Techmeme: Facebook Seeks Acquisitions to Fend Off Google (Brian Womack/Bloomberg)

3:35 PM ET, August 23, 2011

Top Items:

Making It Easier to Share With Who You Want — Today we're announcing a bunch of improvements that make it easier to share posts, photos, tags and other content with exactly the people you want. You have told us that “who can see this?” could be clearer across Facebook …

Discussion: Search Engine Land, ReadWriteWeb, Friending Facebook Blog, CNET News, Inside Facebook, Associated Press, BBC, Bits, Scobleizer, Wall Street Journal and Lifehacker

Matt Rosoff / The Business Insider:

Facebook Rolls Out Major, Sweeping Privacy Changes — Facebook is making a sweeping set of changes to its privacy and sharing policies that will give users much more control over the information they share and who they share it with. — See our guided tour of the changes→

Discussion: Mashable!, All Facebook, Guardian and NBC Bay Area

Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:

Facebook's Massive Kitchen Sink Update: Photo Tag Approvals And So Much More — Hell has frozen over, pigs have flown, and it's now possible to approve photos you've been tagged in on Facebook before they show up in your profile. — Pause. Take a drink if you need to.

Discussion: VentureBeat, All Facebook, AllThingsD, GigaOM and @r

Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:

Samsung cites Stanley Kubrick's ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ movie as prior art against iPad design patent — Late last night, Samsung filed its opposition brief to Apple's motion for a preliminary injunction in the United States. The main part of Samsung's opposition brief has not yet entered …

Discussion: Gizmodo, 9to5Mac, MacRumors, paidContent, AllThingsD, Engadget, CNET News, 9to5Google, The Register, iLounge, Pulse2, GottaBeMobile, TUAW, Macgasm, MacDailyNews, Electronista, MacStories and The Next Web

Chris Smith / TechRadar: Samsung: Kubrick invented tablets, not Apple

Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:

Source: The iPhone 5 Will Indeed Be A Dual-Mode CDMA / GSM ‘World Phone’ — The upcoming iPhone 5 will almost certainly be a single phone that supports multiple networks, namely CDMA (such as the one used by Verizon or Sprint in the United States) as well as GSM (which is used by AT&T and T-Mobile in the U.S.).

Reuters:

Exclusive: Apple suppliers building cheaper, 8GB iPhone 4 — (Reuters) - Asian suppliers to Apple Inc have begun manufacturing a lower priced version of its hot-selling iPhone 4 with a smaller 8 gigabyte flash drive, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Brian Womack / Bloomberg:

Facebook Seeks Acquisitions to Fend Off Google — Facebook Inc., the world's largest social network, is planning acquisitions that will improve site design, keep its service reliable and advance mobile features to stave off competition from Google Inc. (GOOG) and Twitter Inc.

Discussion: VatorNews, Search Engine Land, Digits, Friending Facebook Blog, The Business Insider, MediaPost, The Next Web, NBC Bay Area, Pulse2 and The Register

David Daw / PC World:

Huh? TouchPads Now Selling for Almost $300 on eBay — TouchPads selling for $300 on eBay.The TouchPad may be DOA thanks to HP's recent decision to drop WebOS but you wouldn't know it from the prices the tablet fetches on eBay. After fire sales over the weekend dropped the price …

Discussion: Computerworld and Hack N Mod

Nathan Olivarez-Giles / L.A. Times Tech Blog:
HP Touchpad: HP promises to keep them coming until they run out

Discussion: TechCrunch, GMSV, CNN, Computerworld, PC World, Computerworld UK's News and Tools

Arik Hesseldahl / AllThingsD:
How Much Did HP Lose on the TouchPad? Here's a Good Guess.

Discussion: Computerworld, Pulse2, Between the Lines Blog, Guardian, Inquirer and Neowin.net

Matthew Humphries / Geek.com:

China airs documentary proving military university is hacking U.S. targets — For a long time now there has been suspicion that China is a hotbed of hacking activity either endorsed or ignored by the government and targeting foreign individuals, companies, and even governments.

Discussion: Epoch Times, F-Secure Antivirus …, ZDNet, Neowin.net, Softpedia News and DailyTech

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

Android (Finally) Taking Steps Towards WebKit And Chromium — Why isn't Chrome a part of Android? It's a question as old as time itself. Or at least a few years old. But given that the same company, Google, makes both products, it never made much sense. Now they're finally taking steps to resolve this.

Discussion: lists.webkit.org Mailing Lists, CNET News, SiliconANGLE, Macgasm, Peter Beverloo, Softpedia News and GottaBeMobile

Fred / A VC:

Identity, Authentication, and Provisioning Them Online — Christina jotted down some thoughts on indentity on a flight to SF and I read them this morning. In her post, she references Ev's excellent post on the same topic from a while back. So I went on a bike ride as the sun rose …

Christian Zibreg / 9to5Mac:

Apple makes up its mind: iPad 3 displays to be supplied by LG Display, Samsung and Sharp — Following an enduring period of quality-testing and trial runs, Apple has finally chosen not one, not two, but three suppliers of LCD panels for iPad 3. The winners are LG Display …

Discussion: Computerworld, DigiTimes, iLounge, AppleInsider, iClarified and Softpedia News

Matt McGee / Search Engine Land:

Here's What Twitter Should Do To Make Photo Galleries More Useful — I like the new user photo galleries that Twitter started rolling out yesterday. They'll make photo search and discovery much easier, especially for those of us who've scattered our photo uploads across TwitPic, yFrog, Mobypicture and other photo services.

Discussion: CNET News, The Atlantic Online, PC World, Small Business Search … and FierceMobileContent

Amir Efrati / Wall Street Journal:

Geeks Beat Jocks as Bar Fight Breaks Out Over Control of the TV — Fans Muscle Into Sports Bars to Watch Pro Videogamers Do Battle on the Tube — SAN FRANCISCO—One Sunday afternoon last month, a hundred boisterous patrons crowded into Mad Dog in the Fog, a British sports bar here, to watch a live broadcast.

Amar Toor / Engadget:

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet now available for order, priced at $500 and up — It's been a while coming, but Lenovo's ThinkPad tablet has finally made its way to market. As expected, the line of Honeycomb slates is now available for order on the company's product page, with the 16GB …

Discussion: Computerworld, Digital Trends, AndroidGuys, LAPTOP Magazine, Wired, ZDNet, TechCrunch, GottaBeMobile, Liliputing, Mashable!, Ubergizmo, Softpedia News and Hardware 2.0 Blog

Reuters:

Exclusive: ComScore takes users' credit card numbers: lawsuit — (Reuters) - Online tracking service comScore Inc siphons confidential data including passwords, credit card numbers and Social Security numbers from unsuspecting users, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday.

Mark Striebeck / Google+:

A first, tiny step: view recent Google+ posts in the Gmail people widget! — You can now see the most recent Google+ post that the sender of the email shared with you in the Gmail people widget - see screenshot below. — BTW: +Bella Kazwell is a tech lead on the Gmail team and +Steven Bills …

Discussion: PC World, eWeek, Techland and Softpedia News

Andrew Hampp / AdAge:

Revamped MySpace Will Have iTunes, Spotify and Vevo in Its Crosshairs — New Marketing Chief Explains Site's New Direction Under Specific Media, Talks Forthcoming Ad Campaign — Forget Facebook and Twitter. When MySpace relaunches later this year under new corporate parent Specific Media …

Jay Yarow / The Business Insider:

Sprint Is Getting The iPhone 5 — WSJ — Sprint is getting the iPhone 5, according to new report from the Wall Street Journal. — The report isn't online yet, but SAI commenter/contributor/analyst Sammy The Walrus has tweeted it out, and Bloomberg just sent out an alert as well.

Discussion: @sammywalrusiv and @dkberman

Jim Dalrymple / The Loop:

United Airlines deploys 11,000 iPads to pilots — United on Tuesday said it is converting its flight decks to be completely paperless and will deploy 11,000 iPads to all United and Continental pilots. — The iPads will replace paper flight manuals and things like aeronautical navigational charts …

Discussion: PR Newswire, GigaOM, Computerworld, SplatF, CNET News, MacNN, TUAW, MacRumors, Between the Lines Blog, Mashable! and The Next Web, Thanks:theloop1

Roger Cheng / CNET News:

Dish unveils plans for mobile network — The allure of 4G wireless service has drawn in a number of new players, including satellite-TV provider Dish Network. — Dish on Monday applied for a waiver to the Federal Communications Commission that would allow it to used its recently acquired spectrum …

Discussion: FierceWireless, DSLreports and dailywireless.org

Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:

Forkly Launches to Discover Food You'll Like the Taste Of — Forkly is a beautiful new iPhone app that helps you discover new restaurants you might like and recommends dishes once you're at restaurants, based on your individual taste. Built by former leaders of location based social network Brightkite …

Discussion: MediaPost, Digital Trends and Forkly Blog

Alexander Vaughn / App Advice:

Apple Now Streaming Red Hot Chili Peppers' Upcoming Album In iTunes - First Sign Of More To Come? — Rumors of a “Spotify-like” iTunes in the cloud have been going around for years before Apple finally pre-launched iCloud and the possibility to re-download previously purchased songs.

Discussion: TUAW

Robert Nyman / Mozilla Hacks:

Introducing WebAPI — Mozilla would like to introduce WebAPI with the goal to provide a basic HTML5 phone experience within 3 to 6 months. — The current situation — Where we are today, there's a clear distinction between the Open Web and native APIs and how things have to be built.

Discussion: Softpedia News

Matt Rosoff / The Business Insider:

This Is What Google REALLY Meant By “Don't Be Evil” — Google has been throwing its weight around and pissing a lot of people off. — It allegedly leaned on Motorola not to use a competing location-detecting service from Skyhook. Then it turned around and dropped $12.5 billion on Motorola …

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:

Sony redesigns its PlayStation Home virtual world as a social game hub — Hoping to jump on a trend, Sony is planning to launch a redesign of its PlayStation Home virtual world, making it into a hub for social games. — PlayStation Home launched in 2008 for the PlayStation 3 and it has more than 23 million registered users.

Discussion: Digital Trends, Kotaku, Ubergizmo, TechRadar.com, Massively and VG247

Matt Marshall / VentureBeat:

Salesforce.com's Chuck Ganapathi joins Accel Partners — to build the next Salesforce.com — Chuck Ganapathi, the man who created Salesforce.com's Chatter, the company's largest product development effort ever, has left to join Accel Partners as Entrepreneur in Residence.

Discussion: TechCrunch

Brad Feld / Feld Thoughts:

Foundry Group Invests In MakerBot Industries — Today we announced that we've led a $10m round for MakerBot Industries and I've joined the board. I'm super excited to be working with Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, Zach Smith, and the rest of the MakerBot gang to create consumer-grade 3D printers.

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb

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