Popular social networking site Facebook has bought FriendFeed.com, and will be taking its entire staff aboard, the companies announced this afternoon.

"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO.

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Today, bankrupt-but-bailed-out automobile company General Motors announced it will be attempting to sell cars on eBay in a move to reach out to new customers and possibly reclaim some market share.

Beginning tomorrow, approximately 225 California Chevrolet, Buick, Pontiac, and GMC dealerships will put some 20,000 cars up on a new dedicated portal (gm.ebay.com) with "buy it now" prices which are negotiable.

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Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski is stepping down from his position today as the nearly bankrupt Canadian telecommunications company continues its liquidation and reconstruction.

After losing almost $7 billion in two years, Nortel filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in January of this year.

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In a statement this morning that included a blessing from an Intel vice president, GPU maker Nvidia announced it has been licensed by Intel, along with other leading motherboard manufacturers, to produce its GPU-stacking SLI technology for motherboards that include Intel's Lynnfield generation Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs using Nehalem microarchitecture, with Intel's P55 Express chipset.

It's great news for system builders who had been concerned about whether a recent legal standoff between Nvidia and Intel would render it impossible (or at least, unsanctioned) for them to build performance gaming systems with the latest Intel 45 nm CPUs, plus multiple Nvidia GPUs. Simply being blockaded from doing so at the legal level would be perceived as a watershed moment for rival ATI, which wouldn't be good news for Intel either since ATI is now wholly owned by arch-rival AMD.

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There's an old business saying: If you want to make money in a gold rush, don't prospect, sell shovels. This is the same sort of idea that happened with Twitter and URL shorteners.

URL shortening services are the shovels of the Twitter gold rush, except nobody's making any money selling them.

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Microsoft's sale of Razorfish, which for only two years served as its creative advertising division, to French ad giant Publicis Groupe is not so much the indication of a new trend, but of an old trend that is being suspended for now, perhaps for some very old-fashioned reasons.

In the present-day Internet business model, the principal generator of revenue is advertising. Unless a Web site or publisher is in the music delivery business, or happens to be one of the world's few paid search providers, there's few other alternatives for a steady source of income. But as with nearly all media these days, publishers are contending with whether they actually need to invest in the creative side of the process -- why not let someone else create the content, or better yet, let's see if someone will volunteer to do it for free.

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Toshiba this morning announced that it has applied for membership in the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), the body in charge of standardizing and evangelizing the high definition disc format, and that it intends to launch Blu-ray notebooks and standalone players this year.

"In light of recent growth in digital devices supporting the Blu-ray format, combined with market demand from consumers and retailers alike, Toshiba has decided to join the BDA," read the company's statement this morning.

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In a set of comprehensive Windows Web browser performance tests conducted by Betanews on August 7 -- our first test of browsers running on the final Windows 7 RTM Build 7600 distributed by Microsoft yesterday -- the five major families of browsers tended to run 13% faster on Windows XP Service Pack 3 than on Windows 7, and 29% faster than on Windows Vista Service Pack 2.

That reflects a decline in the speed gap between XP and Win7 of about 1%, from tests conducted comparing XP-based browsers to those running on Windows 7 Release Candidate Build 7100. Some browsers are faster in Windows 7 RTM, although Mozilla Firefox 3.5.2 ran just a tick slower.

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Which Microsoft Office version is most popular at US retail stores -- brick and mortar or online? Office Home and Student 2007, which inherited the position from XP and 2003 versions of Office Student and Teacher. Home and Student accounts for "85 percent of Office sales, either Mac or PC," said Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis.

I asked Baker for the percentage because it's that time of year when students are preparing to go back to school and Microsoft and retailers practically give away Office Home and Student. Last week, I spotted the software, which normally sells for $149.95, at Microsoft Store for $99.99. That's a good deal, right? Wrong. This week, I saw the software at my local Costco selling for $81.99, after mail-in rebate. That's an even better deal, right? Wrong. Amazon sells the software for $79.99, no rebate.

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The U.S.' second most popular retailer, Target announced that it will be ending its 8-year relationship with Amazon.com and launching its own new platform for Target.com, which does not rely on Amazon's services.

Steve Eastman, president of Target.com said, "The strength of Amazon's technology and fulfillment services has been a contributing factor in Target.com's success. However, to deliver a customized multi-channel experience for Target's guests, we believe it is in Target's best interest going forward to assume full control over the design and management of Target's e-commerce technology platform, fulfillment and guest services operations."

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Earlier this summer, Digg's Chief Revenue and Strategy officer Mike Maser announced the beta of Digg Ads, a novel advertising platform where readers rate ads and determine how much the advertisers has to pay. For example, an ad which has lots of Diggs will cost an advertiser much less than if an add is buried. Ads can be buried so much that they are priced out of the system.

This week, the site has begun the rollout of an early beta version of Digg Ads. For a select group of users, paid entries will begin to appear on the site. The only difference between these advertisements and traditional Digg entries is that the advertisements are marked as "sponsored", similar to sponsored results on search sites.

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In June, cable operator Comcast and media company Time Warner announced that they would begin working on the new distribution model known as "TV Everywhere," a Web-based streaming service akin to Hulu that would give Comcast subscribers on-demand access to cable content at a premium. Ideally, the service will help cable companies make more money off of streaming content than syndication sites currently do.

Now, satellite television network DirecTV has reportedly entered into discussions with Comcast and Time Warner about joining TV Everywhere.

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It takes a lot to get Apple to make a statement to the public, but the ongoing controversy related to the company's App Store review policy has come to such an agitated peak that Apple has repeatedly been forced to explain itself.

Yesterday, Senior Vice President Phil Schiller had to make a stand against allegations of downright censorship by the blogosphere.

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Since at least 1999, the lucrative Web URL Office.com has been registered to someone other than Microsoft, the company most closely associated with that term with regards to software. Most recently, Office.com wasn't owned by any cybersquatter, but by ContactOffice Group -- a very legitimate Belgian company which used the URL to establish a virtual e-mail client accessible through desktop and mobile Web browsers.

Late last June, Office.com's clients received e-mails from ContactOffice notifying them that their accounts will be moved to the contactoffice.com domain at the end of July. There's only one really good reason why a company would move from a ubiquitous trademark to an arguably more obscure one; and today, the logic behind that reason was confirmed by the Internet's string of WHOIS databases: Microsoft is now the official owner of the Office.com domain.

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Is Microsoft asking too much of consumers and small businesses planning to upgrade existing Windows XP or Vista PCs to Windows 7? That's the question I asked several analysts after reviewing a chart Microsoft provided to veteran technology reviewer Walt Mossberg.

Out of 66 upgrade scenarios, only 14 allow for "in-place" upgrades. The majority of scenarios require "custom install," which means either installing Windows 7 to a new directory or onto a clean hard drive. While data can be backed up and recovered, applications would need to be reinstalled.

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