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If you haven't heard of longtime Flash developer Paul Yanez, there's a good chance you've likely seen some of his work over the past few months. Yanez creates web-based flash media players that interact with the Internet's top video sites, and many of them have been written up on top blogs like TechCrunch, Mashable, DownloadSquad, and NewTeeVee. His latest creation is an online media player for Hulu, which brings an Apple TV-esque experience to Hulu videos. Yanez has created a number of media players for various online video and image sharing properties which bring desktop-like functionality to browsing and playing files on those networks. But he has loftier aspirations for his project.

Flock, the Mozilla-based social web browser has made the announcement that everyone has been waiting for: they will now integrate with MySpace. Building on the MySpace Developer Platform, Flock will allow users to surf the web with their MySpace friends in their sidebar. At Tuesday's MySpace Developer Platform kick-off, Flock demonstrated this integration by giving event attendees a sneak peak at the upcoming Flock features. Although details of the new functionality are limited at this point, we do know that the MySpace People integration, as it's being called, is expected to function in a manner very similar to the Facebook integration that is already in use in Flock. This integration will expose all of the relevant actions made available by MySpace and will build them into the People Sidebar of the Flock browser.

Syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog

Forget Microsoft, News Corp. or even Apple. Nokia, the world's no.1 mobile handset maker, should buy Yahoo. Or so says Information Week's Stephen Wellman, who puts forward a compelling argument: If Nokia is repositioning itself as a Web services company, to combat falling profit margins on its hardware, then acquiring Yahoo would help to give the company a much needed presence on the desktop (not just mobile), as well as beef up its Web offerings and Internet brand recognition in general.

Chicago based MoveSmart.org is a project aiming to make housing integration a reality, years after legal changes have left de facto segregation intact, by using mashups. The project will combine collections of data concerning public amenities and services, demographic data and economic numbers together with housing search.

Think of it as Trulia plus, with a social justice angle, or Zillow for people interested in more than just the price of a house.

What is it about a weekend that makes you want to create a web application from start to finish? Most people would probably think it insane to try cramming design, development, testing, and deployment of a web app into a single weekend, but a growing number of events are encouraging people to do just that. The latest is Montreal, Canada's Blitzweekend, which will take place over the first couple of days of March.

After being in development for months, Box.net has officially released the beta of their new collaboration functionality. With this new feature, any Box.net user can invite collaborators to any folder in their account. The collaboration feature is also fully compatible with all the OpenBox services, which extends online collaboration beyond just word processor documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, like Google Docs currently offers.

The OpenID Foundation is announcing this morning that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! have taken seats as the organization's first corporate board members.

OpenID is a protocol for authenticating your identity through a single chosen provider instead of creating unique accounts at every website you use.

By Llew Claasen, a web technologist who runs his own consultancy, KeyJam.net.

It's nice being the industry leader. People start to forget that economic principles apply to you as much as anyone else. Say, you're an executive at Google and you have a conference call with analysts to announce lower-than-expected Q4 2007 results.

Why did no one ask whether the bulk of this drop was not attributable to lower-than-normal click-through rates (CTR) in a softening market?

New customer service site Get Satisfaction, itself a wonder to behold, announced today that it is now accepting requests for access to a beta API (Application Programming Interface). Satisfaction functionality will soon be available for apps and sites all over the web. Fresh off of a successful conference titled "Customer Service is the New Marketing," Get Satisfaction is becoming the hippest place for companies to engage transparently with their customers - whether they want to or not!

With the news today that billionaire investor Carl Icahn is getting ready to start blogging, we started to wonder what other billionaires blog. Sadly (or perhaps not so sadly), not many of them blog. Why should we care if a billionaire blogs? After all, they only represent the tiniest fraction of the population (there are at last count 946 billionaires worldwide compared to about 6.6 billion people). Really, you might not care about the things a billionaire might write about, but along with controlling a disproportionally large amount of the world's money, they also wield a lot of power over our daily lives as a result. So it might be nice to see what goes on in their heads.