Top Items:
Red Herring:
Friendster Wins Patent — After emerging from debt, Friendster wins a patent on social networking. — Friendster said Thursday that it has received a patent that covers online social networks, one the company had applied for long before its decline and recent recapitalization.
Discussion:
The Browser, Mashable*, Fast Company Now, The Social Software Weblog, Valleywag and Visible Path
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Marshall Kirkpatrick / TechCrunch:
Friendster awarded patent on social networking — Sagging social network Friendster was awarded a patent on some pretty fundamental qualities of online social networking late last month. The patent covers the determining and display of relationships between individuals who have entered personal information …
Kevin J. Delaney / Wall Street Journal:
Lawsuits Fly Over Google Founders' Big Private Plane — Even billionaires have disputes with their contractors. — Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the low-key co-founders of Google Inc., set tongues wagging last year when they bought a used Boeing 767 widebody as an unusually large private jet.
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Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Watch Blog:Lawsuits Over The Google Party Jet; Arguments Over Bed Sizes On Board
Discussion:
The Browser, Good Morning Silicon Valley, SearchViews, Internet Stocks and Threadwatch.org
MediaPost Publications:
ABC Looks Beyond Upfront To DVR, Commercial Ratings Issues — ABC HAS HELD DISCUSSIONS ON the use of technology that would disable the fast-forward button on DVRs, according to ABC President of Advertising Sales Mike Shaw, with the primary goal to allow TV commercials to run as intended.
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Chris Thilk / AdJab:
ABC wants to kill DVR ad-skipping — (Warning: You may want to go to your happy place before reading this.) — ABC executives have held discussions with the people providing consumers with DVRs about a potential future feature for the devices that would disable the ad-skipping.
Michael / MWGblog:
PodShow And Copyright, I'm Non-Plussed — After much promotion and delay PodShow finally launched a revamped directory today. All kinds of stuff going on that I assume is aimed at the new podcaster. Not really sure of the target demographic, but my guess is the My Space crowd.
Discussion:
croncast.com, Mashable*, FuzzyBlog, loadedpun, Geek News Central …, Podcasting News, Scripting News and TinyScreenfuls.com
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CURRY.COM:
Unleash day 2 — Just returned to the Cottage from Rotterdam. Pretty tired from the week's events, but there's stuff to do and things to patch/fix/glue on PodShow.com. The most obvious being that external feeds should of course link to the original external feed
Stephanie Mehta / CNNMoney.com:
AOL as Yahoo wannabe — If AOL greenlights a plan to give away e-mail, it will be taking yet another page from the Yahoo playbook. — NEW YORK (FORTUNE) — AOL has a serious case of Yahoo envy. — First, AOL last year built a Yahoo-like Internet portal, putting all its content …
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Anick Jesdanun / Associated Press:
AOL may give away more of its services — NEW YORK - AOL LLC may give away even more of its services, including its vaunted AOL.com e-mail accounts now limited to paying subscribers, to boost ad revenues and offset declines in subscriptions, a person familiar with the discussions said Thursday.
Sara Kehaulani Goo / Washington Post:AOL May Speed Shift Away From Subscribers
Discussion:
paidContent.org
huffingtonpost.com:
BREAKING: New Rocketboom Girl Chosen, Looks Strangely Like Old One — HuffPo's "Eat The Press" has learned that Rocketboom executive producer Andrew Baron has tapped former MTV Europe VJ Joanna Colan to take the anchor chair vacated by Amanda Congdon earlier this week.
Joshua Jaffe / VC Ratings:
Google preparing health portal; pitching WebMD and Intuit as partners — Google is planning a product that it hopes will overhaul the way patients, doctors, vendors and pharmaceutical companies manage their medical information online. Dubbed the Google Health Scrapbook …
Jonathan Loades-Carter / Financial Times:
Microsoft to offer open source document format — Microsoft on Thursday bowed to pressure from governments to offer new free open source software that will allow its Office suite of programmes to handle documents in rival formats. — The company said it would develop tools to build a …
Discussion:
Don Dodge on The Next …, Between the Lines, Reuters, eWEEK.com, Inquirer, TechSpot, Consortiuminfo.org, Bob Sutor and InfoWorld
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Nwhite / Windows Vista Team Blog:
New Windows Standard Theme in Windows Vista — How does Sidebar Geek do it? I was just putting the finishing touches on a post about the new theme when I found out that Brandon beat me to it. Well great job picking that up! I had a chance to chat with Don Lindsay on the User Experience Team …
Business Week:
The Plot To Hijack Your Computer — They watch you surf the Web. They plague you with pop-up ads. Then they cripple your hard drive — Consumers have strong opinions about Direct Revenue's software. "If I ever meet anyone from your company, I will kill you," a person who identified himself …
Marshall Kirkpatrick / TechCrunch:
NBC will buy Tribe.net — Rumors are being confirmed (by Rafat Ali and Susan Mernit) that NBC is in fact buying social networking site Tribe.net. Ali estimates the sale at $50 million or less and says that the media company will use Tribe to power the low-tech women's networking site iVillage …
BBC:
Video game legend criticises Sony — UK video gaming stalwart Jeff Minter has criticised Sony for being "smug" about its PlayStation 3 console. — Mr Minter, who founded Llamasoft in 1982 and developed a light synthesiser for the Xbox 360, said the machine was "expensive" and lacked launch games.
