Top Items:
Gary Rivlin / New York Times:
Wallflower at the Web Party — JONATHAN ABRAMS was in a spot. He could take the safe bet and accept the $30 million that Google was offering him for Friendster, the social networking Web start-up he began only a year earlier, in 2002. Saying yes to Google would provide a quick …
Discussion:
Mark Evans, IP Democracy, Mathew Ingram, Screenwerk, Texas Startup Blog, Clickety Clack, TikiRobot!, Listics, i-boy and ben barren
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Matt Marshall / VentureBeat:
The woeful story of Friendster, and lessons — Gary Rivlin, of the New York Times, has just written the best overview yet of the terrific bungle of social networking company, Friendster. — Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster, had a great initial vision, and sparked the social networking revolution …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
The Friendster Tell-All Story — Gary Rivlin at the New York Times finally wrote the Friendster "tell all" piece that everyone's been threatening to do for some time (me included). It's not pretty. I get the sense the most people mentioned in the article are not going to be very happy with the way it turned out.
Brady Forrest / O'Reilly Radar:
How Friendster Lost Its Footing — The New York Times has an article on the downfall of friendster. It traces Friendster through the fabled Google buyout offer, numerous CEOs, and dwindling traffic. In the article most of the blame is aimed at high-profile investors and board-members …
Steven Levy / Newsweek:
'Good for the Soul' — With iPod's fifth birthday around the corner, Steve Jobs discusses the MP3 player's design, the cool factor and the impact on how we listen to music. — Paul Sakuma / AP — Holistic: Jobs at an Apple media event last month — Oct. 23 marks the fifth anniversary of Apple's iPod.
Fred / A VC:
Who Should Buy Yahoo! — I got this comment on my Buying YHOO post last week: … My first thought was that I had sold too soon. My second thought was "no, not a carrier". And the next thing I did was send the comment around to some of my friends who are active in the market.
Richard Menta / mp3newswire.net:
iPod Killers for Christmas 2006 — We have run the iPod Killers for Christmas/Summer series since 2004. In that time we reported on 149 portable players and NOT one iPod killer from the bunch. That said, we may actually have a couple of genuine challengers to Apple.
Discussion:
The Unofficial Apple Weblog, I4U News, Gizmodo, details of a global brain, Slashdot and digg
Newlaunches.com:
McDonalds gives MP3 players infected with spyware as prizes — If it is not lawsuits then there is virus infected MP3 players, the fast food giant is always in the news. It all started in August when McDonalds Japan in association with Coca Cola announced a contest, where a MP3 player …
Daniel Terdiman / CNET News.com:
'Second Life' to begin selling real names — For anyone who has used the virtual world "Second Life," the last names Gjellerup, Godel or Stapovic probably mean a lot more than their real last names. — That's because historically, "Second Life" users have had to choose names from an ever-changing …
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blog.holtz.com:
Edelman and the one-sided conversation — The first inkling I had that Edelman PR had stumbled again in its social media efforts on behalf of client WalMart came early yesterday when Laurel English emailed me a copy of the MediaPost story. Shortly after that, Donna Simmons …
Discussion:
Scobleizer, Mathew Ingram, NevilleHobson.com, Deep Jive Interests, JD on EP, Smalltalk Tidbits …, WebMetricsGuru, i-boy, PR Squared and raving lunacy
Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:
Paid popularity — Inspired by the success of blogging journalist and former staffer Om Malik, Business 2.0 is paying staffers to blog, rewarding them on the basis of traffic. My newfound friend Dan Shanoff objects at HuffingtonPost, arguing, with merit, that this may cause writers to …
Discussion:
Smalltalk Tidbits …, Good Morning Silicon Valley, iwantmedia.com and Netscape.com Hot Stories
Haydn / What Will You See Next?:
Well Said is Not Always Well Written — Dave Winer has been the focal point of a discussion on blogs and journalism these past few days. — Dave's point is that the reader is now the writer and in ten years time all news will be blog based. — On mediangler I've been trying to work some of this out too.
Steve Lohr / New York Times:
Is Windows Near End of Its Run? — Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, has his hands full. The next version of the Windows operating system, Vista, is finally about to arrive — years late and clouded by doubts that it might violate antitrust rules in Europe.
Ismael Ghalimi / IT|Redux:
What I learned at the Office 2.0 Conference — With over 450 participants (375 iPods only, sorry...), 105 speakers, and 56 sponsors, the inaugural Office 2.0 Conference was a success. Eating our own dog food, we used as many Office 2.0 tools as we could to organize the event, and most of them worked.
Jim Courtney / Skype Journal:
Sony Mylo — First Impressions... Thursday I received, as an evaluation unit, a Sony Mylo via the folks at Trinity Convergence whose voice engine software is embedded in the device. The Mylo has turned out to be an interesting personal companion and nothing has changed my opinion …
Jonathan Riddell / KDE Dot News:
KDE Celebrates 10 Years of the Free Desktop — Yesterday at 10:00 AM the president of the KDE e.V. Eva Brucherseifer welcomed the audience of the presentation track at the KDE anniversary event at the Technische Akademie Esslingen (TAE) in Ostfildern near Stuttgart, Germany.
Discussion:
Slashdot
Niall Kennedy / Niall Kennedy's Weblog:
The current state of image search — A picture is worth a thousand words, especially to search engines trying to match a brief search query to a set of appropriate visual results. How can a web search engine collect enough data about a particular image to provide a user with relevant results?
Richard Siklos / New York Times:
A Loopy Deal That Actually Makes Sense — IS Google's $1.65 billion acquisition of the video Web site YouTube another milestone in the annals of the Internet? Or is it evidence of a second silly season? The answer to both questions: Yep, you'd better believe it.
Discussion:
BuzzMachine
