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There is a very exciting thing and romantic about the lifestyle of organized crime, as you have watched in the Godfather. The feel of living at the edge of the law and easy money has promoted this plays very successfully.  Read more...

Motorola has finally announced its bet-the-company Android handset. At an event in San Francisco this morning, Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s co-CEO and CEO of the company’s handset division, uncrated the CLIQ, a device it describes unremarkably as the “first phone with social skills.”  Read more...

The week ending August 21 began August 17 with another round of digital musical chairs—BoomTown reported that David Dickman, VP of West Coast sales for Yahoo (YHOO), will be leaving the company at the end of the month for Warner Bros., to work in digital sales. Also, after a five month tour of Europe and its finer Web establishments, Yahoo seems poised to name a new international head. MySpace made a move this week to fix its ad sales operation by bringing in Media Link and Wenda Millard, with whom BoomTown chatted Thursday from somewhere near Slovenia.  Read more...

Facebook is testing a stripped-down version of its social-networking Web site. The new version, which reportedly increases the speed of updates and posts, is expected to make Facebook a better contender against Twitter.  Read more...

So, we’ve already explained why the newly revealed “Facebook Lite” at the very least wasn’t conceived to be a “Twitter-killer,” but it does look interesting. The service, which is currently being tested in India (and sadly, not in the U.S. despite the messages sent out last night), has an extremely clean look and feel to it — one that is reminiscent of the old days of Facebook, when its simplified look drew users away from the cluttered MySpace. Of course now, Facebook is itself cluttered with settings, applications and toolbars. So to many, this Facebook Lite design would be welcome.  Read more...

It’s been a long time between weekend updates, and a long week without Peter Kafka, All Things D’s intrepid MediaMemo reporter. He returns Monday, and just in time, too, since John Paczkowski and Digital Daily will be out all next week. Must be August–do Europeans still take the whole month off? Or is that an urban legend. No matter, it definitely has not been sleepy around here. To wit:  Read more...

By Tomio Geron, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

SplashCast Corp., which lets people watch television shows within social networking sites, has been unable to raise new funding and has decided to shut down.

In March 2008, the Portland, Ore.-based company announced $4 million in Series A financing led by Australian media and advertising veteran Mark Bayliss with participation from angel group Emergent Growth Fund.  Read more...

When I walk into a bar, it’s always been a dream of mine that they’ll play a theme song for me. You know, kind of like how when a batter steps up to the plate in a baseball game, he gets his own song. (Okay, really what I’m thinking is more along the lines of X’s version of “Wild Thing” playing when Ricky Vaughn takes the mound in Major League.) The problem with that is, what song do I pick? I think I know now.  Read more...

MySpace may not be the hottest thing in social networking any longer, with visitor numbers and page views decreasing at an alarming rate, but apparently its free music streaming service MySpace Music is still something of a hit.  Read more...

It was only three months ago that Facebook announced that it had reached 200 million users worldwide. Today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the social network has passed 250 million active users. And back in January it was just 150 million.  Read more...