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Buzz Out Loud 754: Molly.wood, here I come!

ICANN approves its plan to totally overhaul the Internet domain structure, but all we can do is make fun of the name "Winklevoss." Hee. "Winklevoss." Also today, Microsoft wants to shut off your gadgets from afar (or at least, their patent filing suggests that they do), the Samsung Instinct is totally the new iPhone, and torrent freaks think JJ Abrams' new show, Fringe, will be a hit. Phew! Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 754

Judge Ends Facebooks Feud With ConnectU http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/judge-ends-facebooks-feud-with-connectu/

Facebook suspends app that permitted … Read more

Court enforces Facebook-ConnectU settlement

A U.S. District Court judge has decided to enforce the settlement that Facebook and would-be rival ConnectU signed in February, rejecting the ConnectU founders' claims of fraud.

The legal battle between the two social-networking sites has gone on since 2004, when ConnectU founders Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra initially sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and several other early employees for allegedly stealing ConnectU's code and business plan while they were all students at Harvard. Facebook countersued in 2005, claiming that ConnectU had hacked into its user database to mine e-mail addresses.

Both parties must still show … Read more

Facebook suspends app that permitted peephole

Vancouver-based computer technician Byron Ng, who likes to prod social networks for holes and other errors, stumbled across a way to learn more about Facebook users than you're supposed to be able to--prompting Facebook to suspend the Top Friends application late on Wednesday.

Until Facebook suspended the Top Friends app, created by Slide, anyone could browse partial profiles of anyone else on Facebook who had added Top Friends to their page. CNET News.com confirmed that the security hole exposed the birthdays, gender, and relationship status of strangers, including Facebook executives, the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, and … Read more

Facebook adds to the chatter with Mini-Feed comments

Facebook will soon be making it possible for members to leave comments on each others' "mini-feeds" of activity, according to an announcement Wednesday from the social network. The development is slated to go live later on Wednesday. In other words, it's a very meta turn. Facebook members will now be able to comment on the announcement of a posted item in addition to the posted item itself.

Currently, Facebook allows members to comment on one another's "walls," as well as on individual photos, posted items, videos, and other pieces of media that they share … Read more

News.com Daily Podcast: What Symbian buy means for Microsoft, Google, and consumers

Nokia announced today that it will buy Symbian for about $410 million and form a consortium of hardware and software makers to push the development of open-source mobile software. CNET News.com reporter Tom Krazit joins me in the podcast studio to talk about what the new foundation will mean for competing operating systems and for customers.

Also, ICANN is considering a new system of domain names Thursday; Virgin Mobile targets the U.S. market with a new, flat-rate calling plan; and a judge has kicked the public out of a hearing between Facebook and ConnectU, overruling objections from three … Read more

Memeo launches Share for sending photos to grandma

Tuesday morning software company Memeo launched a new product called Share. Aimed at people who don't use photo- or video-sharing sites, Share lets you take what you've captured on your digital camera and beam it to friends and family members without clogging up their e-mail in-boxes with full-resolution shots.

The product is not aimed at the Flickr crowd, but instead at people who want to create small circles of people to share their shots with. That's not to say there's not a social element, since it can be configured to automatically upload your shots to Facebook. … Read more

MySpace? Naw, keep it to yourself!

Throughout the years, I've received countless invitations to join MySpace. Somehow, I never wanted to join. I have nothing against social network sites as I even have an account on Facebook. However, there's this bad feeling about MySpace when I look at the site. Call me a weirdo if you want, but what happened yesterday is my tangible explanation to all the rejections I've made.

At least since last Friday (possible earlier), MySpace put up a Web page to invite people to a "BlackCurtain" screening of the upcoming movie Wanted at AMC Metreon in downtown … Read more

Judge sets Facebook hearing status to 'private'--hmm

Kicking the public out of a courtroom is an option that should be used rarely, and extremely judiciously, which is what makes U.S. District Judge James Ware's decision Monday disappointing.

Ware shuttered the doors to a San Jose, Calif., hearing pitting Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, probably the world's youngest self-made billionaire, against Harvard University classmates who claim Zuckerberg stole ideas and source code from a similar venture called ConnectU. Ware took this extraordinary step without notice, without a formal request from either side, and without even specifying why it was necessary.

This is at odds with the … Read more

Scaling fast-growing Facebook

In this video interview, Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook, talks with about managing Facebook's hypergrowth. Heiliger is a rock star infrastructure geek. He was the CTO of Global Crossing at age 23, worked at Marc Andreessen's Loudcloud and spent time as the head of Web engineering at Walmart.com.

During the interview, Heiliger said that Facebook has more than 10,000 servers and leverages mostly open-source software across a distributed architecture, with thousands of MySQL instances. "It's almost a new challenge every day," Heiliger said regarding the challenges of keeping up … Read more