Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA by Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

YouTube wants to be on your TV set bad. It’s squeezing its way in through Apple TV, TiVo, and now videogame consoles: the Nintendo Wii and the Sony PS3. Just point those videogame browsers to www.youtube.com/tv and you can now watch a customized version of YouTube from your couch. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/15/youtube-comes-to-the-wii-and-ps3-but-not-xbox 1/15)

Facebook’s ongoing effort to launch a free streaming music service is stalled, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation. The company was close to a deal that would bring free streaming music from three of the four big labels (Universal, Sony, EMI) through the Total Music joint venture. But the deal stalled when the lone holdout, Warner Music, refused to participate. (

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/15/how-warner-music-killed-facebook-music 1/15)

Burger King, through their insanely creative advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky (see their recent Burger King perfume launch), launches a Facebook application that encourages users to remove Facebook friends. Sacrifice ten of them and you got a free Whopper. 233,906 friends were removed by 82,771 people in less than a week. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/14/facebook-blows-a-whopper-of-an-opportunity 1/14)

MySpace Music added a few hundred thousand songs to its streaming music service today by signing up four more independent-label aggregators (Nettwerk Music Group, INgrooves, IRIS Distribution, and RoyaltyShare) plus indie label Wind-up Records. This comes at a time when Facebook is still facing hurdles to launching its own music service. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/15/while-facebook-fiddles-myspace-music-signs-up-another-five-indie-partners 1/15)

Whoopi Goldberg, once a regular on Star Trek: The Next Generation, is set to executive produce and star in the sci-fi miniseries “Stream” for FEARnet.com, per Variety. The series will air in six 5-minute weekly installments both online and via on demand beginning Jan. 15.

Highlight of Whoopi’s career?  The Color Purple.  Low point?  This series.  Ooooooo.  This first episode is bad…and not in that Twilight so-bad-it’s-good sort of way.

At Google, when it rains, it pours. In the wake of announcing its first round of layoffs this afternoon, Google has released several blog posts detailing the upcoming shutdown of a number of services (compiled here by Danny Sullivan). Included among the upcoming closures are: Google Notebooks, Google Catalogs, Dodgeball, Google Video, Google Mashup Editor, and future development of Jaiku (though the service will live on). (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/14/google-axes-dodgeball-jaiku-video-and-more 1/14)

Google padded its lead in search dramatically in 2008 growing by 33.5% to achieve nearly 63% of all U.S. searches, according to Nielsen Online‘s MegaView data. MSN/Windows Live was the big loser, declining by 15% to capture less than 10% of the market for December. If the Yahoo and MSN were to combine search services they would have 26.6% of the market. (Cynopsis 1/15)

Top 10 Search Providers for December 2008, Ranked by Searches (U.S.)
Provider                        Searches (000)  YOY Growth  Share of Searches
All Search                       8,623,705           19.6%           100.0%
Google Search                 5,421,943           33.5%            62.9%
Yahoo! Search                 1,448,140           13.7%            16.8%
MSN/Windows Live             841,457          -15.5%              9.8%
AOL Search                        357,025             5.1%              4.1%
Ask.com Search                  169,116             6.0%              2.0%
My Web Search                     62,415          -11.6%             0.7%
Comcast Search                    50,385           45.1%              0.6%
NexTag Search                     29,219             0.7%              0.3%
AT&T Worldnet Search          27,176             8.0%              0.3%
BizRate Search                     23,593            37.1%             0.3%
Source: Nielsen Online, MegaView Search

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