Yesterday's WN|WN was singing the refrains of "Why Can't We Be Friends?" from the classic group "War." Apparently, we've got more readers in Australia these days (g'day mates!). Yesterday, the crew at Sydney-based digital advertising firm Amnesia Razorfish spent Wednesday trying to get Coke and Pepsi to friend each other on Twitter, and both companies did within 24 hours. "As long as we can live in ha-a-ar-mo-ny!" (We could have used these guys for Norm Coleman and Al Franken.)

Recording industry wins one against Usenet supplier

The first I heard of Michael Jackson's death was six minutes before he was pronounced dead. That's saying something, because I'm not exactly the expert on pop culture, so my ability to have prognosticated the near future, based on something a little bird told me, on the subject of a fellow I seriously believed was still living in Tokyo, would normally be suspect. But there it was, in one of my IM feeds at about 5:20 Eastern time last Thursday, "Michael Jackson died."

My friend and colleague Angela Gunn suggested last Friday that something changed in the fabric of online journalism that day -- a high water mark had at last been reached. And indeed she may be correct, because if this Internet thing is capable of predicting the future even six minutes down the road, then I may want to get into the stock trading business.

Download Firefox 3.5 Final for Windows from Fileforum now.

For a good part of Tuesday, the Web Standards Project's Acid3 testing server was offline. With it went 25% of our browser performance testing capacity, which kept us from being able to publish our initial Mozilla Firefox 3.5 performance index as originally planned. As Acid3 started coming back, browsers were posting curiously low scores (for instance, Opera 10 Beta below 100%) that led us to dispute the test more than the browser.

Registered developers who log onto the Apple Dev Center this morning are being given an interesting little message (and 9to5Mac.com has a screenshot): With the iPhone 3.0 SDK having just been released, the first beta of the version 3.1 SDK began distribution last night.

Perhaps topmost on the list of iPhone 3.1 features that developers have been searching for, but were denied with the 3.0 release, is evidence that instant messages may at last include MMS. This blogger shows screenshots of images that can be cut-and-pasted to the text entry line, which implies that they can be sent using MMS protocol...at some point. AT&T has not enabled that protocol over its network yet, though the carrier is saying it will enable that feature this summer.

The White House on Tuesday launched USAspending.gov, designed to give the public a look at thousands of information technology projects underway around the federal government. The site breaks down Fiscal Year 2009 spending on contracts, grants, loans, insurance, direct payments, and other assistance -- who's getting the money, who's allocating the money, and which agencies can't seem to keep their projects on track. The site so far tracks over $539 billion budgeted dollars in 781 "investments" comprising over 7,000 projects.

The agencies represented by the site are the 24 responsible for complying with the CFO Act of 1990. and the information is mainly derived from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) and the Federal Assistant Award Data System -- or, for those familiar with the paperwork, Exhibit 53 and Exhibit 300 data, covering all investments and major investments respectively. Most of the data is about a month old, though some agencies are slower to submit data on grants or loans; going forward, the site should be updated with fresh FPDS data every two weeks.

The latest usage share data tabulated by StatCounter, a private Web analytics service, confirms that Microsoft's new Bing search engine really did capture usage share of US Web users from rival Google, without damaging share numbers for #2 search engine Yahoo. Just how bad was the damage? Bing gained 0.42% usage share in June from predecessor Windows Live's US numbers, while Google's declined by about that much.

Bing's US-based usage share now stands at 8.23%, StatCounter estimates, based on numbers that closed out yesterday, June 30. This compared to Yahoo at 11.04% and Google at 78.48%.

Joost so done with the consumer-video space

Afternoon of Tuesday, June 30, 2009 • Once it aimed to compete with YouTube, but that goal has backfired on bigger companies than Joost, which on Tuesday announced that it would be converting to a white-label video hosting service. Joost's CEO, Mike Volpi, is also stepping down in favor of Matt Zelesko, the current senior VP of engineering.

Someday, somehow, Twitter or one of the other social-networking services will release a tweak to its interface that every user will love and no user will whine about. We'll all be dead by then, of course, but for now the latest changes to Twitter give as little legitimate reason for complaint as anything we've seen lately.

The Following and Followers sections have been changed to expand the user's options for keeping track of who's following and what people they're following are up to. There are two views for each section -- List, which shows username and real name, and Expanded, which shows all of that plus location and their last tweet. In addition, in the Followers list you can see which people also follow you. (Why isn't that offered in both? We may never know.)

With as many set-top boxes as there suddenly appear to be in the home video market, as long as any one of them has a strong central feature, it could be the one that becomes a household name. Look at TiVo, Slingbox, and AppleTV: Each of these built a TV-based ecosystem around a single unique feature: TiVo's was the DVR, Slingbox was the place-shifting concept, and AppleTV was iTunes.

Now, IPTV startup Myka has designed its own media center STB, focusing on BitTorrent as its winning central feature. And while it doesn't carry all the functions one would expect in a home theater PC (HTPC), it offers enough power and functionality to be considered a little more than your run-of-the-mill set top box. Like the title says, if you're a little bit lazy...you could even consider Myka a pre-built HTPC. Betanews got an exclusive look at this new device.

Download Firefox 3.5 Final for Windows from Fileforum now.

It's a trend we're noticing more and more with folks who use Web browsers: Google Search is becoming so ubiquitous that people are comfortable with typing a query rather than referencing a bookmark, to relocate a page they remember. It saves them the trouble of having to save the page in the first place. You think I'm kidding? Two of the search phrases that land Google users on Betanews most often are "beta news" and "Betanews."

BlackBerry Tour, the latest smartphone from Research in Motion, will be heading to Verizon on July 12 for $199.99 in two different forms: one with a camera and one without. The device was officially announced earlier in June on both Verizon and Sprint, but Verizon is the first carrier to offer a launch date.

Also known as the 9630, the BlackBerry Tour is a world phone with voice support in over 220 countries and push e-mail support in 175. It is equipped with GPS and can also be used as a tethered 3G modem (2100 MHz UMTS/HSPA, or 800/1900 MHz CDMA/EV-DO Rev. A) for Verizon Mobile Broadband Connect Subscribers. With BlackBerry as the dominant brand in enterprise smartphone deployments, the ability to buy the latest model with no built-in camera is crucial for secure work environments where no cameras are allowed, especially including government installations.

On schedule, the Mozilla organization has now officially released its Firefox 3.5 Web browser to the general public, containing the first stable version of its TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. Since Firefox is essentially a JavaScript app in and of itself, the overall performance of the browser on all platforms we've seen should be visibly, and in some cases dramatically, improved over Firefox 3.0.

Naturally, Betanews is beginning its first round of performance tests on the final build of 3.5, especially to see whether that last boost of speed we saw in the final private preview builds was integrated into the final product. We'll let you know what we find out later today.

While Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X looks to turn the Pirate Bay into a legal business, the torrent tracking site's founders have taken the wraps off of their HTML5 project site called The Video Bay, a streaming video service in the vein of YouTube and, what else, The Pirate Bay.

Even though The Video Bay has been in development for two years, it is still extremely rough. The team recently rolled out an "extreme beta" version (like a public alpha) which carries the warning: "Don't expect anything to work at all." Indeed, even the site itself doesn't load for all the traffic it's currently shouldering.

This morning, China's Xinhua news agency announced that the country's IT ministry has decided to indefinitely delay the rollout of its "Green Dam for Escorting Children" Internet filter software, which was supposed to have been mandatory for PCs sold in that country beginning tomorrow. This after reports that the software -- whose code US-based software firm Solid Oak software claims was pilfered from its own filter products -- didn't actually work very well in real-world tests.

As Reuters reported earlier this morning, prior to China's announcement, Garfield the cartoon cat was a particular target of Green Dam's image filter, as was the face of actor Johnny Depp. However, actual pornography managed to get through just fine.

We spent some enjoyable time earlier this week playing with TweetPsych, a site that puts linguistic analysis algorithms to work figuring out just what's with the most compulsive Twitter users out there. Currently in beta, the for-entertainment-only analysis still provided us with some amusing insight into Twitter talk -- and into the brains of three Betanews staffers.

The site, developed by Dan Zarrella of HubSpot (home of the addictive Twitter Grader), builds a "psychological profile" of a given Twitter user based on his or her last 1,000 tweets by running the text against two algorithms that look not at what topics people are talking about but at the cognitive processes they seem to be using. The RID (Regressive Imagery dictionary) algorithm sifts texts for their primary (free-form, associative, creative), secondary (logical, problem-solving), and emotional content, while the LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) algorithm matches words against 82 language categories that can roughly estimate the writer's mindset. The LIWC is a widely used linguistics database; the RID is less so.