Netscape's offer and Flickr's clogged tubes

PR over Netscape's community news re-design went from bad to worse with a NY Times profile on Monday (btw I was interviewed for that, but much to my disappointment my remarks were left on the cutting room floor). Later in the week Jason Calacanis turned up the bluzzometer (which is a blog buzz measuring tool) with his offer to pay the top bookmarkers at Digg, Reddit, Flickr and other places $1000 per month for doing their thing on Netscape.com. In my post I noted that this essentially amounted to an offer to buy out digg users.

From the 'It ain't broke, honest!' department, MySpace had some issues with hacking and Flickr had a "temporary storage glitch" (see image to the left, by ASurroca).

Meanwhile young YouTube hit a stats milestone this week, with the news its users are now watching more than 100 million videos per day. Later in the week there was some controversy about content ownership on the service.

BigCo Action

The week started with lots of Yahoo news. They released their new Ajax-powered homepage to the masses and also gave Yahoo Finance a facelift. Things turned slightly custardy later in the week though, when Yahoo's stock went down after their second quarter results. Apple reported rosier third-quarter results, eBay also announced earnings, Microsoft had its 4th quarter results and (to complete the set) Google announced its Q2 results.

Microsoft announced a partnership with Nortel around "unified communications" - meaning e-mail, IM, telephony, and multimedia conferencing. Microsoft also made blog headlines by pledging to play fair with others, in a set of 12 principles.

Neil Patel wrote a great post detailing Google's growing list of domains - they now own 520 of them. My favorite: richardsbrain.com (I'm afraid, very afraid...). In other Google news, one of their execs had the nerve to challenge the Father of the Web Tim Berners-Lee.

Scoop of the Week

ThinkSecret scooped the news that Apple will announce movie rentals through the iTunes Music Store, at Apple's upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference in a few weeks. For reactions, check out the TechMeme scrum about the story.

Product Plays of the Week

In product news, podcasting startup Odeo released a new service called Twttr - described by Sid Yadov as "a new tool which helps you stay in touch with your friends through SMS".

In search news, Ask.com released a product called RSS Smart Answers and Google released a product called Accessible Search - a "web search for the visually challenged."

On the enterprise side, Salesforce.com released Summer '06 - 20th generation of their online CRM service (see also my interview).

Buys of the Week

RSS feed management powerhouse Feedburner purchased RSS analytics startup Blogbeat. Microsoft was busy this week, acquiring Softrucity Inc. (a provider of application virtualization and dynamic streaming technologies) and Winternals Software (a small maker of Windows utility programs). From the 'I want a piece of that action' dept, Amazon Jeff Bezos is investing in trendy web design firm 37Signals.

Pageturner of the Week

By which I mean, best analytical post (not counting my own posts, of course). Tim O'Reilly's 'Levels of the Game: The Hierarchy of Web 2.0 Applications' is required reading for those who want to understand "the dynamics of the network economy", as he put it.

Blog headline of the Week

Mike Arrington's TechCrunch protege Marshall Kirkpatrick came up with the memorable headline: Got Herpes? Try Prescription4Love. I'm guessing it was a deliberate ploy to get on Valleywag.

On that dodgy note...

That's a wrap for another week! (yes, my old catchphrase is back too)