It's axiomatic that any site redesign will cause hysterics among some portion of the readership. But Facebook's user complaints over the new look have succeeded to the extent of eliciting a lengthy, slightly abashed, and palpably frustrated blog post from Chris Cox, the company's "director of product," discussing where the site goes from here.

What users apparently will not succeed in doing is in getting Facebook to back down from its new, more Twitter-like mien. The post outlines a variety of adjustments in the works, including live page updating (no more hitting Refresh!), better control over which applications intrude in one's stream, realignment with the new Highlights features to bring it back in line with the old News Feed functionality, and some reorganization of navigation components.

Maybe it was thanks to its surprisingly popular Super Bowl commercial featuring an alien Alec Baldwin, or maybe it's thanks to its clean interface and ever-growing library of content, but Hulu's popularity exploded last month.

According to comScore's Video Metrix service, Hulu became the fourth most-viewed video site on the Internet, bypassing Microsoft, Viacom, and AOL sites, and snaring a 2.5% share of the market. The NBC-News Corp. joint venture climbed two positions in the ranking and experienced a 42% increase in views in February. The majority of the growth (33%) took place after the Super Bowl advertisement began running.

From time to time, Microsoft has announced its intent to build its Outlook component of Office into a more fully-featured system for organizing personal contacts, as well as doing some automatic background research into those contacts on the side. Last year, the company very nearly concluded a deal with a San Francisco-based company called Xobni that would have given Microsoft that functionality in one fell swoop, but that deal collapsed.

As it turns out, that's where the good news actually began for Xobni. It managed to obtain startup funding from such top-tier venture capital sources as Y Combinator, First Round Capital, Cisco, and now BlackBerry Partners Fund. Now, the company is prepared to remove the little piece of sticky-tape that says "Beta" from its principal product, which now becomes "Xobni 1.7" for the first time, though it remains a free download.

A brand-new site for mixtapes (or the virtual equivalent) has a charming interface, a fair database of tracks, and the ability for visitors to either play other members' playlists or search out individual songs. So does MixTape.me have a hope in hell of surviving where the legendary Muxtape ran afoul of the music industry?

Hard to say, but practical folk will check it out before much time elapses. Adam Pash, who daylights as editor of Lifehacker, pulled the site together from a raft of sources -- artist bios from Last.fm, lyrics from LyricWiki, videos from YouTube, and so on.

It's allegedly designed to help folk manage their online identities by spotting where "their" usernames might be in use without their knowledge, but DialUsername can also provide some amusement for a slow day at work. Find all the services you never even heard of among their list of 68, then rush to them and register your preferred username, just in case the service becomes popular. We can call it Land Rush Tuesday or something.

Twitter-populated and Microsoft-sponsored, ExecTweets may be the first step on the path toward -- depending on your point of view -- a revenue stream for the microblogging model or a sign that the service is selling out. That's the conversation inside the Twitterati beltway; most of the rest of the world, on the other hand, will probably just be amazed to hear that actual C-level execs tweet.

Yes -- 77 of them so far, according to the list on ExecTweet's About page. According to that page, ExecTweets "empowers the community to surface the most insightful, business-related tweets," though one may well ask how Guy Kawasaki's tweet Monday that "Cassettes Are Cool Again: Jimi Hendrix Tape Portrait" fits into that vision.

David Elliott has an interesting video that demonstrates just how lossy the JPEG format really is. The UCLA MFA candidate chose an image and saved it repeatedly -- 600 times, to be exact -- ratcheting up the compression each time. He's posted the results as a 20-second clip on Vimeo. Very cool; check it out. (HT Laughing Squid)

Today's rollout of a new customer relationship management application for Twitter follows Salesforce.com's already contentious announcement of its Facebook- and Google-enabled Service Cloud in January.

Known as Salesforce.com for Twitter, the new CRM application will work as a plug-in to Service Cloud, a cloud-based customer service channel that gives business workers access to Facebook connections, Google search, and other communications and discussion tools and forums.

In a blog post over the weekend Mel Carson, community manager for Microsoft's adCenter Analytics, announced that the project will not be leaving beta. The project, which began its pilot stage in France back in 2005, will remain online through the end of the year, and the associated blog will continue as "Insights & Analysis" -- indicating that perhaps Microsoft's not entirely done thinking about the Web numbers problem.

Carson called the beta program a success, despite the failure to launch. "The insights you've contributed through your feedback and your use of the tool have served an invaluable purpose in shaping Microsoft's future in this space. You've helped us work towards making an informed decision about building a general Web analytics solution," he wrote. He added that Microsoft in this case is now looking more closely at addressing specialized markets, as opposed to the more general small- and medium-sized "self-serve" clients that adCenter Analytics served.

SpiralFrog, the ad-supported music service launched by Universal Music Group and EMI in 2007, is now defunct.

To say SpiralFrog started off on the wrong foot would be an understatement. The service's launch was delayed by nearly a year due to an internal coup that resulted in the departure of the entire executive team. Then, beta testers reported a very unfriendly system of that commanded the user to authenticate each download within a 60-second span after it was completed, or else the download would be negated. This made the service impossible to use passively.

In perhaps another sterling demonstration of the effectiveness of Google's own product announcements by way of its blog posts, the world awakened this morning to an experimental capability in Google's Gmail that, if you think about it, you wonder why no one's thought about it before: An independent developer with the handle Yuzo F is distributing a Gmail add-on that gives users five seconds after clicking on the Send button to click on an Undo link that stops distribution from going forward.

"This feature can't pull back an e-mail that's already gone," writes Google UX designer Michael Leggett this morning, "it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don't worry -- if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we'll still send your message."

It feels as if we've been waiting forever for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, which is why the fuss a few days back over Microsoft Research's "Gazelle" project -- ZOMG NEW BROWSER MAYBE!!!! -- was sort of refreshing and fun, if pretty far removed from reality as we know it.

The confusion came down to some observers' misunderstanding of the relationship between Microsoft Research and the parts of the company that actually ship products. Microsoft Research is, of course, a research facility; they think interesting thoughts, they test their theories, and after that maybe their ideas are taken up and maybe they're not.

Since the very beginning of Microsoft's venture into distributed video platforms, it's intended to make a system for enabling developers more conventional languages like C++, C#, and Visual Basic to produce truly distributed applications. The code word for this is "n-tier logic," and it refers to the ability for a core application to assume its input/output is being handled by a set of graphical resources, while enabling any number of intermediate layers to connect the core with the graphics. That way, the only technical differences between a local app, a network app, and an Internet app take place in the middle of the chart -- for example, is there IIS or isn't there?

When Microsoft started testing what it had called Silverlight 1.1, it was with the idea to introduce .NET app languages to the mix, and to go beyond JavaScript. Sometimes you still hear a hint of the arbitrary dividing line at Microsoft, between C# "developers, developers, developers" and JavaScript "designers." During the learning process, the company evolved the 1.1 project into Silverlight 2.0, whose stated goal was to provide fluid graphical functionality for rich Internet applications (RIAs) using any .NET language.

Download Internet Explorer 8.0 for Windows Vista from Fileforum now.

As suspected, Microsoft used this week's MIX09 conference to unleash Internet Explorer 8, downloadable as of noon today (EDT). Our initial tests on the final release indicate that Microsoft's promises of better performance and security are realized, and that the team goal of creating "a better way to waste time on the Internet" has been realized too -- in the good sense.

When Nokia announced last month that it will be opening The Ovi Store for mobile apps, the company noted that the content in the store would be of the same nature as the content previously available on Download, WidSets, and MOSH.

Previously is the operative word in that statement, according to a report from Reuters today. According to the report, MOSH will be closing down.