really

PC World is pointing to an interesting study that has found that some popular social sites are not really deleting your photos when you think they are. When the average user deletes a photo they have posted on Facebook for example, they assume that photo is gone.

Gmail will now let you import email and contacts from other email providers like Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL (and a bunch more. Full list at the bottom of the article). This means that if you have an old account that you'd like to merge into your Gmail account, you can do so. It also means (and this is what Google is pushing for) that users of other services can easily start new Gmail accounts without abandoning everything they have built up with another provider. Google is making the switch more enticing.

In 2008, Eric Schmidt called the Internet a cesspool and said that brands were the way to sort it out. Popular blogger Michael Gray aka Graywolf says that big brand media sites are "the real cesspool of the Internet."

We are sifting through mountains and mountains of information and data these days. There is more to look at and digest and analyze and consider and ponder and complain about and on and on. Not only that but we now have so many friends that who has time for anything?

Americans are more economically productive with broadband than any other country, according to new research. But that doesn’t mean the US in number one in broadband. Likely major ISPs and backbone providers will gleefully point to Saul Hansell’s New York Times blog—and his headline: Surprise: America is No. 1 in Broadband—in rebuttal to criticism of how they’ve built out their networks.

I'm still trying to make out whether this is an elaborate hoax or if Bill Gates has finally lost his mind, but numerous reports and tweets (including one from Evan Williams himself) indicate that he has just unleashed a bunch of mosquitoes on the crowd at the TED conference, say

We didn’t verify if Google really has a history of $20,000-$30,000 holiday bonuses for employees. Regardless of past amounts, Googlers are getting Google phone instead this year. There is, after all, an economic crisis going on. It could be worse. Employees at a certain other search engine got pink slips. Still, one imagines it’s a hard come-down from being so pampered. Part of the memo, courtesy of Valleywag, reads this way:

Facebook has found another way to make sure you stay connected with the social network from other sites besides Facebook Connect. They have now launched a feature that keeps you at Facebook, while also navigating other sites you got to from Facebook. When one of your friends posts a link, you can go to it while a Facebook navigation bar will show up on the top of your screen, allowing you to comment while you're at the third-party site.