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5:50 PM ET, August 10, 2009

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Bret Taylor / FriendFeed Blog:
FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request  —  We are happy to announce that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed.  As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle...  The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team.
RELATED:
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
Facebook Acquires FriendFeed  —  Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we've learned.  We're gathering details now.  —  At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it's clearly a good match.  Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few of features …
Facebook:
Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed  —  Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online.  As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed's four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams.
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Tr.im Cuts Off Bit.ly's 301works Idea, Wants to Sell  —  Yesterday, upon hearing that the URL shortening service Tr.im was shutting down, Bit.ly, the largest URL-shortener, stepped in with a proposal.  The offer wasn't to buy the service, but rather to propose that Bit.ly host Tr.im's URL …
RELATED:
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Despite All The Angst Around Its Demise, Tr.im Will Hardly Be Missed
Discussion: ReadWriteWeb, Digits and GMSV
Susan Stellin / New York Times:
Bank Will Allow Customers to Deposit Checks by iPhone  —  The Internet has taken a lot of the paperwork out of banking, but there is no avoiding paper when someone gives you a check.  Now one bank wants to let customers deposit checks immediately — through their phones.
Ashlee Vance / Bits:
An Elephant Leaves the Room at Yahoo  —  Doug Cutting, one of Yahoo's top search and infrastructure software experts, will leave the company later this month and join the Silicon Valley start-up Cloudera.  —  Mr. Cutting's exit from Yahoo follows on the heels of the company's recent search tie-up with Microsoft.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Source: Dell Mobile Phone Launching In China Within Days  —  A source with knowledge of the situation tells us that Dell is launching (or at least announcing) a mobile phone in China in the next day or two.  We are trying to verify the information and gather more details on the hardware and operating system now.
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
King Of The Apple Geeks  —  John Gruber's Daring Fireball is the homepage for Mac nerds.  Even top Apple (AAPL) brass tune in regularly.  And it's a real business, too, now in its fourth year as Gruber's full-time gig.  —  Daring Fireball's influence was in full display last week …
Discussion: Global Nerdy and The SiliconANGLE
Harry McCracken / Technologizer:
Sixteen Reasons the Windows Vista Era Never Quite Happened  —  In a small way, this is a significant post: It's the first one in which I'm going to refer to Windows Vista in the past tense.  Which might be premature and/or unreasonable-Windows 7 won't reach consumers until October 22nd …
Discussion: CNET News, Softpedia News and CloudAve
Jim Dalrymple / CNET News:
Apple working on software fix for MacBook Pro hard drives  —  Owners of Apple MacBook Pro notebooks with 7200rpm 500GB hard drives have been complaining for months of clicking sounds followed by temporary stalling.  According to Apple, a fix is in the works.
John Herrman / Gizmodo:
Is Apple Really Releasing an 8GB iPhone 3GS?  (Confirmed: No)  —  Would Apple really ship something so regressive and line-mudding as that?  Yes, according to Canadian carrier Rogers' website.  Also, no, according to Canadian carrier Rogers' website, and salespeople.  Let's take a gander at the evidence!
Brandon Miniman / pocketnow.com:
Windows Mobile 6.5 Build 23022: What is Microsoft Up To?  —  The latest build of Windows Mobile 6.5 from XDA (and by this point, the version we'll see on phones this fall has already been completed) adds several mysterious new features that may imply that an interim build of Windows Mobile …
Michael Sanserino / Wall Street Journal:
Lawsuits Question After-Hours Demands of Email and Cellphones  —  Two recent lawsuits raise a question that many employees and employers have deliberated: Should hourly workers be paid for time spent responding to work calls or emails while off the clock?  —  The federal suits highlight …
Darrell Etherington / TheAppleBlog:
Textbooks Now On iPhone, iPod Touch  —  It appears that rumors of the death of the e-book on the iPhone platform were greatly exaggerated, at least that's what Apple has said in a recent statement.  Backing up Apple's official denial of plans to discontinue that side of app store business …
Taylor Wimberly / Android and Me:
Motorola Morrison specs - Next T-Mobile Android phone  —  Motorola will have two Android phones on sale this holiday season; Sholes on Verizon and Morrison on T-Mobile.  We gave you the Sholes specs yesterday and today we present Morrison(via a trusted tipster).
Brad Stone / New York Times:
Breakfast Can Wait.  The Day's First Stop Is Online.  —  Karl and Dorsey Gude of East Lansing, Mich., can remember simpler mornings, not too long ago.  They sat together and chatted as they ate breakfast.  They read the newspaper and competed only with the television for the attention of their two teenage sons.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Brainstorm Tech:
Sex-predator iPhone app is back in business  —  Of all the applications that Apple (AAPL) has pulled from the iPhone App Store — and there have been quite a few — none were as creepy, sad or profitable as Offender Locator.  —  Launched in early June by ThinAir Wireless …
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Microsoft sheds 2,000-employee ad agency in $530 million deal  —  The rumors of the past few weeks were true: Microsoft has sold Razorfish — the digital ad agency it purchased when it bought its parent company aQuantive in 2007 — to Publicis Groupe for $530 million.
Scott M. Fulton, III / BetaNews:
Breakthrough in Intel/Nvidia licensing standoff for i7, i5 CPUs  —  In a statement this morning that included a blessing from an Intel vice president, GPU maker Nvidia announced it has been licensed by Intel, along with other leading motherboard manufacturers, to produce its GPU-stacking SLI technology …
Daniel Terdiman / CNET News:
Guitar Hero 5 gets ready to rock  —  In the newest version of the Guitar Hero franchise, Guitar Hero 5, as many as four players can all play guitar at the same time, instead of just two.  Further, any combination of instruments is now possible.  —  SAN FRANCISCO—The first couple of weeks …
Discussion: Softpedia News
Paul Boutin / VentureBeat:
Revenge of the South Bay: VMware acquires SpringSource for $420M to enhance cloud capabilities  —  The boring business back end of technology is still a lucrative market.  Virtualization company VMware, whose software aims to let datacenter managers do more with less hardware …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Bloglines On Life Support.  This Story Needs An Ending  —  If you were a Bloglines user, consider yourself old school.  Most people moved on to Google Reader long ago, and then bailed on RSS entirely for the Real Time Gang (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc.).
Discussion: CloudAve
Andrew Allemann / Domain Name Wire:
Yahoo Buys OMG.com Domain Name for $80,000  —  Yahoo buys popular texting term.  —  Yahoo (YHOO) has purchased the domain name OMG.com for $80,000.  —  Domain Name Wire reported the sale last week on its weekly Sedo sales wrap, but we didn't know the buyer at the time.
Discussion: TechCrunch and paidContent
Timothy / Slashdot:
AT&T Makes Its Terms of Service Even Worse, To Discourage Lawsuits  —  techmuse writes “AT&T has changed its terms of service (including for existing contracts) to prevent class action suits.  Note that you are already required to submit your case to arbitration, a forum in which consumers are often at a substantial disadvantage.
Ross Miller / Engadget:
Zune HD hits FCC in prolific photo shoot, 16GB and 32GB capacities  —  Well, would you look at that.  Microsoft's Zune HD's overexposed — both in quantity of pics and in quality of photography — camera shoot with the FCC has been made public, showing off quite a bit of the device, its internals, and its dock.
G. Pascal Zachary / Technology Review:
An Operating System for the Cloud  —  Google is developing a new computing platform equal to the Internet era.  Should Microsoft be worried?  —  From early in their company's history, Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wanted to develop a computer operating system and browser.
 
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 More Items: 
Agence France Presse:
Pirate Bay to challenge Dutch ban
Ilinca Nita / Unwired View:
AT&T's Samsung A797 spotted in the wild
Discussion: MobileCrunch and Engadget Mobile
Chris Davies / SlashGear:
Gigabyte T1028X touchscreen netbook quietly debuts
Discussion: I4U News and SlipperyBrick.com
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Microsoft delivers test versions of SQL Server 2008 R2
Discussion: The Register
Engineering Windows 7:
What we do with a bug report?
Discussion: Neowin.net
The Age:
Apple store set to gobble up art deco landmark
Discussion: The Mac Observer
Howard Kurtz / Washington Post:
An Old-Fashioned Web Site
 Earlier Items: 
Jon Stokes / Ars Technica:
Despite Intel hype, Atom-based MIDs are a retail no-show
Richard Lardner / Associated Press:
Air Force used Twitter to track NY flyover fallout
Dan Nystedt / Computerworld:
Samsung invades HTC territory with Android handset
Discussion: Softpedia News
Ashlee Vance / Bits:
Microsoft's SharePoint Thrives in the Recession
Discussion: Techgeist, Thanks:mrinaldesai
Louis Gray:
iPhone Call Recording: It Makes Too Much Sense Not to Do
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch:
Tubi launches Scenes, a mobile feature that lets viewers watch 60-to-90-second trailer-style clips from its library to help with content discovery

Daniel Thomas / Financial Times:
James Harding says the Tortoise-Observer deal could create a profitable media group and there isn't a guaranteed future for the Observer with the Guardian

Alex Sherman / CNBC:
Analyzing Comcast's spinoff of cable networks, purposefully structured with low debt: the move might be a signal to the industry that it's time to consolidate

 
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