Amazon misses Q1 earnings estimate. 

American Apparel gets $15M investment.

Apple's white iPhone 4 hits Best Buy on Wednesday.

Arizona Sun Devils ditch logo in rebranding.

AT&T CTO John Donovan talks up its cloud services.

CBS News anchor Katie Couric confirms to People she's stepping down.Continue reading...

A modern update of 1992's Single White Female, psychological thriller The Roommate emerged as the cinematic victor of Super Bowl weekend. The film, #1 in North America with $15.6 million at the North American box office, is packed with brands — but very few stand out.

But this being a Sony Pictures production, we did not want of Sony products. And in the end, the most interesting plot twist of The Roommate is the ironic anti-Facebook Facebook-like site created for the film.Continue reading...

Is Facebook vulnerable? If a recent patent is any evidence, Amazon appears to think so. Amazon's new U.S. patent for a social network defines it as a "networked computer system [that] provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users."

Sound familiar? In fact, the Amazon patent covers the functionality of every social network from Friendster to Divorce360. But with Amazon's resources, could the brand be a real threat to Facebook?

It says something about Amazon's brand strength and business potential that before it even launches a social network, pundits (like us!) are willing to seriously consider what threat it might pose to the almighty ruler of social media.Continue reading...

There is no doubt that Google’s new “Buzz” is their best impression of Facebook and Twitter, but will it actually become the new Facebook and Twitter? Google certainly hopes so, but it may prove more difficult than Google thinks.

Even though other former social networking giants like Friendster and even MySpace have fallen by the wayside, there is no reason to believe that Facebook and Twitter will join their former competitors in the social networking underworld just because Google has joined the fray.

Remember, Facebook has a growing base of more than 400 million users, and Twitter reportedly had their most successful month in January, boasting 1.2 billion Tweets. Do those numbers suggest users will whimsically depart? It doesn’t seem likely – even in light of Google’s impressive reach and considerable power.Continue reading...

Checking or posting on Twitter has become a habit for more than twenty million people every month.

While the social networking site has enjoyed a tremendous level of success, its number of visitors hasn’t changed much since the month of June -- and hasn’t quite reached the impressive heights it achieved in August. It would almost be taboo to use the words “Twitter” and “peaked” in the same sentence -- but could it actually be true, and is it much of a surprise?Continue reading...

After years of branding itself as the safest, most friendly social network, Facebook appears to have turned suicidal. Worst of all, in its race to undo all it has achieved, Facebook is taking down some other iconic brands in the process. 

Facebook buried Myspace and Friendster and the other upstart social networks by maximizing user expectations. Facebook was your group of friends and you were in control of the network. Not anymore. In a now ironic letter, Facebook's CEO informed users of changes to the brand's privacy structure, supposedly implemented so users could have "even more control of their information."

These measures, however, immediately erased most of the privacy protections Facebook had in place, more or less exposing every Facebook user's information -- including photos, friends, and fan pages -- to anyone on the Web, including employers. Users can protect themselves by setting their accounts to fully private; but this fix needs to be done manually and is hardly, in the CEO's words, "simpler."Continue reading...

Yahoo! names their price for your privacy. $10! [Gawker]

Will Amazon open a physical store in London? [Econsultancy]

The new Friendster gets a new visual identity! [Brand New]

Google announces real time search. [paidContent]

What a difference a decade makes. Just ten years ago, brands were given huge headaches by cyber-squatters: users who had beat them to registering their brand-name Internet URLs and were misrepresenting the brand.

No such problems today. Now, brands are given huge headaches by cyber-squatters, users who had beat them to registering their brand-name Twitter accounts and are misrepresenting the brand. Continue reading...