The Week That Was

Many things went down this past week whilst I traveled. Here’s a roundup of what I missed:

Windows Live Local launched (good coverage from Gary and Mike). So did Squidoo, which is either brilliant, or an AdSense honeypot scheme, or both. In any case, I know and have spoken with founder Seth Godin, and he’s not one to take lightly. Speaking of launches and potent founders, Grouper has launched version 2, and it’s quite well received. Congrats to Josh Felser….

UPDATE: I was too flip in describing Squidoo as a “scheme” and the word “honeypot” does have negative connotations – what I meant to say was, it’s built to attract search crawlers and to rank well in search, increasing the value of Adsense and other monetization schemes (there’s that word again) such as affiliate networks. That’s not a bad thing, of course. I did not mean to give the wrong impression….

Sun unvieled its Niagara servers. (Sun release) Why do you care? Because Sun claims these new, 32-hardware-thread servers are the future of web bare metal. Is the company right? Hard to say – I’m certainly not a hardware geek. But I spoke with Scott McNealy for my Business 2 column, and he confirmed that these new servers are pretty much purpose built for the datacenter demands of massively scaled services like search. Watch this space.

Yahoo announced POTS integration with its VOIP service. From the Merc: With the new service, the estimated 82 million people worldwide who use Yahoo instant messenger will be able to call any traditional fixed or wireless phone number in 180 countries. They will also be able to purchase a phone number with which to receive calls. The service comes with a free voicemail box.

Xeni at BB had an interesting post on her interview with director Steven Soderbergh. What I found compelling was his vision of “video mashups”, an idea I really believe will take off next year (yes, my “predictions” post is coming…).

Has Gmail learned to empty the trash? Philipp wonders. Elsewhere, folks are wondering if Google News will soon be “monetized” and if the company will snap up Riya.com.

Clearly hiring is on the minds of the execs at Google. Eric pens an article about his “Ten Golden Rules” for Newsweek.

More Google: The company released a transit planner.

Ingenio and Infospace hook up on pay per call.

The Times reports on the ongoing scrum for the AOL business. Headline: AOL is probably not for sale, now that Gates and Google are willing to pad Time Warner’s bottom line to secure AOL’s search business. No kidding!