Consumer content

I was at the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., Tuesday night for the FBFund event, where the company bequeathed five $250,000 awards to top Facebook apps from a group of 25 finalists (who each had already won $25,000). Most of the finalist apps were impressive. I talked to the creators of several of them and came up with a few favorites.

But first, Facebook's own winners:

GroupCard, which is a really sweet app that lets you create group greeting cards for your friends. Signers can also chip money in for gifts, and the cards can be … Read more

Wikipedia functionality has returned for Brits after the country's Internet watchdog reversed its decision to prevent users in that country from visiting a Wikipedia page containing an image of a naked child.

The Internet Watch Foundation had taken exception with a page dedicated to a 1976 album by rock band The Scorpions. The cover of that album--called Virgin Killer--includes the image of a prepubescent girl, which the group deemed a "potentially illegal indecent image," landing Wikipedia on the group's blacklist.

As a result, Internet service providers in the U.K. began filtering access to all pages … Read more

Apple is an Internet retailer and Netflix is a Web video rental service, but Hollywood treats them as if they are potential competitors to TV broadcasters.

In the past two weeks, customers of iTunes and Netflix's streaming digital-movie service have noticed that a growing number of titles are disappearing from the sites or are scheduled to be removed. MacWorld wrote a story last week about how one of the site's contributors noticed that of the 15 films he bookmarked for future viewing at iTunes, 9 were no longer available. Among the movies that vanished were Charlie Wilson's … Read more

Search start-up Kosmix announced Tuesday that it had raised $20 million in a funding round led by Time Warner.

Among the funding round's participants was former Motorola CEO Ed Zander, who will serve as an adviser to the company. The round, which also included existing investors Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Dag Ventures, brings the Mountain View, Calif.-based company's total funding to $55 million.

The company also announced the beta launch of its search site, which presents specialized topic-centric search results in a "dashboard-style page."

"The site offers a 360-degree view of any … Read more

Google has added a to-do list to Gmail to help users be more productive.

When the new Tasks feature is enabled, a box shows up on top of the Gmail window. In it, users can add, reorder, and delete tasks. It's also possible to assign a due date to each action and even convert e-mails into tasks.

The feature--announced Monday on a company blog--will also run outside of the e-mail program. Adding items is as simple as clicking on a vacant part of the box and typing.

This may sound like a rehash of the many Post-It Note-like … Read more

Rumors coming out of Europe that claim Apple will begin offering unprotected music files from the three largest recording companies on Tuesday are bogus, according to my music-industry sources.

Yes, Apple is in negotiations with the three biggest music labels, Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group about acquiring licenses to sell music free of digital rights management software.

No, none of the deals is final as of Monday afternoon and one source told me it's unlikely Apple will have anything to announce regarding DRM-free music from the top labels before the end of the year. According … Read more

The Pulitzer Prize Board is finally recognizing the obvious: if newsprint's highest journalism award wants to stay relevant it had better welcome the Web.

The Pulitzer board announced Monday that it will consider entries from online-only publications in addition to print outlets for the 14 journalism categories that once were prestigious but now few care about.

Any organization interested in submitting stories for Pulitzer consideration must publish at least once a week, be U.S.-based, and feature original reporting. Online or print magazines need not apply. The Pulitzers are for daily or weekly news organizations.

Why the change … Read more

Google's instant-messaging service suffered intermittent outages Monday, behaving inconsistently for several hours.

The issue began about 10:30 a.m. PST and affected a subset of users of both the Web page-based Gmail Chat and the installed Google Talk software, spokesman Andrew Kovacs said. Because of the problem, sometimes when people sent a message they'd get an error message it wasn't sent and the recipient didn't receive it, but often resending the message worked, he said.

"This issue has been resolved for most users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next … Read more

Web video-rental store Netflix has laid off 50 technical specialists, the people who typically do most of the trouble-shooting for customers with tech issues, such as struggling to connect the service to their laptop or set-top boxes.

Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said 15 of the company's 65 technical specialists will join the 300-person Customer Service group. According to Swasey, Netflix also plans to add 50 more people to its customer service unit sometime after the New Year.

Swasey said there just wasn't as much need to keep so many tech specialists. He credited Microsoft's Silverlight with … Read more