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10:50 PM ET, August 20, 2009

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Biz / Twitter Blog:
Location, Location, Location  —  Twitter platform developers have been doing innovative work with location for some time despite having access to only a rudimentary level of API support.  Most of the location-based projects we see are built using the simple, account-level location field folks can fill out as part of their profile.
RELATED:
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Twitter Can Now Know Where You Tweet  —  Location is one of the features that a lot of the Twitter apps tack on using things like the iPhone's geolocation services.  It's a cool feature, but not enough people use it.  But they are likely to now that Twitter is adding native support for it with a new API.
Tameka Kee / paidContent:
Twitter To Add Location Data—A Precursor To Geotargeted Ads?
Michael Gummelt / Facebook Blog:
Publishing to Twitter from Facebook Pages  —  Many people have asked us to make Facebook and Twitter work better together for those times when they want to share their content as widely as possible.  We agree.  Over the next few days, we will be releasing a feature that allows administrators …
RELATED:
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
Facebook Syndicates Updates From Pages To Twitter, Still Holds User Updates Hostage  —  A ray of light is beginning to shine from Facebook's black hole of information.  The site has just released a feature that will allow Facebook Page owners to syndicate their updates from Facebook to Twitter …
Connie Guglielmo / Bloomberg:
Palm's Colligan Said to Reject Steve Jobs Proposal to Stop Employee Hiring  —  Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) — Former Palm Inc. Chief Executive Officer Ed Colligan rejected a proposal from Apple Inc.'s Steve Jobs to refrain from hiring each other's employees two years ago, calling it wrong and “likely illegal,” according to their communications.
RELATED:
Steve / The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs:
“Likely illegal”?  Bitch, please  —  So everyone is all having a field day about this story that broke today where Ed Colligan of Palm told me that my “let's not steal each other's employees” plan was “likely illegal.”  First of all, the reason Colligan didn't want to play ball was that he knew …
Ryan Tate / Gawker:
How Palm Faced Down a Tyrannical Control Freak
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Brainstorm Tech:
Munster: An Apple TV set by 2011  —  Gene Munster has seen the future of television and it has an Apple (AAPL) logo on it.  —  In a note to clients Thursday, Piper Jaffray's senior analyst offered a scenario by which Apple would enter the cut-throat TV market by 2011 with an Apple-branded television set …
Joachim Bean / TUAW:
Want a 1st generation iPod?  They're still available from the Apple Store  —  In 2001, the same year the Game Boy Advance was introduced, Apple brought the iPod to us (and not to universal enthusiasm, either).  When I was doing some Google searching last night on Apple model numbers, I found something quite strange.
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
MySpace to Hire Media Link (and Millard) to Take Over Ad Sales; Berman Out  —  UPDATE: In an internal memo, MySpace is now telling employees that current ad sales head Jeff Berman is leaving the company.  —  In a move that will surely have Madison Avenue talking, well-known online advertising …
RELATED:
Gavin O'Malley / MediaPost:   Wenda Harris Millard: 'I'm Not Going To MySpace'
VentureBeat:
Twitter had been in talks to buy FriendFeed too, co-founder Stone says  —  Twitter had been in talks to acquire FriendFeed before the start-up of ex-Googlers decided to sell the company to Facebook last week.  —  “If that's where they wanted to end up, that's the right move for them,” …
Discussion: paidContent, Thanks:mgcreed
Mark Milian / L.A. Times Tech Blog:
Flickr says ‘Obama Joker’ image removal complied with takedown request  —  The now-infamous “Obama Joker” picture.  Credit: Firas Alkhateeb  —  After a Chicago student gained national fame for editing a picture of President Obama in the image of the Joker villain from “The Dark Knight” …
Macenstein:
Snow Leopard to hit next Friday (August 28th) - support training has begun  —  According to reliable sources in Elk Grove, support training for Snow Leopard has begun, signaling an imminent release of the next major release of OS X. Sources claim a date of Friday, August 28th is extremely likely.
Discussion: MacRumors and Gizmodo
Liz Gannes / NewTeeVee:
Usain Bolt Breaks Another World Record, and Footage Speeds Online  —  Usain Bolt ran 200 meters in 19.19 seconds today, breaking his own world record set last year in the Olympics.  Earlier this week he broke his own world record in the 100 meters.  But I would venture to say that the sprinter …
Claudine Beaumont / Telegraph:
Bloggers beware?  Google forced to identify anonymous blogger  —  A US court has ordered Google to hand over the identity of a blogger who used her website to defame Liskula Cohen, a former Vogue cover girl.  What does the ruling mean for the blogosphere?  —  Liskula Cohen, a Vogue covergirl …
RELATED:
Richard Koman / ZDNet Government:   The First Amendment rights of anonymous defamers
Elinor Mills / CNET News:
Hacker Mitnick may sue AT&T over data breach  —  After having his AT&T wireless account breached and his personal information posted on the Web, famed hacker Kevin Mitnick thought the least the cellular service provider could do was compensate him for his troubles.
Quentin Hardy / Forbes:
Can Yahoo's Carol Bartz Outsmart Microsoft And Google?  —  Forbes Magazine dated September 07, 2009  —  Bartz is betting Yahoo can bring up display revenues and make money leveraging Microsoft's search engine.  Right now that's more plan than reality.  —  The day before surgery to replace …
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
Yahoo Recommends Firefox Users To Switch To The “New, Safer IE8″  —  Not sure when this started occurring exactly, but Yahoo is apparently now letting Firefox users know that they'd be better off switching to the “new, safer Internet Explorer 8″.
Saul Hansell / Bits:
How Hackers Snatch Real-Time Security ID Numbers  —  The world's savviest hackers are on to the “real-time Web” and using it to devilish effect.  The real-time Web is the fire hose of information coming from services like Twitter.  The latest generation of Trojans—nasty little programs …
Caroline McCarthy / The Social:
Why ‘Joe Facebook’ wants to cash out  —  Was there an unexpected rush of Facebook employees looking to cash out their stock?  Yes, says BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy, who said that the $100 million buyback orchestrated by investor Digital Sky Technologies has been oversubscribed.
Christopher Breen / Macworld:
The end of free lyrics?  —  Something interesting happened to albums in the mid-60s.  (No, not double-album covers and their utilitarian use.)  With artists such as Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and Leonard Cohen singing about something other than teen angst, words began to matter.
Discussion: The Register
Jon Fortt / Brainstorm Tech:
The end of the phone as we know it  —  Startups and disruptors (yes, Google) seek to rethink voice calling.  —  Andy Jagoe is zigging while the rest of the mobile world zags.  Let everyone else chase the next hot iPhone app.  He's betting the next big thing is a twist on the same old thing: making calls.
Discussion: L.A. Times Tech Blog
Nick Eaton / The Microsoft Blog:
Survey: Xbox 360 failure rate is 54.2%  —  Xbox 360 gamers know the Red Ring of Death all too well.  When one of Microsoft's gaming consoles experiences a hardware failure, three of the four red lights ringing the Xbox's power indicator illuminate.  —  Since the Xbox 360's launch in late 2005 …
Discussion: gdgt, MacDailyNews and Slashdot
John Timmer / Ars Technica:
Scientists make bendable, transparent LEDs—without organics  —  Organic LEDs, or OLEDs, promise to bring flexible, transparent displays to the market, but some researchers have found a way to get the same effect by printing microscopic inorganic LEDs onto plastic and glass.
Gregg Keizer / PC World:
Windows 7 Will Run 120 Days for Free  —  Like its predecessor, Windows 7 can be used for up to 120 days without providing a product activation key, Microsoft confirmed today.  —  Although Microsoft generally touts a 30-day time limit for users to activate their copies of the company's operating system …
Long Zheng / istartedsomething:
The Real Live Search - Bing API experiment  —  Wouldn't it be cool if search engines were as fast as you could type and actually showed you results as-you-type?  As I found out this evening with jQuery in one hand and JSON in another, not only is it possible but turns out to be just as cool as I imagined.
Discussion: TechCrunch
Brett Winterford / iTnews.com.au:
Stress tests rain on Amazon's cloud  —  Availability an issue for Amazon EC2, Google AppLogic and Microsoft Azure.  —  Stress tests conducted by Sydney-based researchers have revealed that the infrastructure-on-demand services offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft suffer from regular performance and availability issues.
Google Mobile Blog:
New Image Search Results for Feature Phones  —  Earlier this year, we launched new Image Search results for iPhone and Android-powered devices.  Since then, we've rolled out the new format to iPhone and Android in 28 countries.  Now, the new Image Search results pages are also available for most other phones in 38 languages.
 
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 More Items: 
Charles Starrett / iLounge:
iPhone 3GS capable of 720p, 1080p hi-def playback?
Thomas Kang / Google Photos Blog:
Collaborate on Picasa Web Albums
Lawrence Lessig / Lessig Blog:
Announcing the hibernation of lessig.org/blog (from the blogs-deserve …
Discussion: Sample the Web and madisonian.net
Lionel Laurent / Forbes:
Li Ka-shing Confirms Spotify Stake
Discussion: GigaOM and paidContent
 Earlier Items: 
Electronista:
Apple now has 10% of Canadian PC market
Discussion: The Mac Observer
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Go Ahead, Embed This Post!
Bloomberg:
Apple Sued by Colorado Man Claiming IPhone App Used His Copyrighted Image
Matt McGee / Search Engine Land:
Yahoo's Social Plan: Twitter, Twitter, & More Twitter?
Joe Mandese / MediaPost:
Bigger Isn't Necessarily Better When It Comes To Online Ad Formats
Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
Internet slowly wakes up to PayPal's quiet fee hike
Discussion: I4U News and Between the Lines