dailylicious!

If anyone is going to buy Twitter, it certainly won’t be Google. Ever since the company rolled out Google+ in June last year, it’s been focused on delivering and iterating its own social network. Up until that point, it was looking to acquire Twitter as a way to enter the social network space. Even though many regard Google+ as a ghost town, Google has already set out to integrate all of its web properties with Google+ and it sees G+ as the future of Google’s services.

Lo and behold, Microsoft’s new so.cl (social) is actually integrated with Bing and for some reason, it looks to be “inspired” by Google+.

Were there any doubt that Google would close off Android and charge license fee for partners? It seems unbelievable but apparently to gain approval from Chinese authorities over Google’s acquisition of Motorola, the company had to make such an assurance. Amazon and a number of Chinese companies had been forking Android builds to create their own mobile operating systems and in the process, cuts Google off. Surely this annoys the company and perhaps provided the reason for the concern but it seems that it would be against Google’s best interest to close off Android. Regardless, the Motorola deal ensures that Android will remain free and open for another five years which means companies like Amazon and Baidu would be free to create their own Android-based operating systems.

Funny story from the web design guru about how Google messed up an invitation to Google I/O

So Google wrote to my zeldman.com address, which they won’t allow me to associate with my Google+ address, to invite me to start a Google+ account (which I already have) on my zeldman.com account, which they won’t support. And if I do that (which I can’t), and some other complicated stuff, they promise that I will then be able to participate in Google IO, whatever that is.

While I should be curious about Google IO and what I will miss if I fail to take advantage of the cumbersome offer, what I’m actually far more curious about is how an organization that can’t write an effective direct marketing email message has managed to become one of the most powerful corporations of the 21st century.

That snippet from last week about the negative relationship between in-app advertising and battery life? That doesn’t seem to be a myth or propaganda against Android as Angry Birds maker Rovio also discovered the same correlation. It has worked with Nokia Siemens Network to try and optimize power usage but NSN says the ability to do that lies with the advertisement provider, in this case, companies like Google and Flurry.

Apparently Samsung had been toying with Galaxy Nexus firmware deployed in some regions which caused ICS updates to fail. The poor owners of these vendor-customized Nexus phones are victims of Samsung’s software tinkering which despite being not as significant as applying TouchWiz, changes the version number of the on-board firmware and blocking direct updates from Google. Samsung is probably working with Google to rectify this issue.

As file-sharing service Hotfile finds itself in hot waters with the MPAA accusing it of assisting piracy, an unexpected aid has arrived from none other than Google. The world’s largest advertising company submitted a brief to the court arguing that Hotfile is not exempt from DMCA Safe Harbor provisions as the MPAA had told the court. As TechCrunch noted, Google may not be doing this out of the goodness of its heart. Its upcoming Google Drive could be in danger of facing a similar lawsuit as Megaupload and Hotfile, so it’s going to fight this as far as it can.

Yesterday Kevin Rose announced that Milk was shutting down Oink, the local recommendation app that his company had released just a few months ago. There was no reason given for the shut down other than wanting to focus on the next project but apparently today came the real reason why it was shut down. The company was apparently acquired by Google. Kevin Rose. At Google. Imagine that.