Rough Drafts

After several months of trying to force interoperability between its own MSN Messenger chat software and AOL Instant Messenger, Microsoft has finally backed down. Now the companies will have to come to a business agreement (and how likely is that?) before users of the two chat clients will be able t

YOUNG PEOPLE ARE THE FUTURE: 41% of American Internet users are buying things online — a third more than last year. 75% of those surveyed say the Internet has improved their lives. 52% are rearranging furniture to make room for their computers. But the most significant finding from a recent AOL/Rope

“Want to bet on the Net? Consider investing in radio stations,” this story suggests — pointing out that radio conglomerate Infinity Broadcasting is winning a big piece of the Internet action: ten percent of its revenues this quarter will come from dot com advertisers. To Infinity, And Beyond

A U.S. Internet tax commission, which was charged by Congress with investigating the issue of taxing Internet access and e-commerce, is moving towards a verdict, according to the Industry Standard. It looks like the commissioners opposed to Net taxes have a strong lead. A Taxing Debate Over Internet

Creative Good’s Mark Hurst is publishing a Weblog at goodexperience.com, where he highlights current Web site usability and customer-experience stories. You can also download a copy of Creative Good’s useful and timely white paper here, the Holiday ’99 E-Commerce report, which critiques some promine

Fleeting fame: “The Tweeny Report” is the first of six featured sites on “Six Pack To Go,” today only. I’m not sure who does this site, but hey, at least they spelled my URL right, if not my name. Six Pack To Go presents The Best Web Sites

Microsoft is discovering that, in addition to the annoyance of Justice department anti-trust lawsuits, there’s yet another downside to tightly integrating their browser and mail client into the Windows operating system: Email viruses. A new email-borne virus, nicknamed “Bubbleboy,” has been found —

Egregious opt-out-only marketing from AOL: This message from AOL was forwarded to me by Chris Sandlund. Apparently, you can refuse pop-up advertisements — but you need to keep repeating your refusal if you want it to stick. Chris writes that he’s been an AOL user since 1992, but he’s losing patience

RealNetworks announced this week that it’s really, really sorry about its recent invasions of customers’ privacy — and that it’s working with privacy guarantor TRUSTe to implement a five-point privacy plan. The plan includes a third-party audit, appointing a “privacy officer” to RealNetworks’ staff,

From body parts to boyfriends, it seems there’s nothing you can’t find for sale on a Web auction these days. The latest odd lot is a collection of brightly-colored fiberglass cows, erstwhile decorations on the streets of Chicago, and now up on the auction block at Metromix.com. But you better hurry

AOL is being sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act by nine blind people who charge that the online service, as a public accommodation, is not sufficiently accessible to the blind. The AOL client software, they charge, doesn’t work well with the screen-reader programs used by many blind peop

Maybe you’re thinking that online advertising ISN’T QUITE KAPUT, given recent figures that show a steady increase in online ad revenues this year. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, Net ad revenues added up to nearly a billion dollars in the second quarter of this year; annual ad revenues