• FriendFeed accelerated the move towards truly real-time search engines, with the introduction of real-time, constantly updating search results. As companies including Twitter, Facebook, Google and even Microsoft jockey to capture the audience for real-time search, FriendFeed remains a small player, but a technological innovator.
• The woman accused of cyberbullying a 13-year-old into committing suicide had her conviction overturned by a federal judge. Lori Drew and a group of teenagers had harassed Megan Meier by through pseudonymous accounts on MySpace, leading Ms Meier to hang herself.
• Microsoft withdrew the new ad for Internet Explorer 8 that had been roundly criticsed as tasteless, and described by some as “the worst technology commercial ever”. The ad, which was meant to highlight a feature in IE8 that lets users surf the web without their browsing history being recorded, featured a woman projectile vomiting after she saw what her husband had been looking at online.

Tags: Facebook, FriendFeed, google, microsoft, MySpace, twitter

July 3, 2009 6:00am in Techfile | Comment