Less than a month ago, Meebo announced that it would begin including both MySpace and Facebook into its instant messaging and group chat services. These two networks joined AIM, Yahoo, Google, MSN, and others in Meebo’s repertoire.

However, Facebook has now  requested that Meebo remove its network for the time being, and Meebo has complied. Seth at the Meebo blog writes:

We have been speaking to the Facebook team, and it turns out, they’d like us to connect to their network in a different way - a way that works with their log-in security protocols. In the interim, they asked us take Facebook off Meebo, and we agree with them.

However, we were glad to hear that the Facebook team was genuinely excited to see their network on Meebo, especially since they already have plans to open Facebook Chat. They also committed resources from their Chat and Facebook Connect teams to do extra work with us to get Facebook Chat back on Meebo “really, really soon.”

In December, Meebo’s users grew to about 45 million, presumably as a result of adding MySpace and Facebook connectivity. Seth did not share how many of those are from Facebook, but I would imagine Meebo is eagerly awaiting getting the fast-growing social network back on board.

Google submitted a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month that has just recently come to light. The reason for this delay is perhaps that it was filed via paper-only.

As Frank Reed notes, “This practice avoids the online aggregators of these public records from being able to post the filing through their normal channels. I suspect these folks will have it sooner than later but the intentionality of Google providing the filing this way is curious. Trying to fly under the radar? Who knows.”

So what does the filing contain?

Sources say that Google reports that it has 24,400 employees, 4,300 of which are interns, temps, and contractors. This is far less than than Google co-founder Sergey Brin said a few months ago. The number then for these types of workers was more like 10,000. Though Brin did note that some job cuts were on the way in this area.

Google Spokeswoman Jane Penner says that the number doesn’t necessarily reflect the total number of people cut by Google. I guess that means that some of them just quit.

Either way, it hardly sounds like downsizing, as Google also says that it plans to continue spending money on research and development as well as acquisitions “at a pace consistent with the past two years.” Hmm. I wonder what acquisitions are in store for this year.

WhosTalkin.com has launched to the public after residing in private beta for 7 months. What’s WhosTalkin.com you ask? It’s a social media search engine that allows users to search across a number of social networking sites, blogs, news sites, forums, etc. And it’s pretty cool.

For those of you who actually are familiar with it, WhosTalkin has made the following changes:

- New design and logo.

- Improved the sorting algorithm to organize by freshness and source.

- Developed a URL API to allow third party developers and applications to tie in.

- Added around 15 new services that we aggregate data from, putting our total over 60!
While it still has some work ahead of it, the site appears to be a pretty solid first step toward searching a web that is getting more social by the day. “The problem is that social media is far more dynamic than the Web of yesteryear. And, unfortunately, WhosTalkin is only good for searching while you’re on the site,” says Rick Turoczy at Read Write Web.

“None of the pages are URL addressable - meaning you can’t save or bookmark searches that you perform on a regular basis. Also disconcerting is the fact that there is no obvious RSS feed or alert mechanism to ping users when new results are found. And since the pages aren’t URL addressable, it’s impossible to run a service like Dapper against them to create your own RSS feeds,” adds Turoczy.

I can almost see WhosTalkin as a reputation management tool as much as a search engine. For example, I can do a search for “WebProNews” and find out who’s talking about our beloved publication on Twitter or Facebook or Wordpress blogs, or many other places.

The web needs a go to place(s) for searching social sites easily, although this task will likely only get more difficult as every website and its mother adds social elements, and data portability increases in popularity. Still, I hear Google is looking for new acquisitions.

The Googleplex already has a reputation as being a kind of Emerald City within Mountain View—pet friendly, masseurs on staff, Lego-topian mindsets—but the best company to work for has kept one perk relatively quiet: Google University’s School of Personal Growth.

It’s not really been a secret, the principals have mentioned it when out and about spreading inner peace, but a Google search for Google University won’t bring back the results one is looking for. Only available on the company intranet, Google University—the building down the road from the Googleplex—is available only to Googlers. And, one imagines, patchouli salesmen.

The School of Personal Growth has gained some attention thanks to a couple of obscure statements by two of the school’s founders, Monika Broecker, who left Google last year to start her own Center for Personal Growth, and engineer Chade-Meng Tan, otherwise known as that guy who gets his picture made with every famous person to walk through the doors, a Buddhist and buddy to the American Dalai Lama.

Broecker namedrops Google at her new website: “At Google, I had a dream job. I built and led the School of Personal Growth within Google University, it’s mission, strategy, curricula and programs. This was very inspiring. I now want to bring this mission to the whole world, individuals and companies.”

What’s the mission? According to Soulscode, it’s all about happiness. Tan joined a number of psychologists, neuroscientists, social workers and Buddhists at a conference to identify Happiness and Its Causes—part of that apparently being taking control of one’s hysterical amygdula. Tan explained further:

“Google wants to help Googlers grow as human beings on all levels. Emotional, mental, physical and ‘beyond the self’… (This) is why Google University instituted the School of Personal Growth, perhaps the first of its kind in a large corporation. We don’t just pamper Googlers, we want to help them fulfill their full human potential.”

Hopefully it doesn’t involve sneakers, jumpsuits and comets. (Yeah I know. We mock what we don’t understand. But I do get it, and it’s still pretty funny.)

With classes available entitled “The Neuroscience of Empathy” and “Search Inside Yourself,” Broecker said the end goal is to help Googlers be more creative by helping them be more relaxed and open to new ideas.

No word yet on whether there’s a Timothy Leary Memorial Auditorium or guest appearances by Dr. Richard Alpert. But one bets Be Here Now is a vital part of the curriculum.

People are fired in all kinds of rude ways, but they typically don’t make the news. Get fired via Facebook, though, and the world goes “huh?”

Crystal Bell, fortunately, wasn’t humiliated via any public communication; her boss sent notice via private message. According to the Calgary Herald, Bell, who’d been employed at a spa only two weeks, skipped a staff meeting on a day she wasn’t scheduled to work.

This answers Smokey’s question: How the hell you get fired on your day off?

Other questions go unanswered, though, as those who are not self-employed may be taken aback by the impersonal method of termination. Bell’s boss defended the move saying she tried to call but Bell ignored her phone.

Still it raises the question of whether this is an isolated incident or the wave of the future: getting the digital ax via email, social network, instant message, yikes—Twitter? Will someone get fired in leet?

Blaise Alleyne at Tech Dirt plays out that scenario:

unfortunatesoul btw you’re #fired sry

Unfortunatesoul’s likely response: @bgboss i can haz welfare chek?

As someone with a communication background, let me say that this probably isn’t the best way to go about it. If management is unconcerned with the employee who is fired, management should consider the remaining staff and how they perceive the act. As they internalize and empathize, such indifference may contribute to I’m-just-a-cog-in-the-wheel bitter disloyalty in the future.

In 2038 we’ll likely be weaving tales for our grandkids about how we used to instant message with paper notes instead of our brainwaves and how, when we were really little, stereos were once considered nice furniture pieces. They may be especially interested because, if Richard Wilcox is right, all the really important computers just dialed back to 1901.

Couldn’t say Wilcox didn’t give us ample warning. This link is supposed lead to a post he made in 2003, describing how our 32-bit world is destined to crash on a level a bit more catastrophic than the trumped up worries of December 1999. Unfortunately, due to an unexpected surge from Reddit users recently discovering the post themselves, Earthlink has pulled the plug for exceeding monthly traffic allotment.

Here’s the cached copy.

Impending crises need at least a 30 year run-up—we knew there’d be an energy crisis for at least that long, right?—and it’s not too early to sound the alarms on this one. It may sound unlikely, we’re already Moore’s Law generations past 32-bit systems; just think what we’ll be running three decades.

I generally preferred words to math and programming, so talk of “signed integers” and “time_t” is lost on me, but I did gather from Wilcox’s post that at eight seconds past 3:14 a.m., on January 19, 2038, most computers in the world will think it’s actually a quarter to 9 p.m. on December 13, 1901.

That’s a big, big problem, and apparently a more complicated one than what we faced in 2000.

“So, if all goes normally,” writes Wilcox, “19-January-2038 will suddenly become 13-December-1901 in every time_t across the globe, and every date calculation based on this figure will go haywire.  And it gets worse.  Most of the support functions that use the time_t data type cannot handle negative time_t values at all.  They simply fail and return an error code.  Now, most ‘good’ C and C++ programmers know that they are supposed to write their programs in such a way that each function call is checked for an error return, so that the program will still behave nicely even when things don’t go as planned.  But all too often, the simple, basic, everyday functions they call will ‘almost never’ return an error code, so an error condition simply isn’t checked for.”

Why won’t we beyond 32 bit by that time? Also included in the original post is an explanation about the expense of building new systems and how computer companies tend to rely on cheap, older technology for building basic new technology. In this case, some technology in use in 2038, might span all the way back to the 1970s. Hey babe, dust off Dad’s old 8-track so we can share some Earth Wind & Fire magic with the grandkids.

Early last year, eBay inflicted some damaging policy changes that sent many sellers running for the hills. Now, they apparently are changing the rules to remove negative comments left by customers towards the sellers.

A couple months ago I talked to a number of eBay sellers, and all but one of them told me that eBay’s feedback policy was their biggest frustration. It now seems that eBay has decided to hear the howls of disgust from its users that have been going on for the majority of the past year. Ecommerce Journal reports:

The move to change the Feedback policy was prompted by numerous requests made by the cross-border sellers who received negative comments from customers while there wasn’t actual fault with the merchants. Now eBay will be removing feedback if: the listing meets the Customs Requirements and/or the seller receives a negative or neutral Feedback comment, which references customs delays or customs fees. Merchants in turn are obliged to advise the buyers that import duties, taxes and charges are not included in the item price or shipping charges. These charges are the buyer’s responsibility.

There was also a lot of frustration about eBay’s payment policy. Many were enraged by the favoritism showed to eBay-owned PayPal. eBay will reportedly now be adding Moneybookers and PayMate as acceptable methods of payment starting next month.

eBay users have been quite vocal in their displeasure with the famous auction site. It seems unlikely that many of them that have been so passionate will be willing to go back to eBay just because they finally acknowledged these issues. But the brand power that eBay carries does pull a lot of weight. Are you (or were you) an eBay seller? What do you think?

Days after the biggest scandal to rock the Indian IT sector, everyone is now waiting to see what the other major IT players will make of this situation.

Surjeet Singh, CFO and chief of operations of Patni Computers has termed this event an isolated incident and an aberration . He also revealed that the company is in talks with key Satyam customers to enable business continuity with them. Singh said, While this case is bound to shake investor and customer confidence, I do not believe that it will taint the industry s illustrious past.

Others, such as TCS and Wipro have kept all Satyam accounts/business on hold terming it as uncertain situation.

Rumors of a possible merger/takeover have also gathered steam since the shocking revelations. However, probable suitors like TCS, Wipro, and Mindtree are keeping mum for the time being.

CXOtoday contacted Satyam in a bid to clarify this issue. A company spokesperson said no meaningful discussions have taken place at the board level regarding this issue. He said the board meeting scheduled this Saturday would shed some light on where the recent events leave Satyam in the short term.

The online buzz, the ongoing Satyam Saga, created is something worth talking about. Whether it is social networking websites, job portals, or individual blogs, this news has triggered action everywhere. Suddenly people have something to think about, discuss, and comment on. These include complaints and abuses against the company as well as sympathetic statements in its favor, with many other emotions just waiting to be unlocked.

To start off with, the word “Satyam”, or those associated with it, were the most looked up on Google yesterday. Terms like “Satyam press conference”, “Where is Ramalinga Raju?”, “Satyam Scam”, “PWC Satyam”, and “Satyam.com” flooded the search page.

With reports that Satyam is now planning to axe 10,000 employees off the company rolls, crestfallen employees are venting their grievances on various community websites. Orkut’s Satyam community is buzzing since this news leaked out. All sorts of comments, including many positive ones from Satyam employees, have flooded Orkut pages.

Apart from Orkut, discussions and debates have been ignited on Twitter, Mouthshut, and Facebook. People have been updating each other by posting news links on these websites. What comes through when we read such comments is that there is a feeling of underlying unity amongst Satyam employees, that they should hold on to each other and not just condemn the company.

Job portals like Naukri, Timesjobs, Monster have also seen a jump in the number of resumes posted by Satyam employees. This was also noticed when Lehman was declared bankrupt a few months back. It is only natural that worried employees would post their resumes on job sites when their job security is at stake.

January 2, 2009: On a review of current global and domestic macroeconomic situation, the Reserve Bank has decided to take the following further measures:

Repo Rate

To reduce the repo rate under the liquidity adjustment facility (LAF) by 100 basis points from 6.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent with immediate effect.

Reverse Repo Rate

To reduce the reverse repo rate under the LAF by 100 basis points from 5.0 per cent to 4.0 per cent with immediate effect.

Cash Reserve Ratio

To reduce the cash reserve ratio (CRR) of scheduled banks by 50 basis points from 5.5 per cent to 5.0 per cent from the fortnight beginning January 17, 2009.

The reduction in the CRR will inject additional liquidity of around Rs. 20,000 crore to the financial system. It is expected that the reduction in the policy interest rates and the CRR will further enable banks to provide credit for productive purposes at appropriate interest rates. The Reserve Bank on its part would continue to maintain a comfortable liquidity position in the system.

Background to announcement of present monetary stimulus by RBI :

The global financial situation continues to be uncertain. Since the official recognition of recession in the US, the UK, the Euro area and Japan, the downside risks to the global economy have increased. Concomitantly, the policy initiatives in the advanced economies are geared towards managing the recession and defusing potentially deflationary trends. The US has reduced the Federal Funds Rate to 0 - 0.25 per cent. Several other advanced and emerging economies such as Japan, Canada, Republic of Korea, Hong Kong and China too have reduced their policy rates.

India’s financial sector has remained resilient even in the face of global financial turmoil that is so deep and pervasive. Our financial markets continue to function in an orderly manner. India’s growth trajectory has, however, been impacted both by the financial crisis and the follow-on global economic downturn. This impact has turned out to be deeper and wider than earlier anticipated. Concurrently, because of global developments coupled with supply and demand management measures at home, inflation is on the decline.

Reflecting these developments, the Reserve Bank has adjusted its policy stance from demand management to arresting the moderation in growth. In particular, the aim of these measures was to augment domestic and forex liquidity and to ensure that credit continues to flow to productive sectors of the economy. Notably, since mid-September 2008, the Reserve Bank has reduced the repo rate under the liquidity adjustment facility (LAF) from 9.0 per cent to 6.5 per cent, reduced the reverse repo rate under the LAF from 6.0 per cent to 5.0 per cent and the cash reserve ratio from 9.0 per cent to 5.5 per cent.