The New York Times is reporting that Netflix announced it was no longer going to spin off its DVD-rental service into a separate company called "Quikster."
Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey stated "We underestimated the appeal of the single web site and a single service.... we really underestimated it."
It had been speculated that Netflix's real reason for the proposed split was to secure better licensing prices from major movie studios, since the studios charge licensing based on potential audience and Netflix was having to pay licensing based on its entire subscriber base even when a movie may not have been available on both services. Now that it has abandoned the Quikster plan, I will be curious to see if Netflix has to again raise prices or whether it will be able to win better deals in the future.
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Social networking, being a new technology, is used for all sorts of unintended purposes. Some are positive while others can be harmful. Online harassment is one unfortunately negative aspect of social networking, sometimes referred to as "cyberbullying." This normally takes the form of harassing text messages or private or wall messages on various social networking sites.
What do Facebook and George Lucas have in common? They can't stop messing with their product.
Facebook has redesigned their UI to make a user's front page look a lot more like a newspaper, with a list of "top stories" down the center, and a ticker down the right side that has real-time updates on friends' activities. These UI updates really make Facebook look like they are chasing other social networking services like Twitter and Google+, except that CNET's Molly Wood says it's all really a bit of a mess, and, like so many other updates to Facebook, not optional for its users.
The change (unannounced of course) has created an online backlash with users sick of the tweaking.
This comes as Google Plus announced that it was going open and no longer requiring invitations to join. I don't think Google could have asked for a better promotion than Facebook's move.
Earlier this year Netflix announced that it was going to be splitting fees for its rental services into two charges, one for streaming and another for physical delivery of DVD's. There was a tremendous uproar about the announcement, and Netflix has had to adjust its guidance to investors because they underestimeated the number of subscribers who would leave because of the announcement.
Sunday night Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced via email to subscribers that it was spinning off its physical delivery operation into a seperate service called Quickster.
Giant Bomb's Patrick Klepek has a write up on the experience of trying to use NFL's Sunday Ticket on the Playstation 3.
CNET has news that Yahoo!'s board has removed CEO Carol Bartz and replaced her with CFO Tim Morse.
UPDATE (9/7/11): CNET has a timeline breaking down key events at Yahoo! since 2008.
As Google Plus hits 20 million users, the experience has still been quite pleasant. The signal-to-noise ratio has been high and the interface has been working well.
That's about to go all to hell as All Things Digital reports that Google Plus will soon bring games to the social network.
I know that it's far too late to stem the tide of casual social media gaming that has made Zynga and Facebook oodles of money, and I know that there are plenty of good games out there that aren't AAA titles. However, the spammy nature of games like Farmville have driven people away from Facebook and will take a little bit of the shine off of Google Plus' information stream.
So I kind of backed into this story by first posting something about Facebook blocking contact data exports, presumably because they're worried about people departing Facebook in droves for Google Plus, without even talking about what Google Plus is.
Google has tried to do social before with Buzz, but that service fell flat and it looked like Google was going to be handed its first challenge - social - that it wouldn't be able to surmount.
Google Plus is starting to pick up buzz and is rising to the surface of the Internet zeitgeist in a way that Google Buzz never did. While it is still early days, Google Plus is already up to 10 million users while still being invitation only.
As Plus continues to grow, the challenge for people who decide to ditch Facebook is how to quickly get their friend data out of Facebook and into Plus. As a result several programmers have put together tools to automatically export friend data out of Facebook.
After conducting a scorched-earth campaign for the past few months, LulzSec is apparently calling it quits according to their Twitter feed and a statement on Pastebin.
The move comes after many high-profile attacks, the most recent being the leaking of a number of documents from the Arizona Department of Public Safety and a feud with hacking group TeaMp0isoN. We'll soon see whether this is an actual ceasefire or a feint designed to throw authorities off the trail.
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