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Yahoo Messenger, along with several other core products, are looking more and more social every day.

“Searching for people has been Google’s domain. We’re going to take that away from them,” said Larry Cornett, vice president of search products and design.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.–Yahoo increased the social graces of its core products Monday, with a nod to its new home page and a declaration that it’s not done with search just yet.

Many people forget that although Microsoft is set to take over on the back end, Yahoo will retain control of how Bing-powered results are presented on Yahoo pages, said Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president of Yahoo Labs and search strategy. That means the company will continue to tweak the front-end experience, and from that standpoint could really be considered a competitor of Bing.

Corrected at 2:45 p.m. PDT with the correct spelling of search executive Larry Cornett’s name.

Still, there’s still an awful lot of people who haven’t taken the Twitter plunge, said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president of applications products. Yahoo wants to have it both ways: to provide a social outlet for Yahoo users who haven’t signed up for things like Twitter and to give those Yahoo users already hooked into other social networks a chance to run everything through Yahoo.

“Our user base grows when things are simpler and more delightful,” said Elisa Steele, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Yahoo. The idea is twofold: to attract more people who are not already familiar with Yahoo’s content and to entice those who already use products like Yahoo Mail to spend more time on the site. Either way, that’s more eyeballs for advertisers.

Popular Yahoo products such as Mail and Messenger will soon grow more social, allowing users to update their status, share photos with friends, and initiate video calls. In addition, Yahoo Search is about to get a new results page that can connect searchers directly to the Web content they seek without leaving the results page.

At the moment, however, those obsessed with social networking are likely already hooked up with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. The status updates that are available through the top of the Yahoo home page and Mail page will only broadcast to those who you’ve connected with via Yahoo profiles, but at some point Yahoo wants to link that status update box to outside services to allow you to update your status once and broadcast it to multiple networks, said Tapan Bhat, senior vice president of integrated consumer experiences.

And although Yahoo plans to offload its search business to Microsoft at some point over the next several years, it demonstrated a new search results page that can display search results from specific sites that are related to the query. For example, searches for queries such as “how to make sushi” return Wikipedia and eHow links on the left hand side of the page, and searches for people link to results gathered from Facebook or Twitter.

“We are not a version of Bing…What we do with (search results), how we paint it, that’s entirely up to us,” Raghavan said.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

To that effect, Yahoo hopes to tap into the popularity of social networking by redesigning Yahoo Mail–the leading e-mail service in the world–to feature status updates, links to social content like photo albums, and additional applications such as Evite. The new home page allows Yahoo members to update their status and broadcast that within the Yahoo network, and that box will also be added to the Mail and Messenger experiences.

Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, one of the three founders of The Pirate Bay, has stepped down as the site’s spokesman and has said he is moving on to new projects.

Last spring, a Swedish court found the Web site’s founders: Sunde Kolmisoppi, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, guilty of copyright violations. The three men were sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay $3.6 million in damages.

Last week, the Netherlands banned The Pirate Bay in that country and issued a threat that unless the site discontinues operation there, the operators will be fined $42,227. Also, a group representing copyright owners in Italy filed a $1 million copyright lawsuit.

Peter Sunde

In June, Global Gaming Factory said it intended to acquire The Pirate Bay. Last week, the company’s CEO said the Swedish company has managed to find the funding needed to complete the sale. The transaction is supposed to go through sometime after August 27.

Sunde Kolmisoppi has maintained the three founders haven’t owned the site since 2006. They transferred ownership to Reservella. The Motion Picture Industry Association of America claimed recently that the founders control Reservella. Sunde Kolmisoppi denied the allegations.

“I have decided to not be the spokesperson for The Pirate Bay anymore,” Sunde Kolmisoppi wrote in a blog post Monday. “The reasons are many, but most importantly it takes too much of my time. I want to build something new and I want to focus my energy in a different direction. I have projects waiting to be finished, a book is waiting to be finalized and many more books are waiting to be read.”

The music and film industries have alleged that The Pirate Bay was nothing more than a group of men who used technology to steal from artists and pocket the illegal proceeds for themselves.

Napster sowed the seeds of sharing unauthorized music files on the Web and The Pirate Bay harvested the hunger for free content by building a file-sharing community that extended across the globe, according to the founders. Among many young techies and hardcore Internet users, Sunde Kolmisoppi, Neij, and Warg are revered.

“Today marks the end of a small era for me, but I am simply leaving a role in order to be a person instead.”

(Credit:
The Pirate Bay)

Our issues have “been raised to another level and it’s time for biological dispersal,” Sunde Kolmisoppi wrote. “At the same time, I have a feeling of being sessile when I need to be the most motile creature ever. The regeneration will continue with me in another place.

For the past several years, Sunde Kolmisoppi has become the voice of the controversial BitTorrent tracking service that enabled millions to find and eventually download unauthorized copies of movies and other content. His departure follows a series of crushing legal setbacks for The Pirate Bay.

Peter Sunde holds up a pretend IOU after The Pirate Bay founders were sentenced to a year in jail and fined more than $3 million.

Sunde Kolmisoppi suggested that he may return to the copyright/file-sharing debate one day. “It’s an important cause and I will not give the fight up.”

Should the sale go through, copyright owners say they will try to seize any of the proceeds from the sale.

(Credit:
Mats Lewan/CNET News)

This extension is definitely worth keeping around because it does not interfere with normal, right-click behavior. My one hope is that future versions will forgo the options menu in place of a small pop-up, or slide-out menu that asks what you want to do with links after selecting them.

(Credit:
CNET)

By default, selected links open up in new browser tabs, although you can go into the options to choose whether you want them to open up in new windows, or be bookmarked instead. You’re also able to change the color scheme of the box, and the outlines of the selected links–just in case you’re into that sort of thing.

Here’s a must-have Firefox add-on. Called Multi Links, this extension lets you simply right click and drag your mouse across the screen to select multiple links at once. It’s just like selecting multiple files on your computer, and highly effective for tearing through a page of links you want to look at or save for later.

See also: Snap Links (which does the same thing, but has not been updated since February) and Selection Links.

Advanced users can utilize keyboard shortcuts to limit mouse work. For instance, holding down the control or shift button while creating a box means you can hop around a page of results–selecting the items you want to open or save, while skipping over others. The extension is also coded to ignore extra links on search pages, which keeps you from unintentionally opening up the cached and similar links on each result. This worked fine on Google and Bing, but not on Yahoo or Ask.

Want to open up multiple URLs? Just drag your mouse over them with this handy extension.

In other words, we still don’t know if someone was trying to predict the future, has inside knowledge, or is simply having fun with Apple watchers.

Only time (and Apple’s anticipated September event) will tell.

This story was updated Tuesday with some clarification about the origin of the iPad reference. See details below.

It’s hard to know what to make of this reference. Perhaps Borders has some sort of inside knowledge, or perhaps the third-party producer of this survey reads Apple fan blogs. Or maybe Borders is just listening to CNET readers, who seemed to like the name iPad in our “Name that Netbook” poll.

More specifically, after getting a sense of my taste in books and buying habits, Borders asked about my familiarity with digital-reading devices and whether “I plan to buy an Apple iPad (large-screen reading device) this year.” Hmmm, that was a toughie.

MacLife appears to be the first to have noticed that a survey Borders e-mailed to customers, for which those willing to participate earn a coupon for 20 percent off, referenced a device called the Apple iPad.

(Credit:
Borders/Screenshot by Michelle Meyers/CNET)

There are a gazillion rumors swirling out there about a forthcoming Apple tablet of some sort. And while we certainly don’t feel the need to point you to each and every supposed leaked photo or tip from a super-secret inside source, this potential clue is too interesting to pass on.

A Borders customer survey asks about a mystery Apple iPad large-screen reading device.

Updated at 3:15 p.m. PDT on Tuesday: A Borders representative said book audience research firm Codex Group conducted the poll on behalf of Borders and “included the term iPad in the survey.” However, Codex Group founder and CEO Peter Hildick-Smith declined to explain the origin of the term, deferring to his client, Borders.

For its part, Owen told CNET News last week that I4i isn’t seeking to see Word pulled from the market, but rather just to get Microsoft to stop infringing on his company’s patents.

Microsoft was not immediately available for comment.

In a statement, I4i said that Microsoft’s appeal will be heard on Sept. 23. Microsoft had asked for an expedited hearing on the matter.

A district court judge last week issued an injunction that would halt sales of any version of Word that includes a custom XML function that was found by a jury to infringe on a patent from Canada’s I4i. In May, that jury also dinged Microsoft with $200 million in damages, an amount that the judge hiked to more than $290 million at the same time he ordered the injunction, which he scheduled to go into effect 60 days after the Aug. 11 ruling.

Owen said that I4i welcomes the speedy hearing. “This is a vital case for inventors and entrepreneurial companies who, like i4i, are damaged by the willful infringement of their patents by competitors; particularly competitors as large and powerful as Microsoft.”

A federal appeals court has scheduled a hearing next month to decide whether to uphold a ruling that would force Microsoft to stop selling Word in its current form.

“We firmly believe that the U. S. District Court made the right decision on the merits of the case,” I4i Chairman Loudon Owen said in a statement. “We are confident that we will prevail on the appeal.”

In addition to the appeal, Microsoft could also pursue a technical workaround that allows the custom XML function to work in a different way that doesn’t infringe on I4i’s patent, remove that feature from word, or pursue a settlement.

Four seasons of "Lost" are already available.

What do you think: Are you excited to see these ABC shows hitting Netflix, or does it just highlight some favorite shows of yours that still remain unavailable?

While most of these programs are already available for viewing online on ABC’s Web site, the Netflix deal allows them to be watched on TV screens via a large and growing number of Netflix-compatible home video devices, including many Blu-ray players and home theater systems, some Internet-enabled TVs, the Xbox 360, and the $99 Roku Digital Media Player. The ABC content joins programs from rival networks, including Fox, NBC, and CBS, that have long been available on Netflix. (Disclosure: CNET is a division of CBS Interactive.) The online video streaming–available at no extra charge for Netflix subscribers on the $9 per month or higher rental tier–currently offers approximately 12,000 movies and TV shows.

(Credit:
Netflix/screenshot by John P. Falcone)

Several of ABC’s top shows will soon be available to watch via Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” online streaming service. The first four seasons of “Lost” are already available, and they’ll be joined in September by “Desperate Housewives” (seasons four and five), “Grey’s Anatomy” (season five), and “Legend of the Seeker” (seasons one and two). The deal builds on an earlier agreement to make Disney Channel content available on Netflix (ABC is a division of Disney.)

As far as I’m concerned, this seems like another feather in the cap for Netflix. These sort of serialized dramas are perfect fodder for sequential online viewing. (The final season of “Lost” starts early in 2010, and Netflix subscribers who want to catch up–or start from scratch–can do so at no extra charge.) What’s interesting to me is that ABC’s making this move, which could potentially lower demand for sales of the same episodes on DVD and iTunes. One wonders how Disney board member Steve Jobs feels about it.

One area in which this information would be hugely valuable is in connecting enterprises through their respective employees. Think about it: most companies spend far more money on sales and marketing than they do on product development. Why? Because customers pay the bills, obviously, and customers are hard to come by.

I read with interest that open-source messaging vendor Open-Xchange is building a “meta-address book” service that brings together your contacts from various social networking sites into “one continuous stream of updating contacts.” While promising, I don’t think it goes far enough.

It’s nice to have a centralized address book. It’s even better to analyze the connections between contacts and deliver services based on that data, as I recently argued.

For now, however, the enterprise largely treats its employees as drones with no lives (and, hence, no contacts) outside its payroll system. But if enterprises will look for ways to employees to improve their job performance by opening up their address books…we’ll have discovered the next big thing in sales and marketing.

Open-Xchange is usefully connecting contacts into a meta address book, but I long for the day that someone connects those contacts through a meta address book, one that not only knows how well I know a contact, but also what sorts of things we like to do together and makes suggestions based on past history (”You and XXXX are in Boston at the same time - would you like me to arrange a lunch at Henrietta’s Table again through OpenTable?).

This is a useful way to map and monetize the “social graphs” of one’s employees, but this, too, falls short of the full potential of a true “Web 2.0 address book,” to use Tim O’Reilly’s idea.

And someone will have created a billion-dollar business for themselves. Why not you?

This is when the address book becomes interesting, and when it becomes hugely monetizable by the enterprise.

7-Degrees has an interesting solution called PeopleMaps that that crawls the Web for employment data on the contacts you have in Salesforce.com, and then presents an optimal (visual) contact chain to help enterprises figure out how they’re connected to prospective partners or customers.

(Credit:
7-Degrees)

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

(Credit: Marc Johnson)

(Credit: Marc Johnson)

You know that antiglare filters don’t work. So this hugely practical item, retailing at a piffling $20, could bring an entirely new meaning to your outdoor life.

So practical. So you.

Johnson seems to have begun his quest for your heart, mind, and most of your torso with this Craigslist posting .
He claims something called Trend Setters has described the Laptop Burka as a “hot new item.” He also claims a patent has been filed by axioslawgroup.com. However, this URL seems to engender no Web site.

However, for those of us in the deserving paradise of the American west coast, this is the sort of joy that only indispensability can bring.

For a man in Seattle named Marc Johnson has invented the perfect solution to laptop usage on a gorgeous sunny day.

You might be shuddering in the thought that this has religious connotations. But, no. Johnson is not a member of the Seattle Taliban. He is just an inventor who has come up with the ingenious notion of donning a rather all-enveloping burka so that you might be able to blog on the boardwalk or comment in Cannes.

There is an Axios Law Group in Seattle whose URL is axioslaw.com, so perhaps these are the patent filers. There is certainly a Dylan Adams on the staff, the name Johnson quotes on Craigslist.

As you can see from the images that I have placed here to bring you excitement, the Laptop Burka is the ultimate in deep-seated privacy, as well as keeping the light at bay for as long as you might be able to breathe your own slightly stale air.

The Laptop Burka.

No matter. The Laptop Burka is clearly a marvelous invention and I can see the beaches being full of beburka’d bloggers banging their thoughts out across the world, while enjoying a cooling sea breeze.

For those of you in parts of the world where there remain only four or five sunny days–London, New York–the wonderful news that I am about to impart may well be a little frustrating.

A Thousand Oaks, Calif., doctor won the Ig Nobel medicine prize for his firsthand research into arthritis in fingers. As a child and in adulthood, Donald Unger’s mother, several aunts, and mother-in-law warned him that cracking his knuckles would lead to arthritis in his fingers. To test that theory, he cracked the knuckles of his left hand, but not the right hand, every day for more than 60 years.

“There was no arthritis in either hand, and no apparent differences between the two hands,” Unger wrote in a letter to the editor in Arthritis and Rheumatism, Vol. 41, No. 5,prada bags, in 1998, after he had completed only 50 years of his study.

In Japan, researchers turned to a beloved animal for help in home waste reduction. A team at the Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara won the biology prize for “demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90 percent in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.”

The public-health prize was awarded to inventors who received a patent for a brassiere that can be converted into a pair of gas masks.

Meanwhile, other Ig Nobel-honored research suggests that farmers can benefit from improved human-bovine relations. Researchers at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom won the veterinary-medicine prize for their work showing that “Bessie” is likely to produce more milk than “No. 5863329.”

And finally, the prize for literature was given to Ireland’s police service for writing more than 50 traffic tickets to “the most frequent driving offender in the country–Prawo Jazdy–whose name in Polish means “Driver’s License.”

In Switzerland, the half-liter refillable beer bottle is commonly used as a weapon in bar fights and can crack a skull, researchers said.

The physics prize went to researchers from the University of Cincinnati, the University of Texas, and Harvard for “analytically determining why pregnant women don’t tip over” in their paper “Fetal Load and the Evolution of Lumbar Lordosis in Bipedal Hominins.”

“Full and empty bottles suffice in breaking the skull. However, the likelihood of such fractures is greater in blows with an empty bottle. Empty beer bottles are therefore more dangerous,” Dr. Stephan Bolliger wrote in an e-mail response to questions on Friday.

Research into those topics–as well as studies finding that diamonds could be created from tequila and giant panda feces are good for composting–received Ig Nobel Prizes in a ceremony on Thursday night at Harvard University.

There were also awards for findings that came of less research. The economics prize was awarded to officials from four Icelandic banks “for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa–and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.”

The prizes, awarded to scientific achievements that “cannot and should not be reproduced,” are presented in the week before the real Nobel prizes are announced and are sponsored by the science humor magazine “Annals of Improbable Research.”

His conclusion? The cracking has no effect. (A chiropractor in San Francisco previously agreed with that notion in a very unscientific survey conducted by me.)

Have you ever worried that knuckle cracking will give you arthritis or wondered why pregnant women don’t tip over? Me too.

“This result calls into question whether other parental beliefs, e.g., the importance of eating spinach, are also flawed,” he wrote. “Further investigation is likely warranted.”

The research paper concludes that because half-liter beer bottles present “formidable weapons” in a fight, “prohibition of these bottles is therefore justified in situations which involve risk of human conflicts.”

The Ig Nobel Prize for peace went to a group at the University of Bern in Switzerland for its bar room brawl-related research. The doctors, several of whom are forensic pathologists, had been asked to testify in court cases whether a skull can be broken by smashing a beer bottle on someone’s head–and whether that is more easily accomplished with a full bottle or an empty one.

“On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case,” the researchers wrote in an abstract for their paper, “Exploring Stock Managers’ Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production.”

Asked whether certain beer brands might be more dangerous than others, Bolliger said,louis vuitton handbags, “The brand of the bottle is irrelevant, as the major breweries in Switzerland all use the same, recyclable half-liter bottles.”

(Credit:
Stephan Bolliger/Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine)

And in a modern-day alchemy experiment, researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico received the chemistry prize for turning tequila into diamonds. Well, maybe not exactly diamonds, but diamond films that could be an economical component in electrical insulators.

The mathematics prize went to the governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank for “giving people a simple,replica handbags, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers–from very small to very big–by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from 1 cent to 100 trillion dollars.”

There are differentiating factors, though. Google Voice for instance, gives you a single central number that all your other numbers forward to–cell phone, work line, home phone, and VoIP. It employs call screening and machine-facilitated visual voice mail transcription. Using it, you can block calls, record custom greetings, and interact with SMS. You can’t port your number yet, but Google hopes to offer this convenience in the future.

3jam does not replace your mobile data plan.

In addition to receiving e-mailed transcriptions, 3jam stores voice mail audio and transcripts online.

3jam beta costs $4.99 with a 12-month subscription, but price is indirectly proportional to commitment. A three-month bundle costs $5.99, and you’ll pay $8.99 for one month. The charge won’t include texting rates, which 3jam will tack on for $5 to $20 per month.

Start-up 3jam, on the other hand, gives you the option of choosing one or more phone numbers. It, too, routes calls to VoIP, including Skype (Windows | Mac) and IM voice services such as Yahoo Messenger with Voice (Windows | Mac). Like Google’s product, you can manage texts and visual voice mail messages online. Unlike Google Voice, you can preserve your original phone number by porting it over to 3jam’s service. 3jam also supports voice-to-text machine transcription and SMS routing. It’s a premium service and is available internationally in an open beta.

3jam has arrived at its similar competing service from a background in group text messaging. As such,chanel bags, it has not yet incorporated some of Google Voice’s more advanced voice features, like call screening,prada bags, call blocking, and listening in. It does, however, convert text messages to e-mail copy, allowing you to receive and respond to SMS messages via e-mail.

If you’re itching to try Google Voice, but haven’t received one of the coveted private beta invites,louis vuitton handbags, a Menlo Park, Calif., company called 3jam is offering an alternative.

Google Voice is a free service that is only available in the U.S., and only then to those with invites. Previous GrandCentral users also got an automatic in, since they had joined the service before Google snatched it up.

This week, 3jam announced an open beta of its new voice forwarding and transcription service that bears a striking resemblance to Google Voice (covered here).

Pricing and carrier details

Whether you port your current mobile number to 3jam or get a brand-new number, 3jam is an after-market add-on service you purchase alongside your mobile and landline plan. When you port your number, your carrier will bestow a new one that you’ll keep on record, but won’t pass out to family or friends. Instead, they’ll dial the old number (now the 3jam number) to ring you simultaneously on all lines.

How does it all stack up? 3jam may find it difficult to compete against the free Google Voice when Google’s service opens up to all, especially if it’s lacking some of Google Voice’s more sophisticated screening and blocking tricks. However, its global availability, offer to keep your beloved cell phone number, and support for multiple lines will make it more attractive to some, at least until Google Voice begins operating on a global scale.

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3jam)

With its provision of multiple phone numbers, 3jam hopes to leverage its SMS strength by offering users the ability to text groups of people at one of those permanent group numbers–the intramural sports team, book club, fund-raising committee, and so on.