Posted 11/22/09 at 08:39:00 PM by Justin Kerr

When Rupert Murdoch announced that he was thinking of taking his News Corp web properties out of the Google search index, speculation as to Microsoft and Bing's involvement was rampant. Turns out, there might have actually been something to the rumors for once. According to the folks over at The Financial Times, Microsoft is willing to grease Murdoch palms to go exclusive with Bing, a move that newspapers will no doubt welcome.

The idea is essentially to force Google to pay for content, something it has historically never done. The news certainly came to the disappointment of Google which tends to endorse the "openness of the web", but Google's UK director Matt Brittin told a conference last week that Google doesn't need news content to stay afloat. "Economically it's not a big part of how we generate revenue" he said. In the end Google will likely still gain indirect access to the content by crawling third party websites that link to News Corp stories, but it will certainly impact Google News and start a new and possibly disturbing trend.

Steve Ballmer has admitted that he is willing to spend heavily for many years to make Bing a serious rival to Google, and Rupert Murdoch is but one of many struggling old media mongrels eager to cash in on the competition in search. If the two parties do end up inking an agreement, expect to see Bing advertise heavily as the only place to find The Wall Street Journal and possibly more deals to come.

Will this earn Bing market share? And what effect do you think this will have on the open web?

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Posted 09/21/09 at 12:20:17 AM by Justin Kerr

If you’re a social networking news junky, you’ve likely been getting a kick out the ongoing battle between Facebook and Twitter. The two competing companies have been scrapping away for months now, but Facebook’s vice president of growth Chamath Palihapitiya is ready to call the war in favor Facebook claiming, “Twitter is in the rear-view mirror”. “To focus on a company with 40 million users that is not growing is not a good idea,” he said, citing Hitwise market share data as evidence of Twitter’s slowdown.

Based on the interview it appears Facebook still has a lot of respect for what Twitter has accomplished (imitation is the highest form of flattery after all), but clearly feels Google is the bigger competitor going forward. “Our task it to make sure we innovate and to make sure there’s no new upstart experience that could take users away.” If going after Google sounds like an unrealistic target, it’s worth noting that Facebook currently has over 300 million registered users, followed up by Yahoo at 600 million, and Google at a whopping 900 million.

Palihapitiya claims the future of Facebook lies in redefining the way people surf the web. He claims rather than simply turning to Google to find content, users will consume information largely based upon recommendations from friends. Can you see yourself setting Facebook to your homepage?

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Posted 03/18/09 at 12:30:38 PM by David Murphy

The competition between open-source projects and retail applications is a never-ending struggle.  Even when two products aren't in direct competition -- like Adobe's Photoshop versus the GNU Manipulation Program -- there's still an underlying push and pull for your attention and resources.  The struggle only deepens when the retail version of the two programs approaches an inexpensive or free pricing model.  Open-source is an alternative, but when is it the better alternative?

Open-source software developer Patrick McKenzie wrote a post recently about the various ways retail software developers can out-develop open-source alternatives to their products.  While it was geared toward the perspective of an open-source creator, he nevertheless gave some good insight as to what differentiates quality open-source projects from the muck.  And a number of his points apply to some of the very applications we've recommended in our weekly freeware/open-source roundups.

Click the jump to find out how the best open-source applications get their crowns!

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Posted 09/24/08 at 11:00:00 AM by Tom Halfhill

AMD continues to suffer through corporate misery, most recently by losing almost $1.2  billion in a single quarter, forcing the replacement of CEO Hector Ruiz with his subordinate, Dirk Meyer. If AMD collapses and Intel becomes the only major vendor of PC processors, will prices soar?

Unfortunately, monopolies usually do inflate prices. They also retard progress. AMD stimulates Intel to price its processors more aggressively and develop better processors. Without AMD, we might not have 64-bit x86 processors today or PC processors with integrated memory controllers. Right now, we’d probably be looking forward to the first quad-core x86 processors instead of the first eight-core chips.

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