rumors

Tech gossip blog Valleywag is attempting to counter the TechCrunch-spawned rumor that MySpace.com will be following in Facebook's footsteps and opening up its site to developers.

Sources in touch with the Gawker Media-owned blog allegedly said that MySpace is indeed brewing a developer platform strategy and that the News Corp.-owned social networking site will be making an announcement at next week's Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco--but the two are unrelated.

The announcement, according to Valleywag blogger Megan McCarthy (no relation), will instead deal with MySpace's instant messaging client. Additionally, she wrote, MySpace will … Read more

On Tuesday morning, tech gossip blog Valleywag posted a rumor that TechCrunch's small blog network might not be doing quite as well as its parent brand: Valleywag editor Owen Thomas said that gadget blog CrunchGear had made significant pay cuts and that at least one blogger had been fired. In a message to Valleywag, CrunchGear editor John Biggs attempted to clear the air, saying that some writers are "on hiatus" while the gadget blog works out its new ad sales program and transitions from a per-post model to a monthly salary.

Some blogging insiders, CNET News.com … Read more

Have you gotten sick of the word "platform" yet? Sorry.

According to a post on TechCrunch, MySpace.com is planning to follow in Facebook's footsteps and open up a set of application program interfaces (APIs) so that developers can create "MySpace apps" in the vein of Facebook apps.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, who apparently got the details from developers who have been consulted on the project, wrote that we may be seeing this as early as next week--potentially at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

More specifically, this is allegedly going to be … Read more

Earlier today, my colleague Elinor Mills covered the announcement that Google had purchased the Helsinki, Finland-based microblogging company Jaiku. It's the third oddball move in the mobile (or semi-mobile, as microblogging is) social-networking space that Google's made in the past few years, with its reported acquisition of Zingku late last month and the ill-fated buy of Dodgeball in 2005.

RedMonk analyst James Governor thinks this may not be the last microblog acquisition we'll see. In fact, he said, Google rival Yahoo may be after Jaiku rival Twitter, the company that put "microblog" in everybody's … Read more

AllFacebook blogger Nick O'Neill wrote on Friday that an "extremely reliable anonymous source" had told him that Facebook is working on an in-house rival to Apple's mighty iTunes Store. According to O'Neill, the company is in the process of looking for an executive to head this division--his source allegedly knew about the whole deal because of an acquaintance interviewing for the position--and is already meeting with record labels.

It's unclear whether this would be strictly a music store or whether it might extend to other forms of media, like TV shows and movies.

This … Read more

I learned on Wednesday night that it's fun to play "grill the Google exec." There's also now a little purple lava lamp in my kitchen. You can blame the press cocktail party that Google threw at its New York headquarters at the iconic former Port Authority building in Chelsea.

What you have to understand is that the "Google media party," targeting consumer and lifestyle reporters, had been shrouded in notoriety for the past month. The always classy Page Six section of the New York Post, after all, had described the shindig as "more … Read more

Chatter has intensified recently and the rumor mill is chugging along that Canon will soon be introducing a follow up to the EOS 5D called the EOS 7D. The unofficial keeper of UPC barcode data, upcdatabase.com, even has an entry for the Canon EOS 7D that looks very convincing. On the other hand, Canon has said that it won't release any new dSLRs for the rest of this year and stuck to its guns when I asked about this. So, do I think that we'll see an EOS 7D from Canon anytime soon? No. I don't. … Read more

I'm a smidgen skeptical of this rumor, if only because it seems so darn obvious: TechCrunch reported on Tuesday morning that Time Warner's AOL may have found a use for its Wow.com domain, which it acquired in 1998 as part of the offal of what had once been CompuServe.

The source's big scoop? Wow.com has been transferred to the AOL Games division and will become a World of Warcraft social network. If this turns out to be true, expect plenty of level-28 half-elf mages to be typing "Wow.com" into their browsers soon.… Read more

The Financial Times reported on Sunday that Facebook is working to make its rabidly popular social-networking site available in languages other than English. It's been known for quite some time that translation has been on the company's radar as it expands beyond its U.S. roots--executives have mentioned it amorphously in speeches and panels--so there is very little "real news" here other than the fact that the Financial Times story indicates that there may be evidence that this translation project is a major priority.

Nevertheless, Facebook has been unclear about timing, and has not released any … Read more