These are my links for January 8th:

• Google Toilet Paper : Optimize Your Wipe | Search Engine Journal – Here’s a fun Friday post about what could be easily mistaken for a new Google product launch to accompany the Nexus One and other new Google products : Google Toilet Paper (which gives a new meaning to “just Google it”).
• MediaPost – news and directories for media, marketing and online advertising professionals – If you were on vacation, similar to me, during the end of December you might have missed Twitter's big announcement. The company acquired Mixer Labs, the creator of GeoAPI, which provides developers with the ability to query data. That data can come from about 16 million businesses and thousands of points of interest. The technology also offers developers a layer on which to handle complex geographical queries and location-based services.
• National Weather Service: Twitter Storm Reports – GeoTagging is the act of associating geographical information with something, and Twitter has recently added the capability GeoTagging individual Tweets. This allows the NWS to correlate each Tweet to your location when it was sent. This capability will help to enhance and increase timely & accurate online weather reporting and communications between the public and their local weather forecast offices.
• Wanted: Your Weather Reports, Geotagged and Tweeted – If your natural reflex when the weather gets rough is to tweet about it, that reflex can now help the National Weather Service do its job better thanks to a new Twitter storm reporting program.
• Social Media Today | Social Media Policies of 113 Organizations – With companies searching for and developing standards for social media usage, many of them have come up with social media policies of their own.
• Top CMOs on Twitter – These are the top 63 Chief Marketing Officers around the world who 1) provide useful content and consistently engage with their followers on Twitter, 2) truly "get it" when it comes to the best ways to use Twitter and other forms of social media, and 3) were active on Twitter as of January 7, 2010. Please let me know if I have missed any CMOs who have 500 or more followers. After the review and confirmation process, he/she may be added to this list, which is updated regularly.
• The Dawn of Facebook’s People-organized Web – GigaOM – In 2010, Facebook is setting out to structure a social layer of the web, indexing web pages and objects by harnessing what its users say about them, including whether those users like them or not, and what they tag within them.
• Apple And Verizon: Are Two Star-Crossed Lovers Ready To Consummate? – Apple and Verizon. Two star-crossed lovers.

  A few years ago, when Apple originally set out with the idea of giving the iPhone to one carrier exclusively in the U.S., they first went to Verizon. But the network balked at some of Apple’s demands, which at the time of complete and utter carrier dominance in this country, must have seemed like a joke. So instead, Apple with with AT&T, and the rest is history.

• Anxious Yahoo BOSS Developers To Speak With DOJ About Microsoft Deal – In July 2008, Yahoo announced a radical new product called BOSS, or “Build Your Own Search Service” that lets developers tap into Yahoo’s core search index with an unprecedented amount of flexibility. Now, in light of the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal that was announced last summer, the future of BOSS is uncertain. That’s bad news for the many developers who have built projects on the BOSS APIs, some of whom are building businesses off of the service. Now, after being met with months of silence and uncertainty, some BOSS developers are taking action: they’ve scheduled a conference call with the Department of Justice to discuss their concerns.

These are my links for January 8th:

• Apple Seizes 16 Domain Names From A Guy In One Fell Swoop – When you own domain names associated with the trademarks of a large company, more often than not, they’re going to file a complaint with the ICANN UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy). And more often than not, they’re going to win control of the name. Such was the case yesterday with 16 names related to Apple that one man happened to own.
• Pioneer to Bring Pandora to Your Car Radio … For $1,200 – Pandora and Pioneer — manufacturer of car audio systems — are partnering to bring Internet radio to your car.
• Qualcomm Chip to Power Verizon iPhone [RUMOR] – Qualcomm’s CEO Paul Jacobs has openly expressed interest in inserting a Qualcomm chip into Apple’s popular iPhone. New rumors reported by TheStreet.com indicate that Qualcomm’s endeavors were successful: A Qualcomm chip will power a new version of the iPhone on Verizon in the summer.
• DASH: Sony Reveals Pocket Internet Device – Sony has revealed details about their Internet device at the CES – Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Read on find out more.
• Vimeo to Launch Support for 1080p – In case 720p wasn’t enough for your gorgeous, transcendent works of motion picture art, Vimeo will begin hosting 1080p videos by the end of this month.
• The Rise of Digital Music & The Return of the Record – According to the report, sales were up 2.1 percent in 2009 from 2008, with consumers snagging 1.16 million digital tracks (an 8.3 percent increase from ‘08) and 76.4 million digital albums (a 16.1 percent bump). In fact, 40 percent of all music purchases in 2009 were digital.
• Tweetdeck Infiltrates the News Room – Sky News — a 24-hour UK news site owned by News Corp. — is changing up their entire newsroom to focus more on Twitter.
• Boxee Beta Goes Public and Boxee Box Specs Revealed – Today on the company blog, Boxee revealed the specs for the Boxee Box and announced that the Boxee Beta is now officially open to the public.
• Near Me Now: Google’s Mobile Homepage is Location Aware – Go to Google.com in your iPhone or Android browser and you’ll see a small new addition to the homepage: a tiny Near Me Now option below the search box. The new functionality turns your location into an automated search query and makes finding or learning about places in your immediate vicinity a no brainer.
• Bra Color Facebook Status Updates Go Viral, But Why? – Facebook is quite the colorful place today. An odd meme — bra color status updates — has made its way around the network, but no one really knows how or why the what-color-is-your-bra meme took off.

These are my links for January 7th through January 8th:

• Photograbber Downloads Tagged Photos of You from Facebook – Facebook – Lifehacker – The next time you're skimming Facebook and run across pictures your friends have posted, there's no need to monkey around asking for copies via email. Use Photograbber to snag them right off Facebook yourself.
• Remains of the Day: The U.S. Consumes 3.6 Zettabytes in One Day Edition – Remainders – Lifehacker – Wow
• Delete Giant Email Chains to Speed Up Gmail Mobile Webapp – Gmail – Lifehacker – Gmail's iPhone/Android-optimized webapp is nearly as good as a mail client, but not if you keep multi-multi-message threads near the top of your queue. One blogger saw a nearly 7-second decrease in loading time after killing one seemingly endless chain.
• MailBrowser Keeps Gmail Contacts, Attachments Local and Handy – Gmail – Lifehacker – Firefox/Internet Explorer: If Gmail or Google Apps mail is attached to your workday like your right arm, MailBrowser could be a handy pop-out sidebar tool for making sense of the people who mail you and the files they send.
• Boxee Blog » Boxee Beta Goes Public, Download Now – The Boxee Beta is officially out. You can grab it here.
• Facebook is Building a New Payment Operations Team – Although Facebook has been talking about building a payments service for years, the project has only slowly rolled out.
• Yahoo Further Bridges the Gap Between Internet and TV – Today at CES, Yahoo is expanding its partnerships and making the TV Widget Developer Kit publicly available.

These are my links for January 7th:

• Social Media Collective Wisdom | Who’s Blogging What (Special Edition) Jan 7, 2010 – Some expert thinking on five social media questions as we enter the first decade
• Facebook Just Got Its Own VitaminWater Flavor: “Connect”. Seriously. – Here’s a first. VitaminWater has just announced that its newest flavor will be called “Connect”, complete with a Facebook logo and a full paragraph description loaded with references to untagging, friend requests, and photo stalking. It’s black cherry-lime flavored, with caffeine and “eight key nutrients”. And it’s coming to stores nationwide in March.
• Ask Me, Ask Me: Tumblr Adds a New Query Feature – Good news for anyone who loves interacting with a particular Tumblr: The blogging platform has added an Ask feature that allows you to directly ask a blogger questions.
• Ford SYNC Will Soon Stream Pandora Radio – 2010 is shaping up to be the year Ford SYNC forever alters how we experience digital content in our vehicles. Today, the automotive company is breaking even more ground with the news that the next evolution of SYNC will support third-party mobile applications. Get ready to stream Pandora and tweet hands-free in your Ford.
• Have a Nexus One? Good, Now Tear it Down – Geeks can usually be divided into two categories: those who are perfectly happy with merely using their gadgets, and the more radical type, who simply have to tear them down to see what’s inside

These are my links for January 6th through January 7th:

• HootSuite Now Lets You Update Your WordPress Blog – HootSuite, the popular Twitter app geared towards businesses and power users, has just issued yet another update to their web-based client, featuring the ability to post to the WordPress.com blogging platform, URL and content previews, and trending topic explanations.
• iTunes Browser Previews Now With Actual Music – Back in November of 2009, Apple finally rolled out a web browser preview for music in the iTunes catalog. It let you view the albums page, see all the songs included on the album, their length, as well as price for individual tracks.
• Graphic.ly Creates the Digital Comic Book Store – During Microsoft’s keynote at CES 2010 this evening, Steve Ballmer showed off a very cool mobile and web application called Graphic.ly, a platform that aims to be the ultimate digital content delivery system for the publishing world.
• 2010 Census Turns to Facebook to Maximize Impact, Reach Young Adults – As the year 2010 gets underway, so does the federal Census in the United States — only this time around it has gone somewhat digital, incorporating Facebook and other digital media to spread the word about being counted.
• HOW TO: Erase Your Online Past [HUMOR] – These days, it’s getting tougher and tougher to keep a good name unbesmirched. Surveys indicate that as many as half of hiring managers use search engines to screen job applicants, and 1 in 10 have rejected potential employees because of damaging information on the web. Even if there’s no one out to get you, it’s likely that you’ve left your own e-trail of embarrassment: FacebookFacebookFacebook photos, blog comments, cached web pages, YouTubeYouTubeYouTube videos — all these things can provide the world with evidence of your previous poor judgement and wrongdoing.
• Echofon 3.0 Gets With the Twitter Times – You have plenty of options when it comes to using Twitter on your iPhone. But Echofon just made a big move for your attention by releasing version 3.0.
• Video: Google’s “F*ck You iPhone” Phone. The REAL Google Phone (Satire, NSFW) – As we’re all well aware, Google released the Nexus One yesterday, the first supposed “Google Phone.” But it’s hardly an iPhone killer. For that role, Google has something much more sinister in mind. Meet the “Fuck You iPhone” Phone.
• “Inspired” By Formspring, Tumblr Launches Nearly Identical “Ask Me” – Popular microblogging service Tumblr has just launched a new feature called “Ask Me."
• The Oscars of Twitter: Shorty Awards to Honor Creators of Short-Form, Real-Time Content – Last year, SawHorse Media, a Twitter aggregator that pioneered the concept of lists, put together the Shorty Awards. This contest and ceremony was intended to "honor the best producers of short, real-time content."
• 5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice – ReadWriteStart – The best advice we can give you is to know your audience. You don't try to sell booze to pregnant women, you don't make God-jokes in Utah and you don't get a term sheet without tailoring your pitch. Investors are already blogging about what they want from potential portfolio companies, so if you're looking for funding you should be reading their blogs. While we know there are plenty of useful investment-related blogs, here's a list of five to get you started.

These are my links for January 4th through January 6th:

• Keep All Those Resolutions You Just Made: Try mySomeday – So, this year, you've resolved to lose weight, take a class, learn a new language and buy a better mobile device. Good for you – but we all know how well most new year's resolutions go.
• Facebook’s 1st CTO Launches His Next Company (Screen Shots) – Adam D'Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company's first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora. Built by D'Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself "A continually improving collection of questions and answers." In our very early testing it's a pleasure to use, but we're going to share screen shots with you tonight and write about it in depth after more extensive use tomorrow.
• Social Media Today | 8 Ways To Use Twitter Lists – We talked recently about the Twitter lists set up by My Creative Team. Are you using Twitter lists? Tell us about it.
• Social Media Today | 3 Helpful Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2010 – I read a lot of 2010 predictions to end up with 3 that I felt were truly helpful to a seasoned marketer from a major business. There are a lot of common clams out there from "this is the year of mobile marketing" to the many ways people guess that location-based marketing will take off (this ranges form the 'augmented reality' fans to the predictions that Four Square is a harbinger of major innovation).
• Social Media Today | 7 Tips for Writing Engaging Content –
• How Data Will Impact the Way We Do Business – Outliers like Factual, WolframAlpha, Daytum (Daytum), FlowingData, and InfoChimps have proven that painting our world in data (and metadata) is a rather valuable endeavor for any business.
• Facebook for iPhone 3.1 Adds Push Notifications, Address Book Syncing – Up until now, the Facebook iPhone app [iTunes link] had everything but push notifications. The launch of version 3.1, however, remedies that ill. The other 3.1 biggie is the ability to sync your Facebook friends with your phone’s address book contacts — photos and all.
• 28 Days Later: Say Goodbye to the Netflix New Release Rental – Today is sad day for Netflix customers. The online video rental supplier has just announced an agreement with Warner Bros. that will forever alter your online rental experience. Now should you wish to rent a Warner Bros. flick you’ll have to wait out a 28-day holding period after the film’s initial DVD release date.
• Analysis: Yawn, Google Introduces iPhone Clone | Epicenter | Wired.com – Congratulations, Google. You’ve spent untold millions of dollars to produce another iPhone — two years late. That about sums up the company’s Nexus One phone launch today.
• Exclusive: Apple to Buy Quattro Wireless for $275 Million | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD – Apple is set to announce that it has acquired Quattro Wireless for $275 million, several sources confirmed.

These are my links for January 4th:

• Make Video Encoding Easy and Affordable With Encoding.com – Encoding.com is the leading SaaS provider of studio-class video encoding services. It scales instantly and supports all popular media formats.
• Yahoo to Unload E-mail Provider Zimbra on VMWare – As Yahoo continues to refine and redefine itself, it’s been offloading and shuttering some services in an effort to slim down (RIP Geocities!). One of the divisions that’s been on the auction block since September is Zimbra, an open-source e-mail company Yahoo acquired in September 2007 for $350 million.
• 5 Superb Social Media Tools for Musicians – Musicians take notice
• Eric Schmidt: The Baddest Man On Twitter – Stop what you’re doing right now (reading this) and go look at Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s latest Twitter profile picture. Now look closer. Yes, it appears he’s wearing a flak jacket, also known as a bullet-proof vest.
• An Inside Look At A Twitter Style Guide: 140 Characters – We’ve all seen Twitter grow into the company that it is now, but what was it like when it first started — back when it was still called Odeo, and Twitter wasn’t in existence. As we know, Twitter was spun off from Evan William’s company Odeo, into what we know now as Twitter, the social networking service where you post short messages in 140 characters or less.
• Nothing to celebrate on Public Domain Day 2010 in the US – What child has not sat starry-eyed around the fire, dreaming of the goodies to come on January 1—Public Domain Day? The thought of new books and movies and music coming out from copyright is enough to send sugarplums dancing through heads, unless you live in the US in 2010. In which case, you have nothing to celebrate, since nothing is entering the public domain this year.
• Pearl Jam Gives A Song Away For A Tweet – Regular readers may know my affinity for Pearl Jam. The band, which released a new album, Backspacer, last year had a series of promotions with MySpace to promote the album. Now they’re turning to Twitter for some more.
• 4 Ways for Augmented Reality to Get Past the Hype – GigaOM – With 197 million augmented reality-capable smartphones set to be in the global market by 2012, up from nearly 91 million in 2010, the building blocks are falling into place for people to merge digital information with their view of the physical world. But while we’re just getting to the point that normal users can see the promise of augmented reality for themselves, there’s still a long way to go.
• If You Tweet, He Will Come: Mayor Cory Booker Shovels Snow for a NJ Resident – As the snow piled up on New Year’s Eve, Jersey resident Ravie Rave didn’t call a snow plow service to take care of her 65-year-old father’s walk — she tweeted at Newark Mayor Cory Booker.
• CES 2010: What to Expect [VIDEO] – What to expect from CES 2010. From the team at Mashable.com

These are my links for January 4th:

• Former Time Warner CEO Apologizes for “Worst Deal of the Century” [VIDEO] – Now that Time Warner and AOL are officially dissolved, those behind the deal – originally valued at $164 billion – are speaking out. This morning, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin and AOL co-founder Steve Case discussed the deal on CNBC as we approach its tenth anniversary.
• Las Vegas Courthouse Shooting: Audio Captured on YouTube [VIDEO] – A deadly shooting occurred in the lobby of a Las Vegas federal courthouse building. According to reports from CNN, the suspected gunman was shot and killed after opening fire on federal personnel. A citizen journalist got it all on tape.
• News Corp. Unloads Rotten Tomatoes Onto Flixster – News Corp is unloading more of its digital assets. This time it’s the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, which is being acquired by startup Flixster, which has the most popular movie app for the iPhone and other mobile devices. The purchase price was not disclosed, but it was at least in part a stock transaction. News Corp now owns a minority stake in Flixster, which has only raised a total of $7 million in venture capital.
• Pinging In The New Year: Seesmic Acquires Ping.fm – Well that didn’t take long. Just four days in 2010 and we already have an acquisition. Social networking application Seesmic has acquired the social status updater Ping.fm.
• Video: iPhone hacked to support the Magic Mouse – Those gifted gents over at the BTStack might just be too clever for their own good. First they blow our minds by sneaking Wiimote support onto the iPhone, and then tickle our productivity-loving souls by hacking in Bluetooth keyboard support. It’s a bit awkward to be typing away on a physical keyboard, only to have to reach over and poke the screen whenever you want to do something – wouldn’t it be nice to be able to use a mouse instead?
• Vegas-bound! What to expect from CES – All of us at CrunchGear are prepping for the pain-fest we all know as the Consumer Electronics Show. For those not aware, every January, just after they’ve waddled away from the all-you-can-eat buffet called the Holidays, journalists, bloggers, and big box electronics buyers all head to Las Vegas for more of the same.
• Worlds Collide: Twitter Has More Uptime Than Facebook – If one of Twitter’s New Year’s resolutions is to reduce sightings of the fail whale, it is off to a good start. Last week, the service was up a laudable 97.97 percent of the time, beating out even Facebook’s availability of 97.22 percent, according to benchmarks published by AlertSite. The only site in the benchmark with better uptime was YouTube, with 99.13 percent availability during the week. (MySpace and LinkedIn showed below average uptimes of 94.74 percent and 95.48 percent, respectively).
• Kleiner-backed GOGII Releases textPlus for Android – Why pay for text messaging anymore when you can send texts for free? That’s the message GOGII is trying to send to users via its textPlus application, which has been wildly successful on the iPhone with over 3.2 million downloads.

These are my links for January 2nd through January 4th:

• More Smartphone Users Now Use Their Phones to Shop Online – Smartphone users are becoming increasingly comfortable with using their phones to shop online. According to new data from Compete, about 37% of smartphone users have purchased something with their handset in the last 6 months. Among the most popular items that these users bought are music, books, DVDs, video games and movie tickets. At the same time, though, Compete also found that smartphone users are very likely to abandon shopping sites that haven't been optimized for mobile usage. Almost 8% of smartphone owners who tried to buy something from their phone were simply unable to do so.
• Flixster Acquires Rotten Tomatoes – Flixster just announced that it has acquired Rotten Tomatoes, the popular movie review site, from IGN Entertainment. IGN is a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Flixster is one of the world's most popular movie communities and currently features about 2.3 billion user ratings and reviews from its users. Rumors about this acquisition first surfaced in late December, when Kara Swisher first reported that a potential acquisition of Flixster by MySpace would hinge upon a merger of Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster.
• Twitter’s Psychologist Strikes Again: Analyze Your Lists – Dan Zarrella has long impressed us with his discourses on the science of retweets, as well as his psychoanalytic apps that scan and parse Twitter streams – one for general analysis and one for dreams.
• The 50 Most-Blogged Albums of 2009, Streaming Free: HypeMachine Zeitgeist Out Now – Hype Machine, the smart, long-running MP3 blog aggregator, has posted its annual collection of the most-blogged-about albums, songs and musical artists of the year. Once again, the project is a pleasure to consume and will unfold throughout the month of January. Top albums 50 through 41, Mumford and Sons through Monsters of Folk, are available now in full for streaming.
• Rock & Roll Will Never Die? It Might on Facebook – The graying of the Facebook population seems to have continued according to new stats released today by iStrategyLabs. And while one might expect more of the site's now nearly 10 million users over the age of 55 to be Neil Young fans, his "Rock N' Roll Will Never Die" refrain seems to be falling through. The listing of the term "rock and roll" as an interest is down over 60% among Facebook users in the past year.
• ComScore Ups the Ante in Mobile Analytics – ComScore, a leading Web statistics provider, has joined with Flurry Analytics to provide a more complete picture on the who, what, when, where and how of our use of mobile media. Founded just over a year ago, Flurry has grown immensely and this move will only serve to boost its popularity.
• Watching TV Together in Different Time Zones – NYTimes.com – Simple technology, including video chatting services like Skype, is making it possible for far-flung friends to watch shows together, even if they can’t share the same bowl of popcorn.
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• George Washington’s Rules for Social Media « digiphile – The following “rules” are interpretation of his intent, not President Washington’s words.
• Why Twitter Will Endure – NYTimes.com – In the pantheon of digital nomenclature — brands within a sector of the economy that grew so fast that all the sensible names were quickly taken — it would be hard to come up with a noun more trite than Twitter. It impugns itself, promising something slight and inconsequential, yet another way to make hours disappear and have nothing to show for it. And just in case the noun is not sufficiently indicting, the verb, “to tweet” is even more embarrassing.

These are my links for January 1st:

• Guide to Twitter – The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter | Webdesigner Depot – Twitter isn’t just a cute way for keeping in instant touch with friends on mobile phones anymore. It has ramped up quickly to be the search engine of choice for some with its human driven results.
• At Foursquare Venues, The Mayor Eats For Free – Foursquare, the geo-location based check-in game, just announced its first venue that is combining badges and promotions. On Foursquare you get badges for checking into places. The person who checks into a place the most becomes the “Mayor.” You also get promotions from restaurants and bars nearby based on your location. Now those two elements are being tied together.
• Twitter and Me! Why It’s The Only Social Media Tool I Use. –
• Twitter’s Most Influential Topics of 2009 – In 2009, influence emerged as a source of filtering and focus, especially when Twitter released its new “lists” feature to empower users to organize and follow custom streams by topic, personality, and themes.
• ShopSavvy Barcode Reader for Android: Now With QR Code Support – When Google’s Android platform first launched in late October of 2008, ShopSavvy from Big in Japan was easily one of the most impressive apps available for the platform. Using the phone’s built-in camera, ShopSavvy scans barcodes of any product and then uses the data connection to search the Internet for the best price. It’s one of those really genius mobile app ideas, and it is no surprise that ShopSavvy was one of the winners of Google’s Android Developer Challenge in 2008.
• Tweetup and Hashtag Make the List of Top 2009 Words – “Tweetup,” “hashtag,” “freemium,” “paywall,” “unfriend” and “tag cloud” all made the list, which was compiled by dictionary expert Susie Dent after poring over the two billion-word Oxford English Corpus database. One of the more “late to the party” terms included is “Slashdot effect,” which finally achieves its small measure of lexical legitimacy despite having already arguably had its heyday.