Top Items:
Charlene Li / Groundswell:
Close encounter with Facebook Beacon — I put a lot of trust in sites like Facebook to do the right thing when it comes to privacy. After all, the only stuff that gets out into the public is the stuff that I actually put in. — Until now. — Earlier this week, I bought a coffee table on Overstock.com.
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Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Facebook's "Beacon" Infuriate Users, MoveOn — Facebook's "social ads" so far appear to be a flop. Not only was the "once in a hundred years" announcement largely a yawn, the complaints of Facebook users and MoveOn about the primal annoying-ness of "Beacon" are right on the money.
Discussion:
Inside Facebook, broadstuff, Travel Technology, robhyndman.com, Are You Paying Attention?, The Register and CNET News.com
civ.moveon.org:
JOIN OUR FACEBOOK GROUP: — When you buy a book or movie online—or make a political contribution—do you want that information automatically shared with the world on Facebook? — Most people would call that a huge invasion of privacy. But this week, Facebook began doing just that.
Josh Catone / Read/WriteWeb:
Is Facebook Really Ruining Christmas? — Political action and consumer advocacy organization MoveOn this week launched a public campaign against Facebook's new Project Beacon advertising system (our coverage). MoveOn characterizes the ad system as "a huge invasion of privacy" …
Caroline McCarthy / CNET News.com:
Facebook responds to MoveOn criticism of ad program — Facebook issued a statement on Tuesday afternoon in response to online activist group MoveOn.org's charge that its "Beacon" advertising program is a violation of users' privacy. — "We encourage feedback from our users on new products …
Nilay Patel / Engadget:
Kindle sells out in 5.5 hours — Amazon isn't disclosing how many Kindles it actually had ready to go, but apparently the idea of a tiny e-book reader with free EV-DO and the visual flair of an Apple IIc hit home for quite a few people, because they sold out in just five and a half hours.
Richard MacManus / Read/WriteWeb:
Feedster Quietly Dies... So Which Blog Search Engine Do You Use? — Blog search engine Feedster has had the following notice on its frontpage for at least a few weeks now: — There is no sign of life on the site and the Feedster blog has already been killed off (the big 404 in the sky).
Discussion:
Mike Rowehl
Lester Haines / The Register:
Wii grasses up cheating wife — US soldier discovers incriminating 'Mii' — A US soldier discovered his missus had been playing away at home after spotting a suspicious "Mii" on his Nintendo Wii, the Evening Standard reports. — The man, known only as Tony, returned from a year in Iraq …
Ben Kuchera / Ars Technica:
Songs included in Guitar Hero 3 see a dramatic leap in digital sales — Playing music on plastic guitars is big business. Guitar Hero 3 has become quite the runaway hit at retail, and with Rock Band now released, we have two big-name rhythm games on the market.
Discussion:
Billboard.Biz, TECH.BLORGE.com, mathewingram.com/work, The Globe and Mail and Coding Horror
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Peter Kafka / Silicon Alley Insider:
Fantasy Of The Day: The Kindle Will Save Papers — Did you know that in addition to its odd pay-per-blog scheme, Amazon's Kindle also offers readers a chance to pay to read online newspapers? We haven't spent time talking about it, because it's so clearly a non-starter.
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Aidan Malley / AppleInsider:
MacBook, MacBook Pro owners suffer keyboard freezing with Leopard — Some users of Apple's Intel-based portables are reporting that their keyboards are periodically seizing up during use, especially after upgrading to Mac OS X Leopard. — Numerous posts in Apple's support forums for the MacBook …
Dan Farber / Between the Lines:
Where in the world is Ray Ozzie? — Ray Ozzie is Microsoft's chief software architect-that's Bill Gates' old job. He is charged with building a bidirectional bridge between Microsoft's lucrative rich-client past and its cloud-computing future. — Ozzie, who joined Microsoft in March of 2005, is keeping a low profile lately.
Nick Gonzalez / TechCrunch:
Facebook Stealing Googlers At An Alarming Rate — Facebook and Google have been competing with each over more than just social networking. Facebook is growing from 300ish employees today to 700 next year. And the best place to get good engineers and others is Google …
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes / Hardware 2.0:
Memory test - Firefox 2.0.0.9 vs Firefox 3.0 b 1 — Does Firefox 3.0 beta 1 do a better job of handling memory than earlier versions? In a test put Firefox 3.0 beta up against Firefox 2.0.0.9 in a series of tests. … OK, with that out of the way, on with the tests. I simulated three different browsing scenarios:
