Tech Blog

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Google

YouTube to kill IE6 support on March 13

Over six months ago, Google announced it would start phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 on Orkut and YouTube, and started pushing its users to modern browsers. The search giant has now given a specific kill date for old browser support on the video website via a page on Google.com titled Solve a Problem: Upgrading your browser:

Support stops on March 13th. Stopped support essentially means that some future features on YouTube will be rolled out that won't work in older browsers.

Gmail Labs graduation and retirement
Labs started out with 13 features and quickly grew to 60, with even more on the way. We've received countless comments and kept an eye on our stats: some of these experimental features were adopted by millions and others trickled along with little usage. A couple have already graduated from Labs and we've already retired one: Tasks was the first to become a regular part of Gmail, Right-side Labels was retired when we updated the way labels work, and Offline Gmail graduated a couple months back. Today, true to the original intent of Gmail Labs, we're graduating six more features and retiring five.

Apple

iTunes Prize Winner to Steve Jobs: “Yeah Right, Who Is This Really?”

When Steve Jobs personally called Woodstock, Georgia native Louie Sulcer to tell him he’d won Apple’s iTunes Store 10 Billion Song Sold contest, Sulcer first thought was that he was being pranked. “He called me and said, ‘This is Steve Jobs from Apple.’ I said, ‘Yeah right,’ ” Sulcer tells Rolling Stone.

Microsoft

Windows 7 beta expires next week
Indeed it does, and if you, like me, are running the RC Beta, then I suggest we both read up and upgrade, otherwise we're going to be subject to system shutdowns every 2 hours. It'll be an interesting week for some

Online

Facebook Patents The News Feed
On Tuesday, Facebook was awarded a major patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”. This is a huge deal for a number of reasons, most significantly that it grants Facebook the opportunity to pursue other social networks which are infringing on their patent. Included in the patent are additional claims including feed filters, feed advertising, searching the feed, and more. (update We’ve been told that this is about the implicit feed stories. Will update when we have more info.)

Twitter Ad Platform 'Imminent'
Twitter plans to launch an advertising platform in about a month, according to Seth Goldstein. The chief executive officer and co-founder of socialmedia.com led a panel Monday focused on the next wave of interactive advertising at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2010 in Carlsbad, Calif., that shed light on Twitter's strategy

This you???? : Phishing attack hits Twitter users
Messages asking "This you????" followed by a link are being sent via the system to unsuspecting users. If you click on the link you are taken to a fake Twitter login page, where hackers are just waiting for you to hand over your credentials. In fact, they can automatically post the phishing message from your account as soon as you hand over your details.

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Your Turn
So, did I miss anything? What online story really got you going this week? Link to it in the comments!