Top Items:
Vic Gundotra / The Official Google Blog:
See where your friends are with Google Latitude — How often do you find yourself wondering where your friends are and what they're up to? It's a pretty central question to our daily social lives, and it's precisely the question you can now answer using Google Latitude.
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Wall Street Journal:
Tracking Friends the Google Way — New Mobile-Device Feature Lets Users Share Their Every Move With Each Other — For the past week, I've been stalking my sister, my boyfriend and my boss. They've also been stalking me, and we still like one other. — All four of us have been using …
Discussion:
Gizmodo, Mark Evans, Associated Press, Digits, Alexander van Elsas's Weblog …, Gadget Lab, Search Engine Land, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch and The Equity Kicker, Thanks:mrinaldesai
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
Google enters the location-based networking fray with Latitude — Google has just launched a new aspect of its Google Maps product called Latitude. It's a social layer that goes over Google Maps to show your location information in real time. If you think Google is already creepy …
Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook Blog:
Facebook's 5th Birthday — Tomorrow is Facebook's 5th birthday. This is a happy occasion for Facebook, but much more significant to the Facebook team is the fact that over 150 million people around the world are using Facebook to connect with the people in their lives.
Discussion:
MediaMemo, Guardian, iGeneration, RotorBlog.com, Guardian, Digital Inspiration, Inside Facebook, FaceReviews, TechCrunch, The Blog Herald and Mashable!
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Times of India:
$10-laptop proves to be a damp squib — Text: — TIRUPATI: The much-touted laptop for the masses said to have been built by students of Vellore Institute of Technology that would cost a mere Rs 500 actually turned out to be only a computing device. — Making this clear at the inauguration …
RELATED:
Mark Wilson / Gizmodo:India's $10 Sakshat Laptop “Announcement” Is a Complete Bust
Discussion:
Ars Technica, PC World, InformationWeek, Electronic Pulp, GPS Obsessed, Quick Online Tips and Liliputing
Mozilla:
Firefox 3 Release Notes — Check out what's new, the known issues and frequently asked questions about the latest version of Firefox. As always, you're encouraged to tell us what you think, either using this feedback form or by filing a bug in Bugzilla.
Matt Cutts / Gadgets, Google, and SEO:
Google and Big Ideas — I love Om Malik and respect him greatly. I'm hoping to corner him for lunch sometime to pick his brain on ways that Google could improve. But today he happened to do a tweet that caught my attention just as my morning caffeine was kicking in.
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Om Malik / GigaOM:
Google & The Big Ideas — Sometimes, a tweet is just a tweet. Occasionally it is just a start of a healthy debate! — Earlier today, when I read about Google launching a mobile version of Tasks. I was amazed by the attention being focused on essentially a to-do list website.
Thanks:davemc500hats
getclicky.com/blog:
Google's new Ajax-powered search results breaks search keyword tracking for everyone — Do you run a web site? Do you use a service such as Clicky, Statcounter, AWStats, etc, to monitor the traffic to your web site? Do you find it useful how these services can tell you what search terms are leading visitors to your site?
Discussion:
SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog, the Econsultancy blog, CloudAve, Smackdown! and WebGuild, Thanks:schammy
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Hiroshi Suzuki / Bloomberg:
Panasonic Will Cut About 15,000 Jobs as First Loss in Six Years Looms — Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) — Panasonic Corp. the world's largest consumer-electronics maker, will cut about 15,000 jobs and predicted its first loss in six years as the deepening recession hurts demand for televisions and cameras.
The Boy Genius / Boy Genius Report:
One of Acer's Mobile World Congress' handsets gets pictured — So, here's the deal... One of our infamous ninjas just sent us a shot of an unreleased and unseen Acer handset. They told us it would be announced by Acer at MWC in a couple weeks, and that it is “pretty awkward.” We agreed.
Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:
Google Is Not Your Sugar Daddy — Variations on the “Google should pay me for X” theme have been around for some time now, and the precipitous decline of content-related industries — among them book publishing, newspaper printing and music distribution, to name just a few …
Discussion:
The Official Google Blog, Recovering Journalist, Blogs and Stories and Beet.TV, Thanks:atul
Wall Street Journal:
Google's Clout Grows as Tech Initiatives Take Shape — When a group of chief executives visited the White House last week to talk about stimulus with President Barack Obama, Google Inc.'s Eric Schmidt wasn't hard to spot, perched in a prime seat on the new president's left side.
Jeff Smykil / Ars Technica:
Apple adding to its “vintage and obsolete” list — Sometimes it's hard to say goodbye: Apple has added a handful of machines to its vintage and obsolete list. — alistairmcmillan — From a computer enthusiast's point of view, some machines may never fall into the obsolete category.
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Microsoft's Windows 7 line-up: The good, the bad and the ugly — If you were one of those individuals holding out hope that Microsoft might go the way of Apple and move to one or two SKUs for Windows 7, your prayers have gone unanswered. But there still is some good news in what's on tap …
Discussion:
AppScout, Ed Bott's Microsoft Report, Gizmodo, Geekzone Blog, PC World, Ed Bott's Windows Expertise, SuperSite for Windows, Switched, The Register, Hardware 2.0, The Tech Report, VentureBeat, GMSV, Electronista and Lifehacker, Thanks:bromano
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Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
Exclusive Screenshots Of Bebo 2.0, Launching In February (TWX) — Bebo, the social network Time Warner's (TWX) AOL acquired for $850 million last summer, will launch version 2.0 later this month. — The biggest addition to Bebo 2.0 will be “Timelines,” which will integrate a user's photos, videos, blog posts into a “life stream.”
Discussion:
VentureBeat
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
AOL ad revenue slide continues; Time Warner writes down acquisitions — Time Warner's fourth quarter financial results showed more pain for its struggling AOL unit. — In the fourth quarter (statement), AOL revenue fell 23 percent from a year ago to $968 million.
Matthew Moore / Telegraph:
SongSmith: Financial crisis soundtrack composed from tumbling share price graphs — A soundtrack of the global economic crisis composed by running financial graphs through SongSmith, Microsoft's increasingly popular music software, has become a YouTube hit.
Larry Larsen / Channel 10:
Cool IE8 Tip: Answer Suggestions — Starting today, the default Live search in IE8 is so smart it can answer some of your questions before you finish asking them. For example, with Live set to default in IE8, try typing “MSFT” in the search box. No sooner does your finger lift off the T before Live provides a stock chart for you.
Discussion:
SEO and Tech Daily
Fred von Lohmann / Electronic Frontier Foundation:
YouTube's January Fair Use Massacre — Privacy info. This embed will serve content from youtube.com. — This is what it's come to. Teenagers singing “Winter Wonderland” being censored off YouTube. — Fair use has always been at risk on YouTube, thanks to abusive DMCA takedown notices sent …
Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:
Removing admin rights stymies 92% of Microsoft's bugs — Bulk of IE's bugs in '08 could have been blocked, says vendor — Computerworld) Nine of out 10 critical bugs reported by Microsoft last year could have been made moot, or at least made less dangerous, if people ran Windows without …
Guardian:
Mobile phone sales fall — Mobile phone users are holding on to their handsets and “trading down” to cheaper deals, or opting for a top-of-the-range device such as Apple's iPhone or the BlackBerry Storm, according to the world's largest mobile phone company, Vodafone.
Discussion:
Tom Hume
David Kaplan / paidContent.org:
NYT's Keller: We're Looking For Ways To Charge For Online Content Again — In a Q&A with readers concerned about the precarious financial state of the newspaper this week, NYT Editor Bill Keller was asked if the paper would consider charging for online content again. Keller says that the company isn't making any new plans.
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch UK:
LinkedIn launches German site to take the fight to Xing — LinkedIn is launching a dedicated site for Germany where local - and floated - business network Xing predominates. LinkedIn had significant growth with sites for Spain and France last year - 200,000 users in two months and France hit 700,000.
Judith Townend / Journalism.co.uk:
‘Democratic legitimation via the web is not enough’, says Clay Shirky — Clay Shirky has changed his mind about democratic participation, he tells Journalism.co.uk, ahead of an appearance at a POLIS event at the LSE tonight. — “All the rhetoric, including - I'm embarrassed to say …
Emma Boyes / 1UP.com:
Crytek Purchases Free Radical, Says Company Scriptwriter — Free Radical staffer tells us his company has been purchased by the developer of Crysis. — Free Radical's Rob Yescombe just confirmed to 1UP that the recently troubled developer has been bought for an undisclosed sum by Germany-based Crytek …
AppleInsider:
Amazon rumored to introduce Kindle 2.0 next Monday — Speculation is mounting that Amazon could announce a new version of its Kindle next Monday, a move that one analyst believes will help propel the e-book reader into a $1 billion dollar business for the online retailer by next year.
Discussion:
TechCrunch, TechFlash, MobileDevicesToday, Roughly Drafted, MediaMemo, TeleRead and Electronista
Dan Rayburn / The Business Of Online Video:
Netflix's Streaming Service Did Not Drive Increased Earnings — After Netflix gave earnings last week, various news sites pointed to Netflix's streaming service as the reason why Netflix earnings beat estimates. Most seem to attribute this to the comment Netflix's CEO said on the earnings call …
PC Pro:
Torvalds rejects one-size-fits-all Linux — Linus Torvalds has rejected the argument that Linux developers should pool their resources behind a single distribution. — As we revealed yesterday, Linux is still failing to show any considerable market share growth despite being pre-installed on a wide selection of netbooks.
