In a letter to users, MySpace's co-president Mike Jones on Monday outlined the company's stance on privacy and its place within social networking, as well as detailing what he calls a "simplified" version of the social network's privacy settings that will roll out to users in the next few weeks.

The announcement comes just three weeks after Facebook's F8 conference, where Facebook introduced, and immediately implemented new privacy settings that have drawn user and media ire for making profile information too public. Facebook's new system has also drawn criticism for being overly complex. … Read more

If you've been holding your breath for Hulu to offer an HTML5 video player, your skin's about to get purpler.

Eugene Wei, Hulu's VP of product, posted a missive on the popular video site's company blog that goes over various improvements while adding a decisive note about sticking with Adobe's Flash technology over using an HTML5 video player. At least for the time being.

"We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn't yet meet all of our customers' needs," Wei said. "Our player doesn't just … Read more

Shoes are one of those things that can take a leap of faith to buy off the Internet. Sure there are online retailers like Zappos that offer free two-way shipping, but if you're in a pinch to get the right size the first time around, there's a new company that just might help you do it.

Shoefitr, which demoed its technology at Thursday's AlphaLab incubator demo day in Pittsburgh, Pa., is attempting to solve the size problem by feeding shoes through a 3D scanner. This results in the company having a 3D model of the shoe that'… Read more

Google has released a programming tool to help move its Native Client project--and more broadly, its cloud-computing ambitions--from abstract idea to practical reality.

The new Native Client software developer kit, though only a developer preview version, is designed to make it easier for programmers to use the Net giant's browser-boosting Native Client technology.

"The Native Client SDK preview...includes just the basics you need to get started writing an app in minutes," Google programmer David Springer said Wednesday in a blog post announcing the SDK, a week before the developer-oriented Google I/O conference. "We'll … Read more

YouTube is now offering a third level of privacy for users to implement on their videos, one that makes it easier to share clips privately without actually having to set the video to private.

The new "unlisted" option lets anyone with a link to the video watch it, however it won't show up in YouTube's search results, channels pages, or on user profiles. And unlike YouTube's current private video option, the user who created unlisted video doesn't need to set up permissions for who can watch his or her video, just like the watcher … Read more

In a feature I'll likely find useless, Google has added the ability to drag images directly into e-mails written in Gmail in the Chrome browswer rather than rely on a dialog box to select them as an attachment.

It's a nice idea and I'm all for it, but here's why it's not for me: screen real estate. For most programs I use, they're set to fill the entire screen, so to drag an image into Chrome, I'd have to resize the browser, position it to one side, position the image elsewhere, and then … Read more

Mint.com's CEO Aaron Patzer on Tuesday is giving attendees of the Finovate spring conference in San Francisco a sneak peek at its next major enhancement. The financial planning and tracking service, which was snapped up by Intuit back in September, is getting long-term goals--a feature its software cousin Quicken has had for years, but that could be overly complicated and disjointed.

Patzer, who spoke with CNET about the upcoming service update on Monday, said the new system has been designed with the same kind of simplicity as the rest of Mint.com, and the goals themselves were decided … Read more

At the end of this week, EtherPad shuts down for good, taking user creations with it. The online word processor, whose parent company was acquired by Google last year, has not accepted user sign-ups for months now. But just in case you're one of those users who has not moved on, or is just now discovering EtherPad's strengths, there's good news: the service has been open source for the past five months. As a result, there are a handful of open-sourced clones that provide the same EtherPad experience with a few extra bells and whistles.

One thing … Read more

Mozilla hopes to release Firefox 4 in October or November, a new version that has speed among its top goals.

"Performance is a huge, huge, huge thing for us," said Mike Beltzner, vice president of engineering for Firefox, in a Webcast on Tuesday about plans for the browser. "We created the performance story, and we've got to keep at it."

Among other features planned for Firefox 4--and Mozilla emphatically cautions that plans can change--are support for high-speed graphics and text through Direct2D on Windows; a tidier user interface with more prominent and powerful tabs; support … Read more