Best Damn News Headlines CBS BUYS online media company CNET for $1.8bill ReadBurner Partners with Netvibes - Drew talks about it Ask (IACI) Buys Dictionary.com for $100m Verizon have announced plans to adopt an open source platform for their phones but will be backing Linux over google's android MySpace fake user Lori drew, who allegedly helped create a fake MySpace account to contact neighbour Megan Meier who thought she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans which ended up in the hanging death of Megan has officially been charged with "one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorisation to obtain information to inflict emotional distress." Public pressure (and what they call potential copyright infringement) has forced the folks at Sega to pull a marketing website/video for their new game "Offset the evil" by using a campaign that resembled the My Little Pony character. As a result of the backlash they decided "we thought it would be a good time to take it down and move the campaign onto the next stage." Yahoo launched its new SearchMonkey platform for developers to add extra features link ratings, add images like a facebook photo aimed at improving the user experience, kickstarting it with the SearchMonkey developer Challenge awarding up to $10,000 for the top apps. These "enhanced results" will apparently replace the current search results. Finally, Google is continuing to roll out (although there is a waiting list) FriendConnect with the aim of integrating social features like blogging and feedback forms without requiring the skills of a developer. On the other end MySpace, Yahoo and Ebay have jumped on to the OpenID option. One platform not accepting of the Google initiative is Facebook...for his opinion on such issues... Schmidt faced Facedbook bans Google Friend Connect: Facebook is all about openness and data portability, as long as that doesn t involve openness or portability of data, it seems. Today they wrote a long 7 paragraph blog post to get a single point across: Facebook has banned Google s Friend Connect access to the Facebook API. They claim that Google's use of the data goes against their policies and wants to work with Google to cometo an agreement, however Facebook's application distributes their info in a similar fashion. Iris on the Virus Safari 'carpet bombing' vulnerability. Apple says 'meh' Tech Tips Around the World Wide Web While Google is starting to blur certain images on their street view option here in the US, they're launching street view in the EU amid privacy concerns. According to one source in France "Unlike in the US, we are mostly beautiful people but we do have some uglies. Generally we like to hide the uglies but with something like this Google streetview, it will be difficult". Tech this out - Comcast has acquired Plaxo - ComScore data has Google jumping to the head of the class by overtaking Yahoo as the most popular website in the US as determined by the number of unique monthly visitors. - Amazon is taking some interest in Animoto, the very cool music video creator - Flash 10 has been made available for public testing Tech Biffo I can't decide who the biffo is between, Myspace and the "Spam Kings" or the Spam King to Spam King for the Spam King title. Self proclaimed "Spam King" Sanford Wallace plus another self-proclaimed "Spam King" Walter Rines has been ordered to pay $230 million to MySpace for hijacking other people's MySpace pages or setting up their own and sending over 700,000 junk messages to members. Meanwhile another self-proclaimed "Spam King" Scott Richter is being pursued by the News Corp giant. Site of the Week www.offsettheevil.com
