First up, Yahoo rescinds almost its entire social network presence in favor of Facebook Connect. And now, the rumors that MySpace would drop their social focus and aim towards a network based on content and entertainment seem to be playing out: MySpace are linking up with Facebook Connect. There’s a lot of juicy info to be had over on the Inside Facebook article, but it seems like MySpace and Facebook could become very tightly entwined, with Facebook managing your profile and MySpace becoming the content provider — the quizzes, the games, the music, the movie trailers.

It would appear that, except for Google and their Friend Connect, social networks are bowing out from their competition with Facebook. With their recently-announced usage figures and their ever-climbing membership that recently hit 350 million, that’s probably a smart move. This was a war that never really heated up, and ultimately had a very predictable outcome. Facebook rule supreme. Microsoft own a sizable share in Facebook, incidentally.

Flickr is one of my favourite all-time web services, and I’ll admit a huge fascination with some of the visualisation stuff the Flickr folks do with maps, Flickr photos and their location data. So you can imagine my excitement last week as Popular Science featured a piece on how a University of Washington Graphics team automatically recreated Rome with images from Flickr. The team took photos from 150,000 Flickr users, and using some custom algorithms recreated Rome automatically using 500 computers and 13 hours processing time. They even went one better and also recreated the slowly-sinking city of Venice, and built that 3D virtual model from 250,000 photos in under a day.

By now you’re probably thinking ‘that’s an incredibly long time to render’ – however the team is touting the speed of the 3D model building here too. The technology used in Microsoft’s PhotoSynth product (which also originated at the same research lab) would have taken a calendar year to automatically build the same 3D model of Venice.

Be sure to take a look at the video tours over on the Popular Science Web site, and see the end results from Flickr’s library – the team have set their sights on a million-image based rendering of a city in the future, so hopefully there’s plenty more of these to come!

Android’s supposed to be all about peace, love, and openness, but that apparently doesn’t exempt it from copyright law and trigger-happy general counsels (who knew?). In a move that should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone, Palm has sicced its legal team on the makers of the aptly-named “Palm Pre Android Theme” that borrows icons, wallpapers, and mojo (not to be confused with Mojo) directly from webOS. The concerns center around the usual suspects — graphics copyrights and trademark infringement — and the company is demanding that they cease use of the Pre’s interface, name, and all that good stuff by some date that’s been redacted from the leaked letter (we’re assuming it’s soon). To be fair, Palm comes out and says that it “appreciates that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery,” but at the end of the day, they’re concerned about the potential for consumer confusion. Interestingly, to the best of our knowledge, they haven’t given the iPhone-based theme the same treatment — but hey, maybe it’s easier to confuse a Hero with a Pre than it is an iPhone… or something.

After doing an install from Buildbot’s snapshots, I checked Chromium’s about screen. Lo and behold, build 23129 is tagged as 4.0.202.0. While it’s just a number, it means, of course, Chrome will likely hit v4 long before Firefox ever does.

Other than the version number I haven’t noted any obvious changes as of yet.

Technical Program Manager Anthony LaForge posted a note to the Chromium-dev board announcing that the move was made to reflect the code freeze on Chrome v3. “There is still a bit of work that needs to be done for 3.0 in terms of stability and fixes,” he wrote. “To that end we will be pulling changes into the 195 branch (what will become the stable release).”

This isn’t the first quick version-to-version jump Chrome has seen. Chrome 3 hit the dev channel less than a week after Chrome 2′s release back in May. Looks like I was off the mark about Chrome hitting version 8 or 9 before Google ditched the beta tag on GMail…

The game console market is not doing as well as it once was and the more expensive consoles are especially feeling the pinch of the poor economy. The Nintendo Wii at $249 still reigns supreme when it comes to sales and the PS3 remains the most expensive of the game consoles.

There have been rumors swirling this week that the Xbox 360 Pro would go the way of the dinosaur and the Xbox 360 Elite would be reduced in price to replace it. The rumor has the Elite being cut to the $299.99 effectively pushing the Xbox 360 Pro out of the lineup.

This will mean that only two Xbox 360s will be offered from Microsoft: the Arcade and the Elite. A picture of a catalog from Meijer due to hit on August 30 has been leaked that shows the $299.99 price tag for the Elite. No official statement on the retirement of the 360 Pro or a price cut for the Elite has been offered from Microsoft at this time.

Microsoft may be cutting the price of its console, but Sony has not. There have been persistent rumblings that Sony will drop the price of its PS3, but so far, that has not happened.

Rumors cropped up earlier this month that the rumored PS3 Slim would be debuting on August 18 and that a price cut may come along with the new console.

A large number of Facebook users received a message yesterday, telling them they’d been invited to test something called Facebook Lite. The messages turned out to be an accident, and the users who received them couldn’t sign up. Because nobody’s seen it yet, there’s still a lot of speculation about what Facebook Lite actually is.

Facebook’s recent acquisition of FriendFeed has led some people to believe that Facebook Lite is a bare-bones, status-updates-only version of Facebook, designed to compete with Twitter. Although this would make some sense, TechCrunch says it’s the wrong answer. Based on information that Facebook Lite is already being tested in India, they’re reporting that Facebook Lite is just a slimmer, low-bandwidth version of the site, targeted for users whose Internet connections are too slow to properly use the current version.

The recent shutdown and reopening of URL-shrinking service Tr.im drew a lot of attention to one of the most troubling questions about short URL sites: when one of them shuts down, what happens to the links? To avoid worrying about what a URL shortener might do with your links, you might want to scope out la petite url, a WordPress plugin for creating tiny links using your own domain name.

La petite url creates links to your WordPress pages using 5 lowercase characters, something like yoururl.com/nfpqd. This way, your domain name stays in the URL, letting people know which site they’re clicking through to. You can also automatically display a short link next to each post, making it easier for readers to spread your links. The disadvantage? Unless you have a tiny domain name, your shrunken URL is going to be significantly longer than the ones you get from ow.ly, bit.ly or tr.im.

A US district Court has issued an injunction preventing RealNetworks from selling its RealDVD software. RealDVD is basically a DVD ripper, but unlike most applications that let you crack DVD copy protection and copy videos to your hard drive, RealDVD includes its own DRM scheme which prevents users from making multiple copies or watching ripped movies on another computer or portable device.

RealNetworks had been hoping that these restrictions would help the software survive against any legal claims. After all, the courts have a long history of deciding that you have a right to create backup copies of media you purchase for personal use. Unfortunately, the DCMA circumvents this right by declaring that you can’t use technology that circumvents copy-protection.

The long and short of it is that the court ruled against the company because its software violates the DCMA. It’s not clear whether RealNetworks will appeal the case. Honestly, I doubt there were throngs of people clamoring to buy copies of RealDVD at $30 a pop when there are plenty of free alternatives that don’t restrict what you can do with ripped movies.

But RealNetworks had been hoping to launch a version of the software that could be included on set-top boxes like DVD players that would allow users to insert a disc and save the data to a hard drive so they could browse through their movie collections and watch videos without swapping discs. And that’s a feature I could see people spending a few bucks for.

may be the top search engine in the world, and it may collect a lot of data about you if you use its email, chat, photo, or video services. Heck, even if you’ve avoided every Google product, Google probably still knows a few things about you if you’ve ever done anything that might have possibly left a trail on the web.

But America’s finest news source, The Onion, lets us know that Google has a new service that lets you opt out. All you have to do is click the opt-out button and a van will show up at your door and relocate you to a remote 22 acre village where you’ll be expected to sever all contact with the outside world. Your home will be destroyed to protect your privacy.

You can check out The Onion’s satirical video after the break. Sure, it’s all a joke. But you know what? It does highlight just how difficult it is to stay off the grid in the age of the internet.

Have you ever come across an advertisement on a web page that just made you think, “wow. That really shouldn’t be there.”? I’ve come across a few in my time, but it looks like the folks over at BuzzFeed have been running into them left and right; they’ve compiled a collection of 23 examples of web advertising gone bad.

Their collection runs the gamut, having everything from an article linking coffee to heart attacks brandishing an ad from Folgers to Google providing “Are you a male virgin?” as a sponsored result to the search query “world of warcraft.” BuzzFeed’s commenters also provided a handful of user-submitted additions to the madness.

Also, if you’re interested in more advertising faux pas, BuzzFeed has compiled 15 examples of poorly-placed billboard advertisements.

By

Tr.im, one of the most popular URL-shortening services, shut down last week because its owners saw no way to monetize the service in such a competitive market. Twitter’s choice of Bit.ly as its default link-shrinker means that service dominates the market, with smaller players like Ow.ly abd Tr.im fighting over what’s left.

Tr.im has its supporters, though, and they apparently contacted Tr.im’s owners, Nambu, in such high numbers that the service has now re-opened. Creating new links seems to work fine, and all of your old URLs should be right where you left them.

Was this whole thing a publicity stunt, intended to bring greater visibility to Tr.im? Nambu says no.

They’re still looking to sell Tr.im so it can live on, but not to “an unknown group or individual” who might compromise users’ existing Tr.im links in some way. I believe that this wasn’t a publicity stunt, although there’s little doubt it brought the service quite a bit of extra attention.

Nambu just seems to have realized that they had little to gain by shutting down abruptly with a message that basically claimed Tr.im was practically worthless. The overwhelming user response seems to have made Nambu realize that’s no way to sell something.

 The U.S. Forest Service mascot celebrates his 65th birthday in August 2009.

(ABC News Photo Illustration)

The sweet, but serious Smokey, also known as Smokey the Bear, is America’s most well-known wildfire prevention icon, and today, people across the nation are honoring Smokey on his 65th birthday.

The U.S. Forest Service mascot represents one of the longest running public service announcement campaigns in U.S. history and has taken his popularity to a new level.

Now, kids can interact with Smokey and the Forest Service through interactive games and programs on the USFS Web site.

Smokey also has a fan page on Facebook with more than 7,000 fans. Several Smokey the Bear groups are also sprinkled throughout Facebook, such as “I Support Smokey the Bear” and the “Smokey the Bear Fan Club.”

The latest stable version of the popular Bittorrent client µTorrent is version 1.83. But the developers decided that the next major release packed in too much to simply call it µTorrent 1.9, so the next version will be called version 2.0. And µTorrent 2.0 beta is already available for download.

The update brings:

• Support for UDP trackers, a new protocol for BitTorrent trackers that uses less CPU power on the tracker end
• Improved setup dialog with built-in speed test
• Transfer Cap options that help you track and control how much data you transfer (which helps if your ISP caps your data transfer rates)

The beta is only available for Windows at the moment. The latest version of µTorrent for OS X is 0.9.1.2.

Yahoo has been active in the domain buying and selling space the past few months. Today, it was revealed to be the buyer of OMG.com, which sold last week for $80,000, according to Domain Name Wire.

It’s a great domain, and a really, really great price especially considering the image-centric TMZ.com-rival it has called yes, OMG. (Note: I had no idea it actually existed, at least partially because it didn’t have the omg.com domain — well, and also cause I’m not into celebrity gossip. But supposedly, it’s big.)

Of course, Yahoo has a history of obtaining good domain names and doing nothing or next to nothing with them. It sold contests.com in June for $380,000 after sitting on it for many years. It also sold WP.com to WordPress parent Automattic in April of this year.

Given the numbers for recent sales, it does seem like Yahoo scooped OMG.com for a bargain basement price. As we said, it sold contests.com for $380,000, which also seemed cheap at the time when you compare it to something like candy.com, which sold for $3 million in June. And in February, toys.com sold for $5.1 million.

Sure, “OMG” is not even really a word, but it has become a common phrase in pop culture and would seem to be worth more than $80K in a world where candy.com sells for $3M — especially since it’s only 3 letters.

The folks at Canonical are in the process of redesigning the user interface for Ubuntu Netbook Remix. UNR is basically a custom version of Ubuntu that includes optimizations for netbooks with Intel Atom processors as well as a desktop environment and program launcher designed for computers with small, low resolution displays.

The first version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix introduced a few key concepts. By default, all program windows opened up in full screen. And instead of a typical desktop and start menu approach, you had a list of application categories on the right side of the screen, program shortcuts with big icons in the middle, and a list of places on the right side.

The new version eliminates the toolbars on the right side of the screen to give you more space for program shortcuts. Instead, the places menu has been integrated with the right-side panel. There’s also a slightly refined color scheme, and it’s easier to add program shortcuts to your Favorites area.

The updated version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix should be ready in time for the launch of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala in October. You can get an early peek by downloading the pre-release version of the operating system. Make sure to select the ISO labeled “netbook remix.”