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It is easier to seek forgiveness than it is to get permission according to Verizon, which has once again shown us what large corporations should not be doing when it comes to customer service.

David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and the more recent Everything is Miscellaneous received a letter today from Verizon. A "legalistic pamphlet" that informed him he has 45 days to opt out of 'agreeing' to let Verizon share his personal information.

Microsoft's Windows 7 development team yesterday confirmed that users will be able to remove Internet Explorer 8, as well as several other Microsoft applications, from Windows 7.

This appears to be a major step by the company in addressing the long standing anti-trust complaints of bundling their applications with Windows, and may account in part for the recent scaling back by the European Union in its monitoring of the software giant.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we look into Facebook's homepages, check out Yahoo's answer to Facebook Connect, review the new iPhone version of Amazon's eReader Kindle, analyze the 'Smarter Web' trend that came out of the DEMO conference this year, and more. Also we cover the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

One of the most interesting trends on the Internet right now is a move towards a more real-time experience. We have seen a lot of discussion lately about how Twitter is leading the charge by creating a search engine for the real-time web, for example. However, there are also a good number of other services that already expose some of the promises of the real-time web. In this post, we will have a look at some of the most interesting ones.

Announced alongside BackType Connect today, BackTweets is a fresh new take on a Twitter search engine: It un-shortens and catalogs URLs sent via Twitter.  We believe that, even though BackTweets was created to fill a piece of BackType Connect's total conversation search offering, it will also become an important player by itself and we are glad to see it has gotten its own clean look.

It looks like either Twitter or a third-party Twitter service was hacked today by an adult webcam site. Chances are that you have seen the following message in your Twitter stream at some point in the last few hours: "hey! 23/Female. Come chat with me on my webcam thingy here www.chatwebcamfree.com." The constant stream of messages just stopped as we were writing this story. We have asked Twitter for a response and will update this post as soon as we hear more.

Just a few weeks ago, we reported that Hulu had pulled all of its content from Boxee, a popular cross-platform media player. However, as one could almost expect, Boxee, which has yet to work out a new deal with Hulu, found an easy workaround and Hulu's content is now back on Boxee. The company now simply routes Hulu's public RSS feeds to a new feed reader plugin in Boxee.

Update: Looks like we were wrong about Hulu's ability to keep Boxee down. According to a statement on Boxee's blog, Hulu has now blocked Boxee's browser from accessing the service.

Popular start-page service Netvibes may be in its final days as a viable product. The service has been suffering frequent, extended downtime, hasn't been fully functioning even when up and can't possibly be making as much money as its backers hoped it would.

Update: Please see our follow up post on this topic - I Was Wrong; Netvibes is Not Going Down The Tubes.

Start-pages are highly customizable services that display RSS feeds and lots of other little tools inside widgets on a page. The most successful have been MyYahoo and iGoogle. There used to be a horde of startups trying to enter this market but the energy is largely gone. When your startpage doesn't load, your personal entry point into the web has failed you and it can really put a damper on your day. That's where Netvibes is right now. Update: The site is back up again. If you want to export your feeds and try one of the many alternatives, now's your chance. It turns out though that Netvibes still has a lot of very happy users, as you can see in the comments. We're glad to hear it and despite our deep frustration and worries that the company isn't doing well - we really hope we're wrong.

Around this time last year, we were excited about a new Firefox extension called MySocial24x7 which brought FriendFeed activity streams right into your browser sidebar. Built on the Google App Engine platform, the add-on was one of the first to make use of the FriendFeed API. Unfortunately, the add-on's creator Sandosh Vasudevan stopped work on the extension and soon it became out-of-date. But now, with permission from Sandosh, a new developer has taken over and the add-on has returned.

Excitement about the government's use of Web 2.0 technology has swept Washington, DC. One of President Obama's first acts in office was to issue a directive calling for a more transparent, collaborative, and participatory government. Websites like USA.gov have launched new Web 2.0 features, such as RSS news services. And the President got to keep his precious BlackBerry.