Top Items:
Nick O'Neill / All Facebook:
Facebook Opens Status API, Say Goodbye to Twitter — Tonight Facebook has made a number of updates to the Facebook platform one of which is the opening of status updates. In order to get Facebook statuses, you no longer need to use a session ID to access statuses.
RELATED:
Chris Putnam / Facebook Developers:
Opening Up Facebook Status, Notes, Links, and Video to Facebook Platform — We're launching several new APIs for Facebook Platform today. These new interfaces open up access to the content and methods for sharing through several Facebook Applications — including Facebook Status, Notes …
David Chartier / Ars Technica:
Facebook's “next steps in openness” raises questions — Facebook's wildly popular “Facebook Connect” service may be the polar opposite of OpenID's stumbling approach to providing online identity management with single sign-on convenience. The former is criticized for being a “walled garden …
Nilay Patel / Engadget:
Official-looking Kindle 2 pictures and pricing leak out — We're not going to call it official yet, but a bunch of very real-looking Kindle 2 press images just hit the tubes, and we've got to say we're pretty convinced. Although the device itself looks basically the same …
Chris Ziegler / Engadget Mobile:
Microsoft's SkyBox site live, branded My Phone? — It appears that Microsoft may have its SkyBox beta sign-up site up and running in preparation for a Mobile World Congress unveiling — except that it's not called SkyBox, it's called “My Phone” (even though the domain is getskybox.com — go figure).
Discussion:
TechFlash, mocoNews.net, Brier Dudley's blog, VentureBeat, Boy Genius Report, Tech Beat, MobileCrunch, GPS Obsessed, jkOnTheRun, Gizmodo, Mobile Roar, NEWSFACTOR, Computerworld, AppScout, wmpoweruser.com, SlashGear, I4U News, Pocket PC Thoughts.com, InfoWorld, Mobility Site, BetaNews and Phone Scoop
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Benjamin J. Romano / Microsoft Pri0:
Ballmer tells congressional Dems how Gates worried about making payroll in the early days; gives view of economy, “culture of spending”; calls stimulus package “vital” — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave his take on the economy during the U.S. House of Representatives Democratic Caucus Retreat in Williamsburg, Va., today.
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Microsoft On The Issues:
Steve Ballmer's Comments at Democratic Caucus Retreat — U.S. House of Representatives Democratic Caucus Retreat — Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer — STEVE BALLMER: Well, I want to thank Jay, I want to thank the speaker and all of you for the opportunity to be here today and chat with you.
The Official Google Blog:
Eye-tracking studies: more than meets the eye — Imagine that you need a refresher on how to tie a tie. So, you decide to type [how to tie a tie] into the Google search box. Which of these results would you choose? — Where did your eyes go first when you saw the results page?
Discussion:
TechCrunch, Webware.com, Industry Standard, PC World, ReadWriteWeb, Search Engine Land, WebProNews and InformationWeek, Thanks:atul
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Amazon Announcing Kindle iPhone App Monday? (AMZN, AAPL) — Amazon (AMZN) will likely announce the new Kindle e-book reader Monday at a news conference in New York. We'll cover it live; join us at 10 a.m. ET for the latest. — But will Amazon also announce Kindle stores for other devices?
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Mark Hachman / Gearlog:
Report: Pioneer Exiting TV Business, Spinning Off DVD — Tags: — HDTV, Pioneer — A report in the Nikkei Japanese business journal Friday claims that “Pioneer Corp. will pull the plug on its loss-ridden television business and shift its DVD player operations to a new venture with Sharp Corp …
Don Reisinger / Webware.com:
Webware Radar: Magnolia founder blames self — Social-bookmarking service Magnolia is in deep trouble. Founder Larry Halff, who has been keeping users up-to-date on progress being made on restoring the company's database server, which suffered from file system corruption last week …
dailymobile.se:
Pictures: Samsung M7600 - With Bang & Olufsen Powered Audio — As promised, Here are some pictures of the Samsung M7600 that haven't yet been announced. — Samsung M7600 Specifications: GSP, HDSPA, 3mpix camera, 2,8″ amoled screen, Bang olufsen amp, Divx, Full touch screen.
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
StumbleUpon Hits 7 Million Users, Quietly 50% Bigger Than Twitter — What's got a button to push, knows how to make money while changing the world and is read all over? StumbleUpon! The social discovery network, like Pandora for webpages and videos, just passed 7 million users according to the site.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes / Hardware 2.0:
Apple to go back to user-replaceable batteries? — A patent application uncovered by The Register seem to indicate that Apple is interested in making batteries user-replaceable. … It's far too soon to read too much into this patent filing and could be little more than blue-sky thinking.
Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:
Job Losses: The Silicon Valley Perspective — Today's headlines trumpet the loss of 598,000 jobs last month — the worst in 34 years — but what does that mean for Silicon Valley, the home of technology? In order to get a sense of what's happening with venture-backed startups …
Darryl K. Taft / eWeek:
Trouble at Salesforce.com? — Resource Library: — Steve Cakebread, president and chief strategy officer at Salesforce.com, has resigned, and reports say two top vice presidents have also left the company. — Is there trouble in the house that Benioff built?
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:
Apple has NOT banned Facebook — How do these rumors get started? Or, more to the point, how do they get perpetuated? — Late Thursday, a site called tinycomb ("Hand-Picked Tech News") reported that Facebook had been banned “for life” from every Apple (AAPL) store in the United States …
Discussion:
Digits, Obsessable, GMSV, WebProNews, TechCrunch, CNET News, iPhone Savior, MacBlogz, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, AppScout, Silicon Alley Insider and tinyComb
Reed Hastings / New York Times:
Please Raise My Taxes — I'M the chief executive of a publicly traded company and, like my peers, I'm very highly paid. The difference between salaries like mine and those of average Americans creates a lot of tension, and I'd like to offer a suggestion. President Obama should celebrate our success …
Matt Asay / The Open Road:
Marten Mickos to leave Sun in reorg — Marten Mickos, former MySQL chief executive and current senior vice president of Sun Microsystems' database group, is transitioning out of the company in a planned reorganization. — I reached Mickos this morning for confirmation: he is definitely leaving.
Discussion:
451 CAOS Theory, eWeek, GigaOM, The Register, CNET News, Open Sources, LinuxWorld.com, Computerworld, Simon's Blog and Jeremy's Blog
Benjamin J. Romano / Microsoft Pri0:
Microsoft digital ad shop Razorfish lays off 70 in Seattle, Portland, SF and LA — Razorfish, the digital advertising agency that Microsoft gained when it acquired aQuantive in 2007, is going through another round of layoffs. A spokeswoman confirmed that the company laid off about 70 people …
Declan McCullagh / CNET News:
Obama names Doerr, Phillips to economic board — Two Silicon Valley leaders have been appointed by President Obama to a 16-person committee that's charged with offering economic advice during what has become an unusually sharp and deep recession. — John Doerr, the billionaire venture capitalist …
Jia Lynn Yang / Fortune:
Online marketing's bright spot: In-text ads — A funky hybrid of display and search advertising grows despite downturn. — (Fortune) — It's been a bad couple of months for the online advertising business. Those banner advertisements that run on the top and sides of websites? Down, by many measures.
Dean Jackson / Surfin' Safari:
CSS Animation — WebKit now supports explicit animations in CSS. As a counterpart to transitions, animations provide a way to declare repeating animated effects, with keyframes, completely in CSS. — With a recent nightly build, you can see the above animation in action.
Discussion:
AppleInsider, Obsessable, TheAppleBlog, TUAW, MacRumors, The iPhone Blog, 9 to 5 Mac and Ajaxian
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Hollywood Takes Another Crack At Getting Permission To Break Your DVR — The movie studios and the MPAA have been pushing hard over the last year to get the FCC to let them use “selectable output control” to basically block DVRs from recording certain broadcasts of movies.
Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:
Seagate: Ex-CEO Watkins Gets $5 Million Severance Deal — Seagate (STX) disclosed in an SEC filing this afternoon that former CEO Bill Watkins has resigned as a director as of February 4. The company also said it has reached a separation agreement with Watkins that will pay him $5,000,008 in cash …
Carlo Longino / Techdirt:
Google Accused Of Invisibly Deleting Blog Posts On The RIAA's Say-So — from the how-not-to-promote-yourself dept — The fight between music bloggers and record labels reached its most visible point when a guy who uploaded a leaked copy of the latest Guns N' Roses album to his site got arrested by the FBI.
