paidContent (Friday)

In a report today, Cowen & Co. analyst Jim Friedland says he now expects online advertising sales to fall six percent in the United States this year, down from a previous estimate of negative three percent. His reasoning? Unsurprisingly, he cites poor performance at MySpace and display-advertisin...

News.com (Friday)
It looks like Facebook will be launching a virtual currency instead of a transaction platform. The reasons are complicated, but the goals and possibilities for the social site are much loftier.

paidContent (Friday)

While some might hold out hope that the economy could stabilize in the second half of the year, Cowen & Co. have lowered their revenue forecast for U.S. online ads to a 6 percent decline in 2009 to $22 billion. The financial analyst firm, which tends to offer more pessimistic forecasts compared t...

AP (Friday)
VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Web surfers can now send virtual postcards of Pope Benedict XVI to their Facebook friends or follow the pontiff's travel on their iPhones....

Valleywag (Friday)

Bloomberg has distributed a policy to newsroom staff on blogging, Twittering and Facebook updating. And in keeping with the company's tyrannical management culture, the rules are far more authoritarian than similar admonitions recently dispensed at the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and else...

Venturebeat (Friday)
Credits, Facebook’s nascent virtual currency of sorts, is getting a simple change tonight. The company is marking down items in its gift store from 100 credits to 10 credits, and reducing users’ corresponding number of credits. Facebook users who are worried about losing the last zero of...