Google is shutting down Hello, Picasa’s photo sharing service which was part of the Picasa acquisition back in 2004. On the program, Wikipedia writes:

Here’s a headline from a new Reuters article:

"Facebook users willing to let employers see profiles"

Reuters looks at a new report on Canadian Facebook users and pretty much declares that they are now happy to let employers see their profiles.

But look at the data:

One clever SEO professional said sitemaps are the keys to the kingdom of well-performing keywords.

Display advertising, where Google does not shine as brightly as it does in search ads, could be coming to the image searching side of the site.

A third of European consumers are being misled or ripped off by Web sites selling airline tickets, according to EU Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva.

"It is unacceptable that one in three consumers going to book a plane ticket online is being ripped off or misled and confused," Kuneva told a news conference.

A public service or draconian narc network? You be the judge. It didn’t take long for a few things to happen with Twitter: for so-called spammers to seek out a "marketing" advantage; for Twitterers to fight back against said spammers; and for a moral authority to form.

To be fair, I think any one of us would be thrilled to move 140 million copies of something.  But Microsoft is held to a higher standard, and so Bill Gates’s positive comment about Vista sales is raising some eyebrows.

Microsoft is attempting to see if Facebook has any interest in being purchased by the software company after it abandoned its bid to buy Yahoo.

According to the WSJ Microsoft’s bankers put out subtle signals to Facebook, to see if it would be interested in being acquired.

Last October, Microsoft bought a $240 million stake in Facebook, which valued the social networking site at $15 billion. An unnamed source says there are no active talks between the two companies.

The bellowing fellow now immortalized as Mr. Angry Overreaction Man demanded a photographer not put his raging visage online. You can guess what happened next.

The good news, from News Corp’s perspective, is that MySpace is continuing to grow.  The bad news is that profiting off social ads is tougher than the corporation had expected.

Anyone who’s ever found traditional search results to be a little one-dimensional should be glad to hear that Yahoo’s addressing the issue.  Something called Glue Pages Beta slaps together normal search results, Google Blog Search results, Yahoo Answers results, HowStuffWorks articles, Wikipedia entries, Flickr images, and YouTube videos all in one place.

China says it can’t promise that it won’t censor the Internet this summer during the Beijing Olympics.

Wang Wei, executive vice president of the Beijing Olympic organizers, had assured the International Olympic Committee that the 30,000 reporters covering the games would have open access to the Internet.

In theory, any company should be able to compete with Google on search. Yet Google owns some two-thirds of the queries made in the US search engine market.

Too much variation between the company’s Live and MSN properties makes it look like the branding professionals had no input into the design.

If you’re spending plenty of money and time on marketing and advertising, be wary of landing pages that veer into undue verbosity.

Google needs to fight off Viacom or get the suit dropped if they hope to withstand other potential lawsuits against the YouTube video sharing service over copyright infringement.

All’s fair in love and war—and politics and business. While greased politicians, like good minions, slam Google for meddling in the 700 MHz auction, Google’s own associations show the company is getting better at playing these high-stakes games.

Chalk one up for razor’s-edge stategery cutting right to the quick of Verizon and AT&T.

When Google’s making an important announcement, posts will sometimes appear on more than one corporate blog.  Posts relating to Myanmar have been put on at least three, and the Google homepage has been altered, as well.

Alfred Publishing has partnered with Guitar World to offer its catalog on the Guitar World Tabs Web site.

 Alfred Publishing controls guitar tabs songs performed by The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, Green Day, and Santana.

Europe’s full of different countries, and all that impressive European Union stuff aside, it’s hard to believe they’ve got much in common.  Yet judging from new comScore statistics, it seems as if Google is the sort of thing that’ll generate smiles, or at least recognition, everywhere.

If the idea of spending a day with a few hundred entrepreneurs sounds great, then you really should join us at the Colorado Capital Conference later this month. We have two keynote speakers, Simon Leung and Marc Silverman, and have eight workshops that day, along with eleven companies pitching and hoping for a funding event.

The workshops are going to be terrific:

To mark its 10th anniversary, Search Engine Strategies is hosting its first annual SES Awards in San Jose.

The goal of the SES Awards is to inspire innovation and new ideas. The awards ceremony is scheduled for Wednesday, August 20, 2008, at the San Jose Conference Center.