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 …, 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 …
Bill Ray / The Register:
Google will tell your mates where you are — If that's what you really want — Google's Maps for Mobile just went social, with the launch of Latitude; a service that automatically shares your location with selected friends who might want to know where you are.
Greg Sterling / Search Engine Land:
Google's Latitude Turns Maps (For Mobile) Into Social Tool — Google bought early mobile social networking service Dodgeball in 2005 and shuttered it in 2008. It also acquired the “Twitter-like” Jaiku in October of 2007. Google never really developed the Jaiku service and effectively jettisoned it …
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, Digital Inspiration, Guardian, Inside Facebook, FaceReviews, TechCrunch, The Blog Herald and Mashable!
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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.
Discussion:
The Register, CNET News, PC World, Electronic Pulp, The Apple Core and SEO and Tech Daily
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.
Discussion:
SlashGear, Gizmodo, wmpoweruser.com, Unwired View, Engadget, Electronista, IntoMobile and MobileCrunch
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 …
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.
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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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 …
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.
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!, WebGuild, Beyond Search and Clickety Clack, Thanks:schammy
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Marguerite Reardon / Beyond Binary:
Microsoft and EMC renew their vows — EMC CEO Joe Tucci and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hosted an event for CIOs at the Plaza Hotel in New York this week. — (Credit: Microsoft) — This following is a transcript of the full CNET interview with Tucci and Ballmer, which was conducted …
Discussion:
The Register
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Discussion:
cruel to be kind
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.
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
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.
Edith Honan / Reuters:
MySpace: 90,000 sex offenders removed in two years — NEW YORK (Reuters) - The online networking site MySpace has identified and barred some 90,000 registered sex offenders from using the site over the last two years, MySpace revealed to an investigative task force on Tuesday.
Discussion:
digg.com
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
David Chartier / Ars Technica:
iLife suite quietly going Intel-only, PowerPC owners cry — iLife '09 contains plenty of new features to convince current Mac owners to upgrade from iLife '08, but there is one unfortunate deterrent for those still on PowerPC-based machines. GarageBand '09 is the first iLife component …
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
Tim O'Reilly / Forbes:
Where Real Innovation Happens — Don't look for the gilded road to fortune. Look for passion. — SEBASTOPOL, Calif.—Forget Silicon Valley. Traditional wisdom is that it represents the model for American innovation: a hotbed of young entrepreneurs with easy access to capital from a large pool of savvy investors.
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 …
