- Look out Amazon. Scribd, a digital document sharing service, is launching an online retail market for books and documents, betting that a surge in interest in reading online will help it transform into an Ebay or an Amazon.com of text. The two-year-old Silicon Valley start-up, whose doubling of audience size every six months has been compared to YouTube’s explosive growth, will let some 60m readers of its service begin charging each other for the rights to access just about anything uploaded to the service.
- Facebook became a relying party for OpenID, the universal web login standard that is trying to gain traction. That means, for example, that Facebook users with an associated Gmail account will be able to browse Facebook without having to login if they are coming from Gmail. But Google, an issuing party, is not likely to become a relying party anytime soon. Doing so would mean surrendering some control of access to their proprietary accounts.
- The back and forth between Craigslist and law enforcement officials continues. Less than a week after the online classified ads site agreed to remove the ‘erotic services’ section, South Carolina attorney general Henry McMaster again threatened legal action against Craigslist. This prompted impassioned posts by Craigslist chief executive Jim Buckmaster and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.
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