Alexei Oreskovic

Remember Leon Hill, the controversial peddler of Facebook souls?

Not surprisingly, Hill said he has received a letter from Facebook's lawyers informing him that his service selling Facebook friends ran afoul of the site's terms of service and possibly a slew of trademark and computer fraud laws.

After some back and forth with the lawyers, Hill said that he has stopped offering one of his two Facebook marketing services and will no longer solicit friends for customers that have standard Facebook accounts. And he's removed Facebook's logos from his site.

"If they did want to take me to court over anything I'd probably be screwed, to be honest," Hill said, citing Facebook's deep pockets (He may also have been thinking about the $711 million in damages Facebook recently won in an anti-spam case).

But Hill hasn't been scared away from Facebook entirely. He said that his firm uSocial will continue to sell fans to customers and companies that maintain a so-called Facebook Fan page.

That's because the job of rounding up fans for a customer's Facebook Fan page doesn't actually require logging into their account, as was necessary for customers with personal Facebook pages. Instead it seems, uSocial will rely on a network of partners to solicit fans for customers by offering them the URL for a Facebook Fan page.

Whether Facebook considers the case closed is not entirely clear. Hill says he has not heard back from Facebook since he informed the company of his position a couple of weeks ago.

"Either they've given up or they're trying to get a stronger case against me," he says.

Facebook said in a statement that it will continue to enforce its policies and to protect the integrity of its site. "We're pleased uSocial has agreed to comply."

It's been four months since Google dropped a bombshell with its announcement that it is getting into the PC operating system game, in a direct challenge to Microsoft and Apple.

Now the world may get the first glimpse of Chrome OS, the PC operating system as envisioned by the folks in Mountain View, California.

According to a report in TechCrunch citing "a reliable source," a version of the Chrome operating system will be available for public download within a week.

TechCrunch said Google has a legion of engineers working on hardware driver support, and notes that the software may only run on a limited set of PCs at first:

We expect Google will be careful with messaging around the launch, and endorse a small set of devices for installation. EEE PC netbooks, for example, may be one set of devices that Google will say are ready to use Chrome OS. There will likely be others as well, but don't expect to be able to install it on whatever laptop or desktop machine you have from day one.

Google said in July that it was working with PC manufacturers including Acer, Asus and Hewlett-Packard and promised that the first devices running the Chrome OS would be available in the second half of 2010.

Google also said at the time that the Chrome OS code would be "open sourced" later this year, so next week's rumored release would be in keeping with the original timeline.

As PC world puts it, however, open source code is not the same as a ready-for-prime-time product.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the average person will be able to download these files and get the OS up and running. Source code is just a collection of text files meant for software developers to tinker with.
As I understand it, to get the source code to work as a computer program, you need a compiler that brings all the source code together and turns it into something your computer can actually boot up.

So, if you're a developer, you may soon get a taste of Chrome. The rest of the world may have to wait a bit longer.

The war of words between the news media industry and Google makes for a great spectacle, and this week did not disappoint.

According to a report in the Silicon Alley Insider blog, Associated Press CEO Tom Curley is meeting with Google on Friday to press for the creation of a "news registry." Here's SAI on the AP's move:

It hopes such a registry would propel its content to a higher rank in general search than the blogs that the news agency accuses of lifting its content.

Curley said the AP -- which intends to form landing pages and a social-media desk, among other survival strategies -- is "getting paid for about 12% of our content on the web."

It was not clear what information SAI was basing its report of the AP-Google meeting on - the blog post didn't specify whether one of its bloggers had spoken to Curley directly, or whether it was picking-up Curley's comments from another report; nor did it have links to any other articles on the subject.

A Google representative emailed a statement that said the company regularly meets with its publishing partners to discuss a variety of initiatives. "We're not going to comment on the specifics of any particular conversation at this time."

One would hope Google is also having conversations with News Corp, which is ratcheting up the rhetoric of late.

Earlier this week, News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch told his own Sky News Australia in an interview that he was considering blocking Google from indexing its Web sites once the company begins charging people to read its articles on the Web.

On Friday, News Corp chief digital officer Jonathan Miller expanded on Rupert's anti-Google gambit and stuck a timeline on the move, according to a report in Telegraph:

When asked how long it would be before Mr Murdoch took the step to block Google, which every media company relies upon to send them high levels of web traffic, Mr Miller said it would be soon - "months and quarters - not weeks".

The story later quotes Miller dismissing the benefits that come from have its content accessible through Google:

"The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us... the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it."

There's been plenty of sabre-rattling from the news media when it comes to Google in the past. If News Corp doesn't follow-through with its threat in the next couple of months, will it have proven itself to have no real clout in this fight?

Here's a blog post from our colleague Ben Deighton in London:

Robotic drone planes and night vision sniper rifles take their aim at traditional media in the latest installment of the Call of Duty series -- Modern Warfare 2.

The game made about $310 million North America and the UK in its first day, dwarfing the up to $60 million that blockbuster movies gross on their opening.

But it's not just in cash terms that games like Modern Warfare 2 are challenging the medium of film. Played on a wide screen TV in dazzling high definition, graphics have become so detailed and carefully rendered that they almost give players the sensation of being in a film themselves.

Like the first installment, players occupy a range of different characters, including a British special forces fighter and a U.S. soldier.

This means that the scenes range from assaulting an oil rig by submarine and attacking a base in the middle of a blizzard and escaping James Bond style on a snowmobile, to fighting through the oval office.

However the game subverts the largely historical message of the Call of Duty series, and instead paints a bleak future where players find themselves retaking the White House from Russian invaders and fighting pitched battles through U.S. suburban houses.

Publisher Activision even ended up having to give players the chance to opt out of a particularly gruesome scene where they are asked to mow down civilians in an airport in order to infiltrate a terrorist group.

However some scenes take the gaming experience to a whole new level, like the one where players find themselves on a space station watching a nuclear missile being launched into the atmosphere.

With Modern Warfare 2, Activision really has thrown down the gauntlet to other game makers. Let's see how they respond.

The Web is supposed to be a breeding ground of innovation, but lately it's begun to look like a game of monkey-see, monkey-do.

First came last month's Twitter love-fest, when Web giants Microsoft and Google made back-to-back announcements on the same day that their respective search engines would begin to incorporate Tweets in search results.

Now giving away free Wi-Fi Internet access appears to be the promotional tool du jour.

On Tuesday, Yahoo promised free Wi-Fi to the estimated 500,000 people who wander through New York's Times Square on any given day. The company will light up Times Square for the next twelve months.

Not to be outdone, Google announced on Tuesday that it was offering free Wi-Fi at 47 U.S. airports through January 15 as a special "holiday gift."

Meanwhile, MediaPost reported that Microsoft has its own free Wi-Fi plan through a partnership with JiWire. The companies have been offering free Internet access at North American airports and hotels in exchange for a consumer conducting a single search on Bing, Microsoft's revamped search engine.

As the Web giants compete to sell ad impressions, they're increasingly trying to rope in web surfers at the starting gate - or at least at airports and in Times Square.

Google doesn't want you to be afraid of the cloud.

The company announced a new feature on Thursday that lets people view all the personal information they've entered into Google's sundry Web-based products over the years.

The information in Google's new Dashboard covers everything from your personal account information for email and other Google services, to your viewing history on YouTube and the photos you've uploaded to Picasa. It's information that was always accessible in the past, but Google is now making it viewable in one, all-inclusive snapshot.

Privacy advocates have long warned that Google is accumulating too much information about people through its broad menu of Web-based services and not providing enough insight into how the information is being used.

Whether Google's Dashboard will appease them remains to be seen.

Google said it will begin by incorporating information from 23 Google products in the dashboard, with more to come in the weeks ahead.

Of course, the dashboard also has the benefit of reminding consumers about all the Google services they signed up for in the past and may forgotten about - a reminder that just could lead someone to start using a product again.

For Google, transparency has its benefits

Three years is a long time to go without having an analyst day, and it seems Yahoo decided to make up for lost time with a marathon seven-plus-hour briefing to Wall Street's number-crunchers on Wednesday.

Perhaps having gotten a little rusty from non-practice, Yahoo dispensed with some of the customs of the analyst day ritual. Members of the press were barred from the event, and forced to watch the proceedings over a Webcast, with all the attendant technical difficulties and indignities.

Yahoo's plug for analysts was simple enough: Yahoo got boring and slow-footed over the years, but the company still commands a massive online audience that's extremely valuable to advertisers.

But the company's delivery of the message did not always follow the standard analyst day script.

Specific financial targets were few and far between (Yahoo's promise of 15 percent to 20 percent operating margins by 2012 was the meatiest nugget).

And one slide, during a presentation on advertising yield-optimization, seemed more suited to a blackboard at MIT than a briefing with financial analysts.

Questions?

Before this week’s dueling Google and Microsoft search licensing deals with Twitter, a recurring rumor in Silicon Valley had Google trying to buy Twitter outright.

So when Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a surprise appearance at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Thursday, the stage was set to finally put the record straight.

Showing that ten years in the media spotlight have not been wasted on him however, Brin displayed a deft command of language to duck the question.

Web 2.0 organizer John Battelle: Did you try to buy Twitter?

Brin: I did not try to buy Twitter.

Brin then added, “But if companies approach us we definitely consider any opportunities to buy.” But the resultant ambiguity about whether Brin was speaking about himself personally, or Google, effectively left the question unanswered. Nicely played.

Meanwhile, the list of Internet giants partnering with Twitter came close to growing to three companies, after AOL CEO Tim Armstrong opined about the role of real time data at AOL during his talk.

“I think those guys have done something very impactful,” Armstrong said of Twitter. “And if it works with our platforms and we can leverage it, I think we would be happy to do that.”

Armstrong offered a couple of other interesting tidbits, saying that AOL was in a good position to proceed with its plan to eject from the Time Warner mothership and saying that a guaranteed AOL spin-off was not a precondition of him taking the job at AOL.

He also hinted at a mysterious new content technology platform that he said AOL has been developing internally since this summer, and which would provide a “secret sauce” to the company’s variety of media properties.

“It’s a broader platform with more information around content and the creation of content,” Armstrong said.

Another answer with plenty of ambiguity, but in this case, more details will likely come soon.

Twitter love was in full bloom at the Web 2.0 conference on Wednesday, with Microsoft and Google each announcing deals to partner with the microblogging service.

But marring the Twitter hoopla were no-shows from two of the event’s highest-profile speakers.

A day after Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz skipped the company’s quarterly earnings conference call (because she had “come down with something” as CFO Tim Morse explained), Bartz skipped the Web 2.0 conference, where she was scheduled to kick off Wednesday’s events with a 30-minute talk.

Web 2.0 organizer John Battelle told the crowd Bartz had come down with “a very, very, very bad flu.”

Before the day was through, Battelle delivered news of another absentee.

New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., slated to be part of a panel on the future of journalism in the online age, was also hit by the flu, Battelle said moments before the panel began. Fortunately, Martin Nisenholtz, the New York Times head of digital operations, was there to stand in as Sulzberger’s second.

With one more day to go, attendees at the event are hoping no one else gets afflicted.

With the Web 2.0 conference about to kick off in San Francisco, Internet start-ups are unveiling new products and tossing out crumbs of data about their businesses intended to illustrate how fast they're growing.

Social-networking firm Ning led the charge on Tuesday with the news that it has grown 300 percent year-over-year to 36 million registered users and that it is jumping on the virtual goods bandwagon.

The company said it will begin selling virtual goods across the 1.6 million specialized social networks that exist on Ning for $1.50 per gift. The company said it will split 50 percent of the revenue with the Ning network creators who offer the goods on their respective networks.

Virtual goods are increasingly catching on as an attractive revenue stream for Internet companies.

Zynga, the hot videogame maker for social media services like Facebook, said it raised $427,000 from three weeks worth of virtual goods sales on its FarmVille game, according to the Silicon Alley Insider.

Still unknown is Zynga's annual revenue, which has been estimated to be between $100 million and $200 million in some media reports, but as SAI notes:

By telling us that some of its 59 million monthly FarmVille users spent $427,000 on just one product of the many available in just three weeks (annualized, the number is $7.4 million), Zynga is sending a very clear message: Yo! People really are spending lots of money in our games.

Demand Media, the company co-founded by former MySpace Chairman Richard Rosenblatt, also had some growth metrics to share.

The company, which comScore now ranks as the 15th most popular U.S. online property in terms of unique visitors, said its library of originally produced content is set to surpass one million unique items (from how-to articles to videos) this week and that it now has streamed over 1 billion videos on YouTube.

Demand Media also said that freelancers who produce content on its sites can now get affordable healthcare. Demand isn't actually paying for anyone's healthcare, but it says that by pooling together the freelancers on its payroll it was able to negotiate healthcare packages at rates that cost about half of what it would cost someone to purchase health insurance individually.