Facebook is getting wise to something MySpace has known from the start - users love vanity URLs. When you tell someone your MySpace page, you just say myspace.com/[user/brand/band/etc.] (I'm myspace.com/mikearrington). On Facebook it has always been more difficult. My profile isn't Facebook.com/michaelarrington, it's facebook.com/profile.php?id=500065899. Not so catchy, and the result is people need to do searches to find you. MySpace vanity URLs are popular for the same reason people like domain names instead of just typing in IP addresses.

via washingtonpost.com

A federal appeals court has rejected Yahoo Inc.'s bid to move a trademark lawsuit filed by American Airlines from Texas to Yahoo's home turf of Northern California. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo wanted the case transferred because its sponsored search agreement says that any disputes be settled by courts there or another site picked by the company. But a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled Wednesday that the contract clause didn't apply to the trademark claim made by American.

via chron.com

Facebook is getting wise to something MySpace has known from the start - users love vanity URLs. When you tell someone your MySpace page, you just say myspace.com/[user/brand/band/etc.] (I’m myspace.com/mikearrington). On Facebook it has always been more difficult. My profile isn’t Facebook.com/michaelarrington, it’s facebook.com/profile.php?id=500065899. Not so catchy, and the result is people need to do searches to find you. MySpace vanity URLs are popular for the same reason people like domain names instead of just typing in IP addresses.

via techcrunch.com

Thunder Bay, ON -- The City of Thunder Bay and the Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission (CEDC) today launched new user-friendly websites and the online feature, BizPaL, a partnership with Industry Canada and ServiceOntario. The websites will make it easier for residents, visitors, businesses and investors to access information with new designs, revised content, easy to navigate pages and convenient features. The new sites offer many features not previously available such as online videos, flash photo galleries and accessibility options.

via netnewsledger.com

For the tall, beautiful, 24-year-old Colbie Caillat, the road to stardom seemed to open effortlessly for her. In the span of a year, she went from being an aspiring singer-songwriter to gaining national recognition. It all began with the social networking Web site, MySpace, where anyone can create a personal profile and post original music for public scrutiny and approval. After a friend thought Caillat's music should be exposed online, she made Caillat a page and posted a few of her songs. In eight months, Colbie Caillat was the No. 1 unsigned artist on MySpace.

via cmt.com

An employee of TRU’s Open Learning division is leaving her position at the end of the month to pursue a full-time project aimed at helping high school students find the best university for their needs. Angela Ferguson, student recruitment co-ordinator for Open Learning, will be retiring from her position to launch www.YouKnowVersity.com, a university database she created to make finding the right post-secondary institution for a student’s needs easier.

via theomega.ca

The licensing dispute that has led YouTube to begin taking down thousands of music videos could spread to MySpace, industry experts fear. YouTube has already begun deleting popular tracks from its site despite "positive" talks with the Performing Rights Society (PRS), the governing body that collects royalties for artists, aimed at solving the row yesterday afternoon.
But there are now concerns that the financial demands made by PRS may force other music streaming websites – which allow users to listen to tracks online without paying to download the songs – to close down.

via telegraph.co.uk

Facebook’s Verified Apps program, first announced in Summer 2008, is a way for trusted application developers to be separated from the pack. But the program is yet to launch, and perceived delays and a lack of communication by Facebook is making some developers who signed up for the program a little antsy. The details of the program were announced in November. Developers are charged $375 to apply to the program, and must continue to pay the fee each year. I called it a protection racket.

via techcrunch.com

It seems Google is still finding it difficult to stay away from controversy. If it was the Gmail outage and the Search results bug last month, it is the turn of Google Docs in March. Apparently, the company's famous online word processing service, Google Docs was hit by a security bug that caused private documents being shared with unauthorized users. This was caused by a flaw in the system, which caused the documents to be made accessible to users who were not supposed to see it. The flaw has now been fixed, according to Google.

via techtree.com

In January, Yahoo increased the number of searches performed on its Japanese sites by 13 percent year-over-year, and continued to hold the top spot with a 51.3 percent share of searches conducted in Japan, according to market research firm comScore. Google, which is the No.1 search firm in the U.S. by a long shot, saw its search share in Japan slip to 38.2 percent, from 39 percent in September. Total searches on Google sites in Japan increased 5 percent year-over-year in January.

via blogs.reuters.com

Do you remember all the recent buzz surrounding Amazon launching the second version of Kindle, its reading device? Of course when some new device is launched to the market accompanied with buzz like this, it will inevitably get attention from potential consumers and even those of us who don’t plan any expenses on new gadgets in the near future will still be interested enough and some willing to possess the gadget sooner or later fascinated by all the coverage the device gets from traditional media and the blogosphere.

via profy.com

At the end of January, the three Hungarian mobile operators had 508,000 mobile internet subscribers and there were 424,000 SIM cards active in data transmission over the past three months, the first mobile internet flash report published by the National Communications Authority of Hungary (NHH) has revealed. According to the report, at the end of December, when Pannon, T-Mobile and Vodafone had 12.224 million subscribers in all, the number of those also with mobile internet subscription totalled 494,000.

via cellular-news.com

MySpace, the News Corp.-owned social networking site, is off to a rough year. Growth has slowed (the number of U.S. visitors has hovered around 75 million for the last seven months), top talent is leaving the company, and like other media companies, it is feeling the effects of the slowing economy: a MySpace executive this week told FORTUNE that ad sales dipped in January and February.
This all comes after a disappointing 2008, in which analysts estimate MySpace posted revenue of about $600 million - far short of the $1 billion target set by its parent company.

via money.cnn.com

Facebook on Wednesday introduced a redesigned user home page and new public profiles for celebrities and organizations in a move widely seen as an attempt to compete with the real-time social messaging offered by Twitter. In a blog post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that the changes were necessary because as Facebook has become a conduit for more and more information, the need to find relevant and recent information has grown.

via informationweek.com

Google is now serving expandable display ads onto partner websites in its AdSense content network. But it's taking the tasteful route. Unlike so many others, these expandable ads won't consume your browser unless you ask them to. With a blog post late yesterday afternoon, the Mountain View Chocolate Factory introduced expandable ads that only expand if web surfers actually click on them. If you merely visit a page or mouse over an ad, expansion is avoided. Google also limits the size of the expansion. Ads won’t grow to more than twice their width or height.

via theregister.co.uk