Techmeme: Facebook Crosses the 500-Million Threshold, ComScore Says (Jennifer Valentino-DeVries/Digits)

6:25 PM ET, May 18, 2010

Top Items:

Edmund Lee / AdAge:

Yahoo Buys Associated Content for $100 Million — Deal Will Shore Up Portal's Content Offerings, Help Produce Low-Cost Media — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Yahoo has acquired startup Associated Content for slightly more than $100 million in a deal that gives the portal new technology and a new strategy for producing low-cost media.

Yahoo / Yodel Anecdotal:

Welcoming Associated Content to the Yahoo! Family — Yahoo! & Associated Content @ Yahoo! Video — Today we announced we are acquiring Associated Content, a pioneer in delivering crowd sourced content. We are at their headquarters today talking with employees and I spent a few minutes talking …

Discussion: TNW Social Media

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
What Is Yahoo Thinking? Buying Associated Content Opens Up A Whole Can Of Worms

Discussion: Silicon Alley Insider

Joseph Tartakoff / mocoNews:

Google To Buy VOIP Technology Firm Global IP Solutions For $68.2 Million — Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is offering $68.2 million to buy up publicly-traded Global IP Solutions, a San Francisco-based company which sells technology used to deliver voice and video over IP networks.

Larry Dignan / ZDNet:

Google buys VOIP engine behind Yahoo, AOL, WebEx, Lotus conferencing — Google on Tuesday said it will acquire Global IP Solutions Holding, which makes processing software for voice and video over IP, for $68.2 million. The deal means that Google will own the voice and video conferencing engine behind …

Discussion: Boy Genius Report, Financial Times, Disruptive Telephony, Mashable!, ITworld.com, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim and ReadWriteWeb

Electronista:
Google buys VoIP firm, hints at possible Android video chat

Discussion: IntoMobile, I4U News and Android Central

Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:

Google To Launch Amazon S3 Competitor ‘Google Storage’ At I/O — Amazon's cloud storage services are going to be getting another major competitor this week: Google. We hear that this week during its I/O conference, Google will be announcing a new service that is a direct competitor with Amazon's S3 cloud storage.

Discussion: PC World, Erictric, Maximum PC, Electronista, Google Code Blog, TNW Apps and ZDNet, Thanks:auralab

Facebook Press Releases:

Facebook and Zynga Enter Into Long-Term Relationship — Facebook and Zynga announced today that they have entered into a five-year strategic relationship that increases their shared commitment to social gaming on Facebook and expands use of Facebook Credits in Zynga's games.

Discussion: Download Squad, TechCrunch, Digital Daily, CNET News, GigaOM, blogs.ft.com, Geekosystem and Joystiq

Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
Zynga Saved! Five Year Deal Keeps Farmville-Maker On Facebook

Discussion: VatorNews, All Facebook, L.A. Times Tech Blog, Inside Facebook, VentureBeat, Mashable!, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, paidContent, Inside Social Games and Pulse2

Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
Central To The Facebook-Zynga Deal: Credits

Discussion: Silicon Alley Insider

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Waiting to Pay for Hulu? Wait a While Longer. — A public service announcement for those of you eager to start paying for Hulu: Be patient. You're going to have to keep waiting. — Last month, the Los Angeles Times said Hulu was set to roll out a subscription service “as soon as May 24.”

Discussion: Fast Company, DailyTech, I4U News, AppleInsider, PadGadget, SlashGear, Geek.com, CrunchGear, O'Grady's PowerPage and fierceonlinevideo.com …

Michael Finney / KGO-TV:

Cash not always welcome at Apple stores — PALO ALTO (KGO) — It is said that “cash is king” and that people can buy anything with U.S. currency. But, that is not always true and the red hot Apple iPad is a case in point. It is unbelievable but true. Apple Computer has come a long …

Discussion: ZDNet, Gawker, Lockergnome Blog Network, CrunchGear, GottaBeMobile, TeleRead, Tech Eye and MacNN

Sid Murlidhar / Facebook Blog:

Fast and Free Facebook Mobile Access with 0.facebook.com — Today, we are launching another way for people to access Facebook anytime, anywhere: 0.facebook.com. 0.facebook.com is a new mobile site that includes all of the key features of Facebook but is optimized for speed.

Discussion: TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Inside Facebook, Reuters, VentureBeat and PC World, Thanks:atul

Liz Gannes / GigaOM:

Hot or Not: New Hotmail Is No Knockout — Hotmail, the leading web email provider, has coasted along for years with barely a feature update. But Microsoft is finally planning a major release for later this summer and on Monday provided reporters with a preview.

Discussion: Download Squad, The Windows Blog, Lockergnome Blog Network, Softpedia News and VentureBeat

Paul Boutin / VentureBeat:
New Hotmail takes aim at Gmail's top features

Discussion: Datamation, Computerworld, Microsoft Watch, Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable!, Beyond Binary, Bits, eWeek, CNN, The Business of Search, TNW Microsoft, TechCrunch, BBC, Digits and WebProNews

Chandrashekar Raghavan / Google Enterprise Blog:

Putting email in context with Gmail contextual gadgets — Since launching the Google Apps Marketplace in March, Google Apps administrators have deployed integrated third party apps to more than one million users, and today we're excited to build on this momentum with the launch of a new Gmail API …

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb, Google Watch, VentureBeat, Mashable! and TNW Google

Enigmax / TorrentFreak:

The Pirate Party Becomes The Pirate Bay's New Host — Following an injunction obtained by several major Hollywood movie studios, yesterday Pirate Bay bandwidth provider CB3ROB Ltd. & Co. KG took the decision to take the site offline while it digested the legal implications.

Discussion: Techdirt, CNET News, Mashable!, DSLreports, The Register, PlagiarismToday, Ars Technica, Erictric, p2pnet, Softpedia News, Pulse2 and Geekosystem

Erica Ogg / CNET News:

HP quarterly revenue up 13 percent to $30.8 billion — Hewlett-Packard slightly beat expectations with another positive quarter as revenue climbed 13 percent from a year ago to $30.8 billion. — That amounted to second-quarter 2010 earnings per share of $1.09, up from 86 cents per share from the same quarter a year ago.

Discussion: PC World, ZDNet, Datamation, Tech Trader Daily, Digital Daily, internetnews.com and Boy Genius Report

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

Kindle For Android Hits This Summer — And You Can Buy Books In It — Easily one of my favorite apps for the iPad is the Kindle app. Weird, I know. But in some ways it's superior to the iPad's own iBooks experience. You can sync it across multiple devices, for example.

Thomas Ricker / Engadget:

MacBook refresh gets official with 10-hour battery — Weird, but there it is, the leaked MacBook refresh is now official, on Tuesday, just as we thought. The 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo refresh with NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics and longer 10-hour battery life (up from 7 hours) is sitting up …

Greg Kumparak / MobileCrunch:

Visa officially announces their case that turns your iPhone into a credit card (and we've got pics!) — Around two weeks ago, Visa announced that they'd partnered with a company called DeviceFidelity to build the iPhone case of our dreams: one that would allow us to use our iPhone as a credit card …

Discussion: Computerworld, SlashGear, Techi.com, Visa Corporate, PC World, Obsessable, Geeky-Gadgets, iPhone Buzz, MacRumors, Engadget, Gadget Lab, Edible Apple and I4U News

Ryan Singel / Epicenter:

Facebook to Launch “Simplistic” Privacy Choices Soon — Reacting to the latest privacy backlash, Facebook will be rolling out new “simplistic” privacy options for its users in the coming weeks, according to Facebook head of public policy Tim Sparapani. — “Now we've heard from our users …

Discussion: VentureBeat, Guardian and Mashable!

Ryan Tate / Gawker:

Steve Jobs Is Opening Up Apple One Email at a Time — If there's one enduring lesson I took away from my late-night argument with Steve Jobs, it's that Apple's relationship with the public is undergoing a quiet revolution. Are we about to see a new, more open Apple?

Discussion: Gizmodo, Apple Gazette and Media Decoder

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries / Digits:

Facebook Crosses the 500-Million Threshold, ComScore Says — Facebook crossed the 500-million-visitor mark for the first time in April, according to market-research firm comScore — providing some positive news for the social-networking site amid criticism over its privacy policies.

Discussion: Boy Genius Report, I4U News and Free People Search …

Robin Wauters / TechCrunch Europe:

Shazam shares big numbers: 75 million users, over 1 billion songs identified — Mobile music recognition and discovery startup Shazam this afternoon revealed that it has grown its user base from 50 million to 75 million members in the last six months. — Stunningly, the company …

Discussion: paidContent, Music Ally, All About Symbian and Mashable!

Kim Zetter / Threat Level:

LifeLock CEO's Identity Stolen 13 Times — Apparently, when you publish your Social Security number prominently on your website and billboards, people take it as an invitation to steal your identity. — LifeLock CEO Todd Davis, whose number is displayed in the company's ubiquitous advertisements, has by now learned that lesson.

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

Spotify Halves Subscription Cost As Competitors Gather — Spotify is slashing the cost of its advert-free music streaming in Europe, in a bid to win more paying customers besides just mobile users. It comes in two new tariffs Spotify's introducing... —Spotify Unlimited …

Discussion: Digits, Spotify, The Register, Fast Company, Tech Eye, THINQ.co.uk, Download Squad, TechCrunch Europe, blogs.ft.com, Telegraph, T3.com News and Ewan Spence's All New Musings

Archived Page Info:

This is a snapshot of Techmeme at 6:25 PM ET, May 18, 2010.

View the current page or another snapshot:

Techmeme Sponsor Posts:

Meta:

Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few — Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.

Tribe AI:

Build AI products that matter — Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact. We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.

Zoho:

5 common accounting mistakes — This is a guest post by Yaali Bizappln Solutions. A lot of businesses manage their customers and finances on separate platforms. This disconnect often leads to missed invoices …

Hamming: