THE WRITERS GUILD negotiating committee has announced a unanimous recommendation to go on strike, perhaps as early as this Monday. The committee announced its decision Thursday night and drew an enthusiastic response from the meeting of 3,000 Guild members. The final decision is expected to be made at a meeting of the East and West branches of the Guild today.
MYSPACE and BEBO have agreed to join OpenSocial, GOOGLE‘s new alliance of social-networking sites. MySpace is still the top social-networking site in the US and BEBO is the most popular in Britain, with the two sites boasting a combined base of over 150 million users. They will provide a major boost to Google’s new technical specifications and potentially make them more competitive with the rapidly-rising Facebook.
VERIZON has responded to the HD channel war by saying it would offer 150 HD channels on FiOS TV before the end of 2008. The company will initially double its HD channels to 60 this spring and increase its HD on-demand offerings. By the end of 2008 it expects to have 1,000 HD titles on demand and all 150 HD channels in operation.
FTC commissioner Jon Leibowitz told a forum on behavioral targeting that the agency would begin to exert more control over online advertising in response to increased tracking of consumers. Leibowitz said standards and policies that ensure privacy must be established to protect consumers. Advertisers responded warily to the talk, but tech companies (including Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) agreed that privacy and trust were the “healthiest” things for the Internet.
WARNER MUSIC has decided to withhold its content from NOKIA‘s new music service because Nokia also owns and operates “Mosh,” a file-sharing service that is a breeding ground for piracy. Nokia launched Mosh this summer and claims to monitor it for copyrighted material. However, copyrighted videos and music are regularly shared amongst users. Both Mosh and the Music Store are part of the Nokia’s new shift towards becoming a a software and services company.