tune in, mash up, buy out

A quick news round-up, and an update on a couple of previous postings. I mentioned Tim Guest’s book Second Lives: A Journey Through Virtual Worlds in a recent post. It publishes this week, and is the Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 in the UK. This stuff is mainstream! Catch it if you can: 09:45-10:00 GMT, repeated 00:30-00:45, or listen online for up to 7 days after broadcast.

Random House are also using their new Elysian Isle in-world for the virtual launch, and Tim Guest will be interviewed from within Second Life during the Hay Festival. And on Start the Week in real life.

Since my post on status updates, Facebook have made their API available to developers, resulting in a fantastic range of ‘mash up’ applications you can add to your Facebook profile – including your Twitter updates (or ‘tweets’). So you can have the best of both worlds.

Surely there is potential here for a good book recommendation app, which uses the data from ‘favourite books’ lists, allows users to rate and review them, and share them with their networks..?

Everyone is opening up their APIs at the moment, and getting far more relaxed about making their content available. More on that story later.

Finally, acquisition news.

Google bought three companies last week – de trop even by their recent track record. The more interesting one was Feedburner – a great free service for managing your RSS feeds – acquired for a rumoured $100m. I use it for my blogs, and it comes highly recommended.

And CBS acquired Last.fm for $280m – a site that creates a personalized online radio station for you. I’ve just added the new Last.fm app to my Facebook profile, which creates a radio station from my ‘favourite music’ list – genius!

Here is some comment from others on what these acquisitions mean:

• Publishing 2.0 | It’s Official: Google Has Acquired Feedburner And It’s All About Metrics And Advertising ROI
• TechCrunch | CBS Acquires Europe’s Last.fm for $280m