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12:20 PM ET, August 2, 2008

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Matt Richtel / New York Times:
Don't Want to Talk About It?  Order a Missed Call  —  When Alexis Gorman, 26, wanted to tell a man she had been dating that the courtship was over, she felt sending a Dear John text message was too impersonal.  But she worried that if she called the man, she would face an awkward conversation or a confrontation.
Jeremiah Owyang / Web Strategy:
How “Janet” Fooled the Twittersphere She's the Voice of Exxon Mobil  —  The game is up, “Janet” is not an official Exxon representative  —  A few days ago, the Twittersphere was curious, interested, and excited to see a member of Exxon Mobil's employee ranks to join the twitter conversation …
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Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
What Should Exxon Do About Twitter?  Absolutely Nothing  —  Energy giant Exxon Mobil fell victim to a Twitter user spoofing official use of an account named ExxonMobilCorp, it was discovered yesterday, and now a discussion is unfolding among social media advocates about what the company should do.
Leslie Cauley / USA Today:
AT&T: 'We're all about wireless'  —  DALLAS — Wonder why the smoking-hot 3G Apple iPhone only costs $199, less than half the price of the original?  Here's a two-word hint: Randall Stephenson.  —  Stephenson, who became AT&T's (T) chairman and CEO a year ago, championed the idea of paying Apple …
RELATED:
Frederic Lardinois / ReadWriteWeb:
AOL is Getting Serious About Lifestreaming: Buys SocialThing  —  SocialThing, a lifestreaming/social aggregation site, has been acquired by AOL.  We currently have no information about the final price of the acquisition, but given that SocialThing was still in private beta, we assume that it was relatively low.
Discussion: Startup Meme
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Cade Metz / The Register:
Privacy watchdog hoists Google by its own petard  —  Spews Street View pics of Larry Page Lexus  —  In an effort to prove that Google is a serious threat to the personal privacy of people everywhere, the National Legal and Policy Center has exposed countless Google Street View pics that detail …
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Mobile Web Wars Videos: Does Anybody Care About Android?  —  A week ago, I put together a roundtable about the upcoming mobile platform wars between the iPhone, Google's Android, and older platforms like Nokia's.  One thing I discovered as I was organizing the event was that it was really hard …
The Technium:
People Want To Pay  —  Yes, everything will be free, but in my experience people want to pay.  They really do!  People, mobs of them, will grab stuff that is free.  They will try stuff for free that they would never touch if they had to pay.  They will always gravitate, on average, to the lowest price, and what is lower than free?
Josh Lowensohn / Webware.com:
Facebook's auto-tagging feature could be tip of tagging iceberg  —  One of my favorite Facebook features is auto-tagging.  It happened to me last night by accident and ended up being one of those very rare moments of using a product where I got a big grin on my face.
Peter Whoriskey / Washington Post:
Instant-Messagers Really Are About Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon  —  Big Microsoft Study Supports Small World Theory  —  Turns out, it is a small world.  —  The so-called small world theory, embodied in the old saw that there are just “six degrees of separation” between any two strangers on Earth …
Discussion: Smart Mobs
Rob Cottingham / ReadWriteWeb:
Tag Clouds R.I.P.?  —  I loved tag clouds from the moment I saw them, and I still do.  Two years ago, they roamed the social web like buffalo on the pre-Columbian plains of North America... huge, thundering herds of keywords of all shades and sizes.  And you'll see them to this day on many …
Discussion: HighTouch
Fred / A VC:
The Lazy and Smarter Web  —  If you spend a lot of time reading web/tech blogs, you'll be familiar with the concept of the “lazy web”.  The idea is instead of doing a lot of work researching/googling, you just ping/spam your social net with a question and get them to do the work for you.
Discussion: VCMike's Blog
Duncan Riley / The Inquisitr:
Site Meter causing Internet Explorer failure  —  Traffic measuring tool Sitemeter is blocking users of Internet Explorer from accessing sites using the service.  —  According to a tip to The Inquisitr, the problem happens when anybody using Internet Explorer tries to open any sites …
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Yahoo Shareholder Vote: Old Board Stays Put (While AOL Makes Another Boneheaded Move!)  —  After its annual meeting today, as its board members had lunch together, Yahoo released the results of its shareholder vote and it seems we will still have CEO Jerry Yang to kick around some more.
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 More Items: 
Andrew Lih:
Recently Unblocked in China...
Nilay Patel / Engadget:
Netshare iPhone tethering app reappears in the App Store.
Yahoo!:
Yahoo! Announces Results of 2008 Annual Stockholder Meeting
Josh Catone / SitePoint Blogs:
Advice: Microsoft Should Invest Y Combinator-style
Discussion: HipMojo.com and blist
Deborah Jian Lee / Reuters:
NYPD calls on citizens for amateur video evidence
Robert McMillan / Computerworld:
Apple bails on Black Hat talk
Daniel Shen / DigiTimes:
HTC to begin shipping Android-based handsets in 4Q08 as scheduled
Discussion: last100, IntoMobile and jkOnTheRun
Industry Standard:
Dell tries to trademark “cloud computing”
Discussion: WebGuild and CenterNetworks
 Earlier Items: 
Richard Bennett / CircleID:
FCC's Comcast Ruling Inconsistent and Incoherent
Doug Aamoth / CrunchGear:
Asus still sticking with the whole 7-inch screen thing
Discussion: Gadgetell and Engadget
PBS:
The Eyes Have It  —  So little real information leaks out of Apple …
Ben Jones / TorrentFreak:
EFF Tool Hunts BitTorrent Throttling ISPs
Josh Lowensohn / Webware.com:
Resnooze puts helpful nags in your e-mail
Discussion: WebWorkerDaily
Ben Kuchera / Opposable Thumbs:
Mole attack: 360 price cuts on all hardware in September
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
We Know How Many Kindles Amazon Has Sold: 240,000
Katie Marsal / AppleInsider:
Carmack: iPhone more powerful than Nintendo DS, PSP combined