Flickr’s founders, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield are leaving Yahoo. The company, which has been pursued (and dropped) by Microsoft, has seen a slew of high profile defections.

Technorati Tags: yahoo

Google has extended its Trends service to include data on sites. Now you can enter domains and get back data on daily uniques (you have to sign in to get the numbers). You can compare more than one domain by adding another separated by a comma. Searchengineland has the skinny.

Technorati Tags: Google, metrics, rankings, search

Amnesty Hypercube aims to let widgets live wherever they want, according to TechCrunch. The software, available currently only the Mac (but with a Windows version promised shortly) allows conversion from desktop to web-based widgets in various formats. Is this the start of a whole interconnected ecosystem of widgets? I wonder if we can use this to free our platform widgets on EpiServer so they can live in the wild?

Technorati Tags: mac, tools, web2, widgets

The way social apps can authenticate against each other has taken usability to a whole new level. But it makes you think how cataclysmic a security breach on one account could be. The new iPhone Blog-it app, for instance, easily created links with my Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and Google identities.

Not all journalists feel put upon and under pressure in this multi-media world. At least that’s the presumption behind the JollyJournalist.com which aims to capture up beat soundbites from journos happy to be alive.

Yahoo! has produced a guide to reputation systems with discussions about which system is right for your particular type of application. Some of the types described are: the competitive spectrum (points mean prizes); named levels (like rank for enthusiasts) and numbered levels (does what it says on the tin). As they say:

A person participating in a social structure expects to develop a reputation and hopes for insight into the reputations of others, but each designed model of participation and reputation embodies its own set of biases and incentive structures. Balancing these forces determines in large measure the success or failure of a social system.

The Online Journalism Blog posts an answer the the question "how can journalists use Facebook?"

1. As a way to find contacts
2. As a way to find special interest groups (particularly niche ones)
3. As a news source via status updates (not convinced about that one)
4. By setting up your own groups to bounce ideas off

Convinced? Using Facebook already?