A month ago, Jason Calacanis went on a rant about why everyone should boycott comScore . He felt they were using sketchy tactics to bully people into their pay-to-play model for measuring web analytics. He also noted that their free competitors like Quantcast, Google, and Compete would soon eat their...

Facebook has acquired its third company, Malaysian startup Octazen Solutions . Facebook says this is largely a talent acquisition, according to GigaOm . Octazen has a slightly different story on their home page, saying Facebook acquired “most of the company’s assets and to employ those assets...

For at least the past hour, Netflix has been down. Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge deal since as they note, “ Our shipping centers are continuing to send and receive DVDs , so your movies will be processed as usual. ” But, increasingly , Netflix is becoming a streaming video service....

As we noted this morning, Google isn’t wasting any time in responding to user criticism about Buzz.  Now they’ve rolled out another set of changes to further address Buzz’s privacy issues. The biggest change involves the automatic follow system: it’s now being switched to a...

Could IBM be prepping more of its own location-aware technology and devices? According to a recent patent filing, it looks like it. On Thursday, Big Blue filed for a patent for a “method and system for location-aware authorization.” The inventors appear to be IBM engineers based in Rome,...

This looks really, really bad. An avid Facebook user named Harman Bajwa says that his Facebook vanity Url – Facebook.com/Harman – was unceremoniously revoked yesterday for violating Facebook’s policies. His new Facebook URL is the much less memorable facebook.com/profile.php?id=538612932...

Twitter has just implemented a change that may well have a massive impact on the service. The company has revamped its highly controversial Suggested User List, in favor of a list of Suggestions based on topic. That’s big news in and of itself (before Twitter’s suggestions were not categorized),...

MySpace has cut three senior tech executives from its staff, we’ve learned. We’re hearing that those affected are VP of Media & Entertainment Technology Kevin Freund, VP of Engineering Lucas Buck (who writes on his LinkedIn page that he was one of the original programmers who built MySpace),...

Big changes are coming to Facebook Platform. Today, Facebook is granting developers on Platform the ability to request (or require) users to hand over their email addresses so they they can send periodic messages directly to users. This doesn’t come as a surprise: Facebook first talked about these...

Pixelpipe, the service that lets you syndicate text, audio, video and image files to 120 different social networks, blogs and sites, has upgraded its Android app with one click publishing from the mobile devices’ camera and automatic publishing. The startup previously upgraded its app to work...

This guest post was written by Martin Seibert , a German Internet media consultant. Google Wave is a hot topic at the moment. The ambitious group collaboration and micro-messaging platform started rolling out in beta via an initial batch of 100,000 invitations two months ago. Many people still want...

I love watching excellence in motion. Watching Fred Astaire dance, reading a poem by Robert Frost, watching Michael Jordan play ball, Tiger Woods play golf or opening new products that have the ability to bring a smile to my face. They all share one thing, these folks make it look so easy. The result...