Techmeme: Facebook is Japan's LinkedIn (Paul McMahon/TokyoDev)

2:30 PM ET, January 23, 2011

Top Items:

Vlad Savov / Engadget:

Motorola Xoom launching February 17th at Best Buy (update: priced at $700) — When we stumbled upon an $800 price for the Motorola Xoom yesterday, our instinctive reaction was to leap forward to the next obvious question: when? Well, that call has now been answered by an internal Best Buy document that's …

Discussion: MobileWhack.com, Droid Life, Go Rumors, MAGGadget, AndroidOS.in, Techie Buzz, Androinica, Electronista, PhoneNews.com, The Next Web and Android Central

Vivek Wadhwa / TechCrunch:

Why I Don't Buy the Quora Hype — Let me start with a disclaimer: I am not writing this in my capacity as a university professor or researcher; I don't claim to be an expert on social networking; and I will be happy to be proven wrong—I have no vested interest in the success or failure of Quora.

Discussion: SAI

semilshah's posterous:

A Quick Response to @vwadhwa Post on Quora — There are some interesting nuggets in Vivek Wadhwa's post on TechCrunch today about Quora. Let me say first that he's right to highlight the holes in the voting incentive structure, but other than that, here are some reactions to why many of his assertions …

Discussion: @christinelu

Frederic Lardinois / NewsGrange:

Hacker Shows It Doesn't Take $8 Million to Clone Qwiki - Just 321 Lines of HTML Will do the Trick — Qwiki is an app that creates pretty slideshows based on Wikipedia entries. The service won the top award at the last Techcrunch Disrupt conference and just received $8 million in new funding …

Discussion: Pulse2, TechCrunch, ABCNEWS and Mashable!

Josh Ong / AppleInsider:

Apple's new ‘two is better than one’ iPhone ad promotes Verizon, AT&T — Just days after Verizon launched its first iPhone ad, a new TV spot from Apple for the iPhone 4 highlights both Verizon and AT&T with the pitch “two is better than one.” — Set to the iconic Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss …

Discussion: 9 to 5 Mac, TechCrunch, Engadget, MacRumors, Erictric and Electronista

Mark Gurman / 9 to 5 Mac:
Verizon iPhone 4 costs $50 more than AT&T iPhone 4 off contract

Discussion: SAI, Examiner, Apple Headlines, Phones Review, Life On My Mobile and iClarified

Ernesto / TorrentFreak:

The Music Bay: Pirate Bay Crew Instill More Fear Into The Music Industry — For years The Pirate Bay has been a thorn in the side of the music industry, but things could be about to take a turn for the worse. Over the past days rumors of a new project titled “The Music Bay” have been circling …

Discussion: PC Magazine, The Next Web, THINQ.co.uk, Erictric and p2pnet

Leander Kahney / Cult of Mac:

$10K iTunes Winner Hung Up On Apple, Thought It Was a Prank [Exclusive] — Gail Davis of Orpington Kent hung up the phone when Apple called to say she'd won a $10,000 iTunes gift card. She thought it was a prank call. — The winner of the Apple's 10 billionth App download sweepstakes nearly …

Discussion: CNET News, IntoMobile and Guardian

Trudy Muller / Apple:
Apple's App Store Downloads Top 10 Billion

Martin Bryant / The Next Web:

How much traffic can a Google Doodle drive to your site? Nearly 1/4 million uniques in a day. — Google's Doodles - the fun pieces of art that Google replaces its logo with for special occasions - are immensely popular with the public, but how much traffic do they actually drive?

Paul McMahon / TokyoDev:

Facebook is Japan's LinkedIn — A couple of weeks back, an article Facebook Wins Relatively Few Friends in Japan made its rounds. As usual, Facebook is compared to the big three Japanese SNS: mixi, Gree, and Mobage-town. However, Gree and Mobage-town market themselves more as social gaming platforms …

Matt McGee / Search Engine Land:

Google May Let You Blacklist Domains To Fight Spam — Ready for do-it-yourself spam fighting? Google has discussed giving searchers the ability to remove domains from its search results. That's according to Matt Cutts, Google's top spam fighter, who's been posting frequently …

Discussion: WebProNews, eWeek and The Atlantic Online

Arik Hesseldahl / NewEnterprise:

Apple Taps Former Navy Information Warrior for Global Director of Security — Apple has tapped security expert and author David Rice to be its director of global security, three sources who know Rice have confirmed to me. He's expected to start at Apple in March. Apple hasn't returned calls seeking comment.

Discussion: TiPb, TUAW, Apple Headlines, Electronista and iClarified

Zee / The Next Web:

Sean Parker: The Social Network is a complete work of fiction — Sean Parker and Paulo Coelho's two man panel at DLD raised a number of interesting points about the future of content but it was Coelho's question to Parker on his thoughts on the The Social Network, that grabbed everyone's attention.

Discussion: Mashable! and TechCrunch Europe

Liz Gannes / NetworkEffect:

Is Larry Page the Consummate Anti-Social CEO? — Google's new CEO isn't much for the social Web. If he has a presence on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, it was created with deep privacy settings or a fake name. I couldn't even find a fleshed-out Google profile for Larry Page.

Discussion: TechCrunch

Brian Womack / Bloomberg:
Google Turns to Co-Founder to Step Up Attack on Facebook

Discussion: NASDAQ.com, Reuters and Wall Street Journal

Archived Page Info:

This is a snapshot of Techmeme at 2:30 PM ET, January 23, 2011.

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:

CIO challenge 5: Can we find an effective solution that also minimizes operational costs? — Welcome to the next and final installment of our CIO series! After what feels like a thousand cups of coffee …

Hamming: