"Unfriend" is Oxford's word of the year

Perhaps in a sign of how the plague of social media has numbed us all to the value of legitimate human connections, the New Oxford American Dictionary has picked the verb "unfriend", or "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook", as its 2009 Word of the Year.

At the very least, it's a testament to the ubiquity of Facebook, which now has well over 300 million members around the world.
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iPhone worm Rickrolls users in Australia

Well, this hacker has quite the sense of humor.

Reports started spreading this weekend that iPhone users in Australia had been falling victim to "ikee," a worm that replaces default wallpaper with a picture of Rick Astley, the British pop singer whose song "Never Gonna Give You Up" has gained eternal infamy thanks to the mainstreaming of the "Rickrolling" prank craze. The photo is accompanied by the message "ikee is never gonna give you up," and it's apparently quite difficult to remove. According to security firm Sophos, this is the first worm detected that targets the iPhone.
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Beatles music sold on apple-shaped USB

No, the digitally remastered Beatles catalog hasn't come to Apple's iTunes. But it has come to an apple-shaped USB device.

Retailing for US$279.99, the collection will be released December 8 in US, three months after the September 9 release of the remastered set of the band's albums (as well as The Beatles: Rock Band video game). The apple shape is in reference to Apple Corps, the Beatles music publisher--which in the past, you may recall, sued tech giant Apple in a trademark dispute.
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Music search is Google's latest tune

Already the far-and-away leader in search, Google wants to be a big player in music discovery, too.

The search giant teamed up with News Corp.'s MySpace and streaming service Lala for the Wednesday debut of the new Google music search feature at the historic Capitol Records building in Hollywood. With the new music search, which had been internally code-named "OneBox" when news of the project broke earlier this month, search queries pertaining to something like a song, artist, lyrics, or album will bring up links to streaming songs from iLike and MySpace, as well as links to artist information on Pandora, Imeem, and Rhapsody. The lyrics search is provided through a partnership with Gracenote.
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With "memorialized" profiles, Facebook sees dead people

With over 300 million active users around the world, it's a legitimate concern for social network Facebook to come up with a solution for what happens when members die. The company has now spelled out the process on its official blog (in a post that's a little bit awkwardly close to Halloween, considering the sensitivity of the subject matter).

Facebook's Max Kelly explains in the blog post: "Obviously, we wanted to be able to model people's relationships on Facebook, but how do you deal with an interaction with someone who is no longer able to log on? When someone leaves us, they don't leave our memories or our social network. To reflect that reality, we created the idea of 'memorialized' profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who've passed."

To "memorialize" a profile, members are encouraged to use a feedback form that asks for some proof of a relationship to the person in question (knowledge of an e-mail address and birthday, for example), as well as a link to proof of death (like a news article or obituary). When a profile has been memorialized, "sensitive" information, like phone numbers, are removed, and the profile is locked up to anyone who was not already a confirmed friend (non-friends can't find the profile in search queries, either).

But for those who were confirmed friends of the deceased, they can continue to leave "wall" posts in remembrance.

Memorialized profiles are also locked to future log-ins to prevent hacking--something that highlights how Facebook will have to be very vigilant about making sure that mean-spirited members don't try to "memorialize" one another's profiles as a macabre prank.

Via CNET.com

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