murdoch.jpgNews Corp., under CEO Rupert Murdoch, already has developed a reputation for stealing websites, when a Fox television show or advertiser covets a desirable URL on the MySpace social network. But Murdoch’s website-snatching ways extend further than that. On Wednesday, News Corp. and NBC Universal announced that their online-video joint venture finally had a name, “Hulu”. But before Hulu.com fell into Murdoch’s hands, the website featured no videos at all — just innocent pictures of a couple’s 7-year-old daughter.

Copies of the Hulu.com website cached by the Internet Archive indicate that Posen and Lucy Hung previously owned the four-letter domain name, rare and valuable because of its brevity. (A person named Posen Hung works for Symbol Technologies in the Bay Area, according to LinkedIn.) One hopes the Hungs were handsomely rewarded for giving up their family photo album. Or was this deal, too, a steal for Murdoch & Co.?

Source: Valleywag.com

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While Europe is celebrating its 2.5 millions .eu domain registrations, some countries have the smallest number of domain name registered, some French overseas territories:

181 in Réunion,
75 in Guadeloupe
49 in Martinique

Among EU countries, the countries with the greatest number of .eu domains are Germany (815,000), the United Kingdom (354,000), and the Netherlands (340,000).

Facebook has added a useful feature to all profiles. Beneath your user photo you can see icons for all the action links and application you have on your profile. When you click on one of these icons, you will be directed to the part of your profile page where that application is sitting.

These icons are viewable for your friends’ profiles as well, so now it is easier to see at a glance what applications have been added to their profile pages, and it makes it a little easier to get to the various applications as well.

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_1211841_mark_andreessen150.jpg Marc Andreessen (born July 9, 1971, in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, United States) is a software engineer and entrepreneur best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He was the chair of Opsware, a software company he founded originally as Loudcloud, when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. He is also a cofounder of Ning, a company which provides a platform for social-networking websites.

I have found on his blog, the “Pmarca Guide To Startups”, very interesting to read.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

Mini Blogging is fun, even I wonder everytime I update my Twitter or Pownce (not really doing the same for Jaiku & Tumblr), that why anyone would be interested in reading or following or knowing at what time I woke up or I am going to sleep and … and … and …

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Nevertheless, I was kind of “a good miniblogger” lately with some juggling between the sites, writing something on Pownce, then you have to abbreviate as much as possible to insert it in Twitter and Jaiku because the restriction to 140 characters, then if any link is included, which is a cool feature of Pownce, you need to shrink the url for Twitter. While Pownce takes too much time to load the feeds, Twitter is much faster.

I looked around on the net, to find a way for posting to the 4 sites in 1 shot, landed on a blog where it offered a few confusing steps solution for it and after trying, Twitter was posting some old stuff I had, so I dropped it.

I was really eager to see something similar to Meebo, the coolest online messenger, one simple sign-in and you are online with 6 different messengers.

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I am sure some internet geeks out there are working on the multi-miniblog posting thing, so please guys make it quick or my second option is going the hard way, by dropping 3 of them and stick to only 1, which is hard to do when you are addicted to online stuff.

aimlogo.pngI never used AIM in my internet history path since I started surfing in 1995 and I always had the feeling that AIM was mainly used by people living in the US, while at that time ICQ was “the next big thing”.

When I was introduced to ICQ by a friend, his ID number was a 7 digits starting with 5 and I got mine which was also a 7 digits but starting with 9, and I used sometimes to feel proud that I am an ICQ user with a 7 digits ID, while most of friends I introduced to ICQ where in the 8 digits field, at that time, ICQ was not really carrying about the screen name or ID of its users, so the system allocated random numbers as your ID.

Then lately I wanted to have an AIM account, so i went to discover this online messenger and got surprised that your screen name can not be more than 16 characters. And it really reminded me of those email early days when your email address could not be more than 8 characters, also it reminded me when you were not able to put a dot in your hotmail email address, while you were able to use an underscore.

I have the same username or screen name on Skype, Yahoo, Hotmail & Gmail which is [myfirstname.mylastname] a total of 18 characters including the dot while I had no chance to have the same for my AIM because it is limited to 16 characters and it really made me wonder what are the reasons behind this limitation.

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While all the other players are flexible with your username choice, I still wonder how can AIM limit itself in the WEB 2.0 age!