12/05/2008 – Monday

• Google announced Google Friend Connect. This new service, announced as a preview release which lets non-technical site owners sprinkle social features throughout their websites, so visitors will easily be able to join with their AOL, Google, OpenID, and Yahoo! credentials. You'll be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web like Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, LinkedIn, orkut, Plaxo, and others.

• Microsoft Corp has launched Messenger TV, a new online service in 20 countries which will allow users to watch video clips at the same time as a network of friends and chat via Windows Live Messenger. The new service will offer a range of clips on MSN Video including MTV shows and music clips from providers such as Sony BMG. The firm hopes the ability to watch clips with friends on different computers will create a new social experience and attract users who already spend hours on social networks.

• Microsoft Corp. launched its WorldWide Telescope, bringing the free Web-based program for zooming around the universe to a broad audience. WorldWide Telescope, developed by Microsoft's research arm, knits together images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and others. Computer users can browse through the galaxy on their own or take guided tours of different outer-space destinations developed by astronomers and academics. The site lets users choose from a number of different telescopes and switch between different light wavelengths.

• Zuckerberg’s (CEO of Facebook) last remaining peers and a high school classmate, Adam D’Angelo, Facebook’s Chief Technical Officer, is leaving the company. It is said that according to sources close to the company, D’Angelo felt his responsibilities no longer fit well with his skills and interests. He was working at Facebook since 2004.

• Facebook has taken out $100 million in debt financing and plans to use the funds entirely for new computers and data centers. Since October, Facebook has received $375 million in financing, valuing the firm at $15 billion, according to a source close to the company. Microsoft Corp invested $240 million, Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing put in $120 million and smaller investors contributed another $15 million.
  

13/05/2008 – Tuesday

• Apple Inc. has teamed up Time Warner Inc.'s HBO to feed television shows to its online iTunes store, reeling in one of the last holdouts among major channels and agreeing to a rare pricing concession to land hit shows like "The Sopranos," "Sex and the City" and "The Wire." The Cupertino, California-based company said HBO programming began appearing on iTunes Tuesday and the shows cost either $1.99 or $2.99 per episode, making HBO the only channel allowed to charge above the standard $1.99 for their episodes on iTunes.

• According to comScore, in April Yahoo! Buzz for the first time did more traffic than dig: Buzz got nearly 7 million U.S. unique visitors in April, a 74% growth over March. What's more, about 51% of Yahoo! Buzz users are women, compared to just 39% women for digg.
  

14/05/2008 – Wednesday

• "Spam King" and his partner now owe MySpace about $230 million in damages after a federal judge awarded the popular online hangout what is believed to be the largest anti-spam judgment ever. The judgment is a big victory for MySpace, although service providers often have a tough time collecting such awards. But even if the News Corp.-owned site never collects, it hopes the judgment deters other spammers.

15/05/2008 – Thursday

• Television company CBS has agreed to buy technology news and entertainment website CNET for about $1.75bn. CBS said that the purchase of CNET, which owns sites such as ZDNet and Gamespot, would help to boost its online presence. CBS has offered $11.50 a share in cash, which is 45% more than CNET's closing price on Wednesday.

• Amazon on Thursday launched a widget that bloggers and Web-site owners can use to make money by showcasing and playing song samples from the online retailer's catalog of 5 million tunes. The MP3 Clips Widget lets users pick the song and albums they want to display or select the latest bestsellers or new releases within a specific genre. The mini-application, which is embedded in a blog or Web page, can also be set up to play a 30-second sample of song.

• Animoto, a web application for creating videos out of photos and music has received funding from Amazon. The amount of money invested was not disclosed. The service uses Amazon Web Services (S3 in particular) to scale its application which quickly gained tremendous popularity. For instance, the Facebook version of Animoto is one of the most popular applications on Facebook platform, with over 750,000 users.

• Yahoo’s developer tool, SearchMonkey is open to all. Developers can build two types of applications using SearchMonkey: Enhanced Results and Infobars. Enhanced Results replace the current standard results with a richer display. All the links in the Enhanced Results must point to the site to which the result refers. Infobars are appended below search results and can include metadata about the result, related links or content, or links for user actions (such as adding a movie to a Netflix queue).
  

16/05/2008 – Friday

• As Google’s freshly announced Friend Connect supposedly shares user data in a way that circumvents total disclosure to all users involved, Facebook has stated that Friend Connect does not comply with its standards for collecting user data and redistributing it across the web. Facebook suspended Friend Connect’s access to its users.

17/05/2008 – Saturday

• YouTube added some new features to improve searching for videos, messaging and managing your contacts on YouTube.
  

• Spanish police have arrested five people suspected of hacking into or outright disabling thousands of Internet pages, some of them run by government agencies in the U.S., Latin America and Asia, authorities said Saturday. The National Police said the suspects belonged to one of the most active hacker groups on the Internet and said two of the suspects are 16 years old. The others are 19 or 20. On the Internet, the group calls itself D.O.M Team, police said. One of the group's techniques was to infiltrate Web sites and insert a page of its own, police said. The group attacked some 21,000 Web (NASA, Venezuelan national telephone company, Spanish telephone operator Jazztel, …) pages over the last two years, police said in a statement. The five were arrested this week in Barcelona, Burgos, Malaga and Valencia.