Today is a sad day. Plucky college kid Nick Ciarelli has agreed to close down his Apple rumor blog, Think Secret. Ciarelli has been publishing the site since he was 13, under the name Nick dePlume.
Apple filed a lawsuit in January 2005 to try and force Ciarelli to disclose his source inside the company for pre-announcement news. Think Secret disclosed the release of the Mac Mini and the iLife 05 software suite two weeks before Steve Jobs did on stage.
Web metrics firm Compete released their latest "Candidate FaceTime" metric yesterday, which measures how many hours people are spending across the social networking profiles of US presidential candidates. Not surprisingly, Ron Paul continues to dominate all candidates, while Barack Obama leads the pack among Democrats. The biggest surprise is the rise of Mike Huckabee -- who has also been rising in national polls -- perhaps due to the Chuck Norris bump (what can't that guy do?). Compete, however, points to Meetup as the true secret weapon.
The folks over at Hulu have made 2500 invites available for the closed beta of the Hulu service for ReadWriteWeb readers.
Hulu is a joint venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal that puts popular television content from those companies online. It's ad supported (via pre and mid-roll ads) and the videos are quite high quality. Popular shows include 24, The Simpsons, Family Guy, 30 Rock, The Office, House, and my favorite, Psych.
Popular BitTorrent search engine TorrentSpy lost a copyright case brought against it in a US cought by the Motion Picture Association of America by default for destroying evidence, reports the BBC. The site's operator's apparently ignored an order to keep server logs of the IP addresses of people who facilitated the trading of files via the site.
From YouTube’s continued dominance, the television networks’ newfound willingness to experiment online, the rise of the desktop Internet TV application, and a number of new PC-to-TV devices and set-top boxes — it’s been a big year for Internet TV in all shapes and forms. In this post we look back at 2007 through the lens of last100’s coverage, highlighting some of the important stories and trends, and how they point to what we might expect for Internet TV in 2008.
This is a guest post by by Zach Beauvais.
Talis is a bit different than most web 2.0 startups we hear about. It is a 40 year-old technology
company with a significant presence in the UK - nearly a quarter of British
academic and public libraries make use of its software. Although the Web is a
prominent feature of the organization, their primary focus is on data
management.
Yahoo! representatives have agreed to adhere to 100% of the recommendations for email clients made by the Email Standards Project, according to the group.
The Email Standards Project (ESP) is a campaign working to bring all the major email clients into compliance with a subset of HTML standards so that HTML emails will render appropriately everywhere.
TechnologyReview has published an interview with Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig, where it's acknowledged that the search giant hires individuals to look at search results pages and provide their judgment about the quality of the results.
The New York Times is planning to begin running "citizen" videos about the US presidential primary elections on the paper's web site later this week, reports Beet.TV. The videos will feature non-professional journalists and will run on the Op-Ed section of the site until February 5, so-called "Super Tuesday" when a large number of US states hold primary elections.
Facebook finally rolled out their long awaited friend lists feature today. The feature allows users to create groups of friends and has been seen as a necessary step for Facebook to be able to compete with professional networks like LinkedIn, but Facebook's implementation seems incomplete.
