Industry News

Facebook just announced it has crossed the 300 million user mark and that it became cash-flow positive last quarter.

"This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term," said Mark Zuckerberg in a statement.

A reminder: that doesn't mean Facebook...

Some Bing search results pages will now show pictures instead of text.

The new feature is called "visual search" and uses Microsoft's Silverlight technology.

The AP:

Microsoft Corp. is testing a way to display some search results as galleries of moveable images instead of text links. That's...

Many upgrades to Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 7 will take one to three hours -- a reasonable amount of time. But some upgrades could take more than 20 hours, Microsoft employee Chris Hernandez says on a company blog.

Exmple: For a Super User -- a system that has 650 GB of data, 40 applications...

Yahoo (YHOO) is selling its 1.1% stake in Alibaba.com for close to $150 million.

Alibaba.com shares nearly quadrupled in the last year, so big Purple looks smart here.

Alibaba.com is a publicly traded subsidiary to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Yahoo will retain its 40% stake in the parent company.

Google's economist Hal Varian says Google's search patterns show that the economy is recovering:

Cecilia Kang, WaPo: In March, the number of Google users searching for information about unemployment benefits or employment centers began to drop, Varian said. Overall unemployment has continued to climb,...

What a market leader and major dealer in capital does publicly with their money is revealing. One of the things I admire about Microsoft is that through their Labs and Research initiatives, they’ve done a lot of good work in fields only tangentially connected with Microsoft markets. Google has some initiatives...

So, we now have Facebook Lite in the U.S., a slimmed down, sexier version of Facebook. It’s been said for a while that Facebook may have a long term problem with Twitter because it was too bloated, while Twitter was so light and simple — talk of that should die down now.

So how will Twitter respond?...

Facebook just added a new feature that let's users make Twitter-like @replies with their status updates.

Still don't believe Facebook is working as hard as it can to copy-and-kill Twitter?

Facebook engineer Tom Occhino explains the new feature in a post:

Now, when you are writing a status update...

Google has enlarged its search box to make it "easier" for people to use, the company said late Wednesday.

In a blog post, Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president for search products and user experience, said the simple change to the company's home page "symbolizes" its "focus on search." She added...