Profy

Yesterday the FriendFeed team announced integration with instant messaging services that allows users to send updates to FriendFeed right from the IM dialogue and also see and reply to new comments on their posts and be updated when new items are posted by friends. At this stage the FriendFeed IM only works with Google Talk or other Jabber-based IMs but knowing how busy FriendFeed team usually is I'd expect other IM protocols to be added in the near future.

What I particularly like is that FriendFeed allows you to choose exactly how busy you want the chat window to become because of the notification settings available. For example, you can choose to only get notified when someone comments on one of your posts or you can choose a larger number of updates to be notified when any of your feeds gets updated (the home feed or the one formed by a certain list of friends)...

There are certain unchallengeable brands in music industry that are nearly impossible to compete with. For example, in digital music players it is iPod while in indie music distribution and self-promotion of independent music bands it is no doubt MySpace. And it looks like News Corp has an idea that combining the two could be a perfect combination for a victory - the only thing is that the iPod should not be manufactured by Apple.

The reason for me thinking so is that yesterday at the Web 2...

It looks like the world financial crisis is providing us tons of new materials to cover with companies inventing new and more promising ways to monetize their services looking for additional revenue sources. The latest examples included an interesting idea by Calgoo to monetize online calendars via the so-called in-calendar marketing and Ma.gnolia trying to charge users for the social bookmarking service. Today it is LiveJournal with an interesting new idea that will probably change the way we think about subscription-based revenue models for web companies...

I actually thought it was quite predictable. It was way too obvious that Yahoo behaved too aggressive trying to resist the unsolicited acquisition by Microsoft all the way after the software giant offered a generous $37 per share earlier this year. In its attempts to stay independent Yahoo tried just about everything, including even partnership with its main competitor in the web search field - Google...

The largest classifieds website Craigslist has been known for a huge and popular "erotic services" section where prostitutes and various sex-related businesses can post advertisements for their services on the site for free and without any obstacles. Earlier today Craigslist has agreed with 40 state attorney generals to take measures intended to limit sexually explicit ads posted by its users.

Earlier this year the attorney general of Connecticut sent a letter to Craigslist on behalf of 40 states. In the letter he demanded that Craigslist removes such ads from the site and enforce some rules to prevent their postings in the future...

There's an interesting question raised on TechDirt today - the question of online news and their naturally free distribution. The item arrives as a response to a post on the UK Telegraph blog where Shane Richmond addresses the complains of various newspaper executives worried about the fact that they can not charge for access to their news online because other publications (blogs and various news aggregating sites included) offer news for free - often much faster than newspapers manage to serve the same piece of news...

It looks like Google is facing yet another patent lawsuit - this time involving a huge amount of money, the technology that is the key to Google's money-making machine and a team of Russian developers. The Russian company "Era Vodoleya" (translated into English as "The Age of Aquarius") claims that they patented the technology involved in contextual advertising a year before Google began using this technology.

The CEO of the Russian company told to the Russian CNews branch (in Russian) that the technology of displaying ads related to content of a web page was invented by his company back in 1998...

Russia is an interesting country when it comes to the top level domains that the nation uses. Initially Soviet Union was assigned .su domain but soon after that the Soviet Union itself went into oblivion and Russia was granted a separate domain zone of its own - .ru this time.

For what I've seen here people never really minded using both .su and .ru domains here in Russia (even without Soviet Union) and when one of the zones is not available for a desired domain name, people simply choose the second one. I still think this situation with dual zones used as equal (with some preference for ...

This morning Google has announced on the official blog that it will not proceed with the advertising deal with Yahoo. This deal was supposed to help Yahoo withstand the acquisition by Microsoft by offering it a stable revenue stream to survive and support itself. The revenue was supposed to be generated by Yahoo showing Google ads on its sites.

But of course from the very beginning it was quite evident that the deal would raise questions from antitrust authorities and that was exactly what happened...