Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Here’s a clean look at the upcoming Facebook homepage redesign that will go live next week. The new design will give users the ability to easily feed the news stream by friend type and network, and gives users a much easier way to post links, photos and videos. The news feed will also begin updating in real time without page refreshes. See more here. CEO Mark Zuckerberg also wrote a blog post summarizing the changes here. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/04/screen-shots-the-new-facebook-home-page 3/4)

I love the real-time update on the news feed.  Now I won’t need to refresh Facebook 5.000 times a day.  This will convince me that I don’t in fact have a social networking addition.  Sigh.  Dodged that bullet!

(Below) The only one I don’t really like is that company pages will become profiles much like MySpace enabled companies to have their own profiles.  Why would I want to be friends with CNN?  That feels wrong…  I mean.  I like CNN but I don’t like like CNN.  I can’t exactly see what it looks like from the photos but I guess I’ll wait till next week.

Facebook made a number of announcements today about changes to its home page, profile pages, and activity streams. Taken together, these represent a concerted response to the rise of Twitter as a real-time message broadcasting system that goes beyond members’ personal circle of friends. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/04/facebooks-response-to-twitter 3/4)

DVD-rental icon Blockbuster, which has faced a competitive onslaught from companies like Netflix, has hired a law firm to analyze a possible restructuring. The company said it brought on Kirkland & Ellis to aid in “ongoing finance and capital raising initiatives,” but that it was not planning on seeking bankruptcy protection. ClipSyndicate (3/3) , The Wall Street Journal (3/4) , Reuters (3/3) , The New York Times (3/3)

Following the larger open access distribution trend, CBS Sports is looking to expand traffic to their NCAA March Madness on demand product by again offering third-party sites access to free applications that feed live scores and other info from the games. CBS has exclusive rights to video of NCAA tourney games (offered in HD this year via Microsoft’s Silverlight platform) but rivals sites including ESPN.com and Yahoo! Sports will have access to the apps, along with the extended CBS Interactive family. The NCAA March Madness on Demand Developer Platform‘s selection of widgets are more sophisticated this year, including applications dedicated solely to brackets, live scoring, news or each of the Division I Men’s Basketball programs. CBS drew 4.8 million unique visitors on its March Madness On Demand site last year, delivering 4.9 million total hours of live streaming video. Video consumption jumped an astounding 81% compared to the 2007 tournament. (Cynopsis 3/4)

After months of rumors, Google Health finally launched last May, promising to store our medical records in a secure way that is more accessible, easier to understand, and useful than traditional paper records. Since there hasn’t been too much news about the service, which isn’t particularly surprising given the sensitive nature of the information involved. Today, Google has announced that it has launched a significant new feature, giving users the ability to share their medical records with designated family or close friends. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/04/google-health-now-lets-you-share-your-medical-history-with-loved-ones 3/4)

MySpace may be in deep trouble, but that isn’t stopping them from capitalizing on middle America (and Los Angeles), which still rampantly loves the site. You can now get a MySpace branded credit card and rack up points to download free music on the site. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/04/will-a-credit-card-solve-myspaces-woes-who-cares-get-free-music 3/4)

Proving that Myspace can figure out how to become just a bit more lame.  As someone who used to work in credit card marketing, I can tell you that co-branded cards usually don’t work.  Remember the Sony Citi card?  Yah, I didn’t think so…

The highly publicized Pirate Bay copyright infringement trial concluded yesterday in Stockholm with the site’s young defendants claiming that the P2P portal is simply an innocuous piece of internet infrastructure – a tool used to search for content uploaded by others. In closing statements on Monday, prosecutors asked the judge to issue one-year prison sentences to each defendant for enabling illegal copyright infringement. Industry lawyers weren’t that generous, pushing for the maximum penalty of 2 years. The final verdict is scheduled to be handed down on April 17. (Cynopsis 3/4)

Philippe Dauman, the chief executive officer of Viacom, has pronounced his company “very open” to initiatives such as TV Everywhere, Time Warner’s plan to make cable content available online to multichannel subscribers. “We think it has to be seamless to the consumer, and we’re working (with the distributors) on the consumer and technology side,” he said. Advertising Age (3/3)

(Below) Comcast and free Wi-Fi?  Never thought I’d live to see the day…

Comcast has begun testing free Wi-Fi hot spots at commuter rail stations in New Jersey. Separately, the country’s largest cable provider launched DOCSIS 3.0-powered broadband service in the San Francisco Bay area with download speeds of up to 50 Mbps. CED Magazine (3/2009) , Light Reading (3/3)