible Apple

Mike Rogoway / Oregonian:

Apple starts work on massive Prineville data center — Apple has begun work on the first, $68 million phase of its new Prineville data center, clearing and flattening land for the one of two, 338,000 square-foot buildings atop the bluff that overlooks town. — Each building is more than twice the size of a typical Costco store.

More: The Register, CNET, VentureBeat, Ars Technica, TUAW, GeekWire, MacRumors, Mashable!, InvestorPlace, 9to5Mac, TechCrunch, PadGadget, iDownloadBlog.com, Macgasm, The Next Web, Wired and iClarified

Sam Oliver / AppleInsider:

Apple's expansions credited with boosting US office development

More: Bloomberg

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

Facebook Officially Begins Shutting Down “Questions” Product, May Refocus On Search — It was no Quora. Today Facebook finally confirmed it is retiring Questions, which originally launched in July 2010. The Questions Dashboard and option to share a poll to the news feed are being removed.

More: CNET, AllThingsD, AllFacebook, Inside Facebook and WebProNews

Will Oremus / Slate:

Minnesota bans Coursera: State takes bold stand against free education — Honorable mentions go to New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission for driving out Uber's online taxi-hailing service and to automobile dealers' groups in four states for trying to have Tesla dealerships declared illegal.

More: PandoDaily, GigaOM, TechCrunch, The Register, VentureBeat, GamePolitics blogs, Examiner, Forbes, bizjournals, Techdirt, Geekosystem, WebProNews, Wired Campus, Popehat and Slashdot. See also Mediagazer

Sam Byford / The Verge:

New Samsung Chromebook also available with 3G for $329.99 — We were under the impression that Google's new Samsung Chromebook would only be able to hook up to the internet via Wi-Fi, but it seems that something got lost in the announcement. A 3G model will in fact be available …

More: Computerworld, CNET, Redmond Pie, Engadget, ZDNet, The Next Web, Inquirer, Sammy Hub, The H Open Source, 9to5Google, GadgeTell, Google Operating System, GigaOM, Telegraph, SlashGear, The Official Google Blog, Gizmodo and Pocketables

Ilya Pozin / Forbes:

Is Pheed the New Twitter? — Miley Cyrus seems to think so. As does Ashley Tisdale, David Guetta, Paris Hilton, Chris Brown, and thousands of others who have joined the site in a matter of days. — So what is Pheed? — In short, think of it as Twitter, with a business plan.

More: Daily Dot, Telegraph, David Chartier, Marketing Pilgrim and AllTwitter

Tweets: @jpbarlow, @hunterwalk, @mikko and @counternotions

Connor Simpson / The Atlantic Wire:

Watch Reddit's Biggest Troll Defend Himself — Michael Brutsch, a 49-year-old man who posted on Reddit under the name Violentacrez until Gawker's Adrian Chen outed him, went on Anderson Cooper 360 to defend himself on camera for the first time. — Brutsch's Reddit persona became famous …

More: Guardian, Betabeat, Mediaite, TechCrunch, digitaltrends.com, Gizmodo UK, Freedom to Tinker and CNN

Tweets: @kevinrose and @waxpancake

See also Mediagazer

Lauren Weinstein / Lauren Weinstein's Blog:

An Internet Monster, Reddit, and Free Speech

More: Marketing Land, Gawker and Forbes

Daniel Rubino / wpcentral:

Microsoft Stores giving out Surface reservation passes — Looks like if you live near a Microsoft Store or even a pop-up holiday kiosk you can stop by and get a reservation card good for one Surface RT come October 26th. — The info comes via our forums where member jdevenberg was given …

More: PC World, Los Angeles Times, Softpedia News, The Verge, CNET, PhoneArena, WinBeta, Neowin and Gizmodo

Fruzsina Eördögh / ReadWriteWeb:

YouTube Networks: An Inside Look At Their Unsavory Business Practices — Ray William Johnson, the world's most successful YouTuber, announced he is leaving his signed network Maker Studios earlier this week via video. The news sent the YouTube-o-sphere abuzz with gossip as both Johnson …

More: New Media Blog, The Wrap and Daily Dot

Jenna Wortham / New York Times:

Airtime, a Pedigreed Start-Up, Is Struggling — It sounds like a recipe for success for a new start-up: Two famed entrepreneurs, tens of millions of dollars in the bank and endorsements from celebrities like Alicia Keys and Jim Carrey. — But Airtime, the much-hyped video chat site created …

More: Daring Fireball, Business Insider and The Awl. Tweets: @pkafka

Jessica E. Lessin / Wall Street Journal:

Thiel in Talks to Invest in Airbnb at $2.5B Valuation — Online room rental service Airbnb Inc. is in discussions with venture capitalist Peter Thiel about a roughly $150 million investment that would value the company at around $2.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

More: CNET, Forbes, GigaOM, CNET, Quartz, Business Insider and Quartz

Ina Fried / AllThingsD:

Facebook: We Weren't Moving Fast Enough in Mobile — One of Facebook's mottos is “Move Fast.” Indeed, there are posters extolling that mind-set throughout the company's offices. — But when it comes to mobile, even Facebook wasn't moving fast enough. That was the message on Friday from Facebook Mobile VP Vaughan Smith.

More: AllFacebook and TechCrunch

Isabela Fraga / Knight Center for Journalism …:

Brazilian newspapers leave Google News en masse — Brazil's main newspapers abandoned Google News after the world's top search engine refused to compensate them for the rights to their headlines. The mass rush started last year when the National Association of Newspapers in Brazil, or ANJ …

More: WebProNews, Techdirt, paidContent, Search Engine Land, 9to5Google, Forbes, Mashable! and ITProPortal. See also Mediagazer

Matthew Panzarino / The Next Web:

Google launches Campaigns, a progress bar on YouTube for nonprofits with video view goals — Google has launched a new tool for its YouTube Nonprofit Program users called Campaigns. This acts as a progress bar that takes on the role of the ‘thermometer’ that nonprofits raising money have used …

More: ZDNet, The Verge, TechCrunch, SlashGear, YouTube Blog, Mashable! and WebProNews

Dan Moren / Macworld:

iCloud: Sharing done wrong — Despite the prominent addition of sharing features in iOS 6 and Mountain Lion, the company's concept of “sharing” is actually a narrow one. And in an increasingly interconnected era—when people are spending more and more time sharing words, images, files …

More: Daring Fireball and MacStories

Zack Whittaker / ZDNet:

Microsoft offers only one-year Surface warranty, despite EU law — Summary: Microsoft is offering only one-year warranty for the enterprise-favored Surface tablet, while EU law dictates it should be “at least two.” Didn't Apple recently get stung for this kind of behavior? — Zack Whittaker

More: Softpedia News and Inquirer

Rachel King / ZDNet:

Salesforce.com's Marketing Cloud adds 20 social analytics vendors — Summary: Salesforce's Marketing Cloud ecosystem expands to include social analytics vendors to enable more insights from a single dashboard. — Rachel King — Salesforce.com is expanding its new Marketing Cloud ecosystem already …

More: BetaKit, VentureBeat, AllFacebook, VatorNews and TechCrunch

Sean Ludwig / VentureBeat:

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: Windows 8 is ‘the end of Windows’ — NEW YORK CITY — Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, always game for a little tech trash talk, said that Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system would be “the end of Windows” and that “Windows is irrelevant.”

More: blogs.salesforce.com. Thanks:@seanludwig

Emil Protalinski / The Next Web:

GitHub hit by DDoS attack second day in a row — GitHub is having one hell of a week, with four outages in five days. The social coding site is currently being hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the second one in two days. The site's engineers are working on fixing the issue …

More: The H Security. Tweets: @github

Alex Wilhelm / The Next Web:

Microsoft announces Office 365 University, bringing subscription-based productivity apps to students — This morning Microsoft announced Office 365 University. Due in the first quarter of calendar 2013, the product offering is the Office 365 suite, tweaked for students, and priced so that anyone heading into school can afford it.

More: The Microsoft Office Blog, VentureBeat, ITProPortal, TechCrunch and Engadget

Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:

How Many Techies Does It Take to Reelect a President? T4O Launches “Innovator Series” Videos for Obama. — A large group of tech luminaries — including LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, Path's Dave Morin, JLab's Judy Estrin, Dropbox's Drew Houston, Craigslist's Craig Newmark and Box's Aaron Levie …

More: Mashable!. Thanks:@beet_tv

Ty Pendlebury / CNET:

Ultra High Definition officially replaces 4K — The Consumer Electronics Association has announced that the consumer name for 4K will be Ultra HD and gears up for displays to be shown off at next year's CES in Las Vegas. — The display format formerly known as 4K will now be called 'Ultra High Definition …

More: The Verge, TechSpot, CEA, VentureBeat, SlashGear, DailyTech and Gizmodo UK

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

Google Adds 25 Million New Building Footprints To Google Maps On Desktop And Mobile — Google just announced that it has added 25 million new building footprints to Google Maps. Most of the company's recent announcement around mapping had to do with flashy updates like 3D maps and buildings …

More: google-latlong.blogspot.co.uk, CNET, Mashable!, Softpedia News, BetaNews, PhoneArena, Engadget and TUAW

Matthew Panzarino / The Next Web:

Instagram now auto-translates @mentions of usernames when you share photos on Twitter — This is fantastic. Instagram has just done something I've been wanting it to do from day one. It translates the names of people you share photos with on Twitter to their appropriate Twitter name, even if their Instagram name is different.

More: VentureBeat, CNET, Mashable!, MobileBurn.com, Instagram Blog, TechCrunch, SocialTimes and App Advice. Thanks:@bradmccarty

Eric Mack / CNET:

Bitten: Apple's ‘blasphemous’ logo under fire in Russia — Some Russian Orthodox Christians see the iconic logo as a symbol of sin that they would like to see outlawed. — You might make the case that Apple is sinful based on the gluttony for gadgets it inspires, but some extreme Orthodox Christians …

More: WebProNews, PhoneArena, Betabeat and MacDailyNews

Bryan Bishop / The Verge:

Google Play Store carrier billing coming to Verizon in ‘the coming weeks’ — Earlier this year Sprint began supporting carrier billing for the Google Play Store, allowing customers to purchase apps, movies, or music, and have the charges end up on their phone bill.

More: Inside Mobile Apps, AllThingsD, PhoneArena, Android Authority, IntoMobile, The Next Web, BetaNews, Engadget and Droid Life

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