Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

This morning you likely woke up to a flurry of nearly identical messages in your Facebook News Feed prompting you to get out and vote – the result of what may have been largest unified online statement ever as nearly 1 million Facebook members simultaneously changed their status messages. The effort was put together by Causes, the altruistic Facebook and MySpace application, which asked Facebook users to “donate” their status messages in the hopes of getting more of their friends to the polls. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/04/causes-holds-largest-online-rally-ever-to-get-you-to-the-polls 11/4)

Amazon.com is partnering with retailers on an effort to cut down on the packaging required to ship goods. The online retailer will ship products in plain brown cardboard boxes and without extraneous boxes or plastically-sealed packaging inside. ClipSyndicate/KING-TV (Seattle) (11/3) , CNET (11/3) , The New York Times/Bits blog (11/3)

Netflix has decided to stop selling used DVDs to its customer base, instead deciding to focus its attention on its rental by mail and Watch Instantly services. “As you know, our core business is delivering great movie rentals to you on DVD by mail and instantly to the computer and TV, so we’ve decided it makes sense for us to focus exclusively on that,” the company stated in a Netflix blog post. CNET (11/3)

Trying to push through their search advertising deal, Google and Yahoo have revised the terms of the deal to satisfy antitrust objections by the Department of Justice, reports the WSJ (article behind the pay wall). The main concessions are putting 25 percent cap on the revenues that Yahoo can generate from the partnership and making it a two-year deal instead of a ten-year deal. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/03/google-and-yahoo-revise-deal-to-get-government-approval 11/4)

A Flickr user named Garrett Ryan Smith uploaded the 3 billionth photo to the site today. The last big milestone was 2 billion photos, a year ago.They’re well behind Facebook, with 10 billion. And they’re falling further behind – a year ago Facebook had just 4.1 billion photos. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/03/three-billion-photos-at-flickr 11/3)