In this edition of the Week in Review, the Facebook news keeps coming, MySpace tries to wrap its arms around the whole child online safety thing, and it might start costing more to watch video online than just to buy it in a store.
- Hasbro, the company that makes Scrabble, demanded removal of the very popular Scrabulous Facebook application this week, and is going after a Boggle-style game on the social network, too. More on Facebook: CEO Zuckerberg appeared on 60 Minutes, the site got some German funding, MySpace is still leading in traffic, and the British government wants to know what happens with deactivated accounts (and so do we, actually…).
- Contextual search startup Proximic adds a huge inventory of auction listings.
- Widget developer Slide was valued at $500M just today. Bubble?
- Compete revealed winning 2007 sites and their loser counterparts.
- MySpace teamed up with state attorneys to put in place some new security features protecting minors.
- We explored ISP censoring earlier this week, then Time Warner announced they’ll test a “metered” model that charges broadband users by how much bandwidth they use instead of a monthly “buffet” fee, potentially making music and movies extremely cost-prohibitive to download or stream.
- Some in-house news: we’re on Facebook, and we’ll be in San Diego for the Online Marketing Summit next month (Also – last call for discount tickets).
- OpenID, the organization/consortium/movement to eliminate username overload, got a boost from Yahoo’s support this week. Another exec left Yahoo this week. And is there more to come from Yahoo in mobile this year? Their ad deal with T-Mobile suggests so.
- Popular microblogging format Twitter is going to Japan. They still have some kinks to work out here in America, as this week all the tweeting over Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote crashed the site (and Jobs’ talk tanked Apple stock). Other international bloggy news: Blogger’s now available in Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew.
- In non-profit news, Wikipedia turned 7 this week; what did we ever do without it? For history buffs, the Library of Congress put two of its collections on Flickr. And take note, Google.org applicants: the search giant’s philanthropic arm has a roadmap now.
