Yahoo further integrates Facebook into e-mail app

Sunnyvale, Calif.—Yahoo Inc. has added a new feature to its e-mail application, allowing users to update their Facebook status directly within Yahoo Mail. The service will be rolled out gradually in “select markets,” according to Yahoo.

To use the service, Yahoo Mail users must link their Yahoo and Facebook accounts from within Yahoo Mail. After that, users can type a message within the mail application that will appear automatically on Facebook, Yahoo Mail or both. In return, Facebook profile photos that link to Facebook will be displayed within Yahoo e-mails.

Last month, Yahoo provided a way to import Facebook friends’ e-mail addresses into Yahoo Contacts.

2 Lawmakers Urge NJ Gov to Join Health Care Suit

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- Gov. Chris Christie says he'll wait for assessments from his attorney general and health commissioner before making any decisions on whether New Jersey should join other states in the lawsuit challenging health care reform.

State Assembly members Dave Rible and Mary Pat Angelini, both Republicans representing Monmouth County, are urging Christie to join 14 other states challenging the constitutionality of the federal health care reform bill signed into law by President Barack Obama last week.

Rible and Angelini say a mandate that all citizens should buy health insurance is in violation of the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Christie says he hopes to have his Cabinet members' assessments by the end of the week and will make a decision soon after.

Microsoft Integrates Foursquare Into Bing Maps; Turns Attention To Signals

Microsoft plans to deliver new tools in Bing Maps powered by mobile location service Foursquare. The Redmond, Wash. company's Silverlight technology will pull in the data.

Bing has begun to pay more attention to real-time, social and location-based data signals that can provide depth to search queries that serve up tips, comments and other information.

Enhanced location-based services and a variety of other features will become available during the next few months, as Microsoft continues to invest more in its mapping platform. Not just information from "maps" that show location, but a "canvas where you can visualize search data," Adam Sohn, Bing director for the Online Services Division, told MediaPost Thursday. "The concept is related to the notion that there's real data and information behind each search that often gets disaggregated from its physical context."

People searching for information on Bing will finally begin to see the fruits of labor from separate deals inked with Facebook and Twitter last year to deliver real-time data.

The ability to deliver real-time information based on a variety of signals means giving people who search for a particular news source, such as The New York Times, access to connect not only to the main site but to links of the most popular trending stories based on information shared across the Web. Sohn says it's a new way to generate traffic from the search engine to the publisher's site.

Microsoft also plans to enhance Quick Tabs on Bing, moving the tabs from the left rail to the top of the page. The feature aims to deliver results based on what the search engine believes represents the intent of the person searching on the query. The change also represents a new look for the user interface and hopefully a more intuitive way to search.

Bing's focus on "curating content," rather than "cataloging Web sites," supports Forrester Research Principal Analyst Shar VanBoskirk's vision for the future of search. "Think about a search engine as a concierge pointing you to answers you need, instead of presenting lists of sites that have content that matches your query," she says.

VanBoskirk points to the side and the top navigation capabilities. The features allow users to drill into categories of content related to their search without having to do a subsequent search, or click through to pages to see if the content matches their needs.

"I think the other enhancement that really illustrates this shift is the creation of comparison answers and domain task pages," VanBoskirk says. "These are literally aggregations of content, links, images, video specifically to answer the most commonly search goals associated with different topics. Instead of having to scout through multiple pages, content sources, using multiple queries, Bing curates all of what they think the searcher is after into one page."

Thursday marked the beginning of Bing's spring release. Microsoft will experiment, test and roll out these features during the next several months.

AOL To Launch Patch.org; Commits Millions To Revamp Local Strategy

AOL plans later this week to launch patch.org, a charitable foundation intended to improve the quality of life in underserved communities. It is part of a move by the recent Time Warner spinoff to focus on local markets, advertising and editorial content to become every community's online newspaper, Jon Brod, executive vice president at AOL Ventures, told attendees at the BIA/Kelsey conference in San Diego Monday.

Brod laid out AOL's strategy, which will allow patch.org to partner with community foundations. "This is a charitable foundation with all profits being returned to communities we serve," he says. "We believe local information is the most important and helpful information people want and need. And we are committed to filling this need in society without regard to economic status."

Pointing to AOL's commitment to invest up to $50 million this year on local initiatives, Brod says Patch.org ties into AOL's focus on local content that bridges the gap between real-life offline neighborhoods and online communities. It follows the company's push to hire local journalists to write and post community news.

Today, Patch supports 41 communities in four states, up from five markets when acquired by AOL in June 2009. The initiative cost roughly 4.1% of what it takes to run a like-size daily newspaper when you strip out ink, print, and distribution. Brod says as more people migrate to online, AOL believes the project will become profitable.

The concentration on community also means focusing on mobile and Mapquest. The mapping technology will get a complete makeover, including user interface, employee support, and rebranding to give the mapping tool a new look and feel. "Mapquest, quite candidly, has been under-resourced during the past several years, but despite that it has remained a massive brand," Brod says.

Evidently, Mapquest sits at the nineteenth-largest property on the Web with 46% market share and 40 million monthly unique users, according to Brod. However, he declined to provide specifics on local advertising opportunities and skirted questions on specific technologies that might allow AOL to go head-to-head with mapping tools from Google and Microsoft, or geo-tagging tools from Twitter and others.

AOL also plans to revive the City's Best brand in 25 markets between July and September 2010. City's Best is an eight-year-old brand that AOL stopped funding in the end of 2008. The site features the best entertainment options in each city. It will combine professional editorial with consumer opinions that will allow community members to vote for the best in each city.

When asked how this differs from AOL's failed efforts to roll out Digital City, Brod says the billions of dollars spent online by consumers today, along with the penetration of smartphones in the market, and the use of much more sophisticated technology will make work today what didn't work in 1995.

In New Jersey, the For-Sale Signs Are in Bloom

MAPLEWOOD

“GET ready for the block party! Great neighborhood!” That is how an agent named Heather Gilheany verbally baits the hook in her listing for 156 Oakland Road, a three-bedroom one-bath colonial built in 1925.

“Selling the neighborhood,” explained Ms. Gilheany of Coldwell Banker. “That is what we always do — sell not just the house, but the neighborhood.”

But it so happens that on this particular block of Oakland Road, and in the immediately surrounding three or four blocks, for-sale signs abound. While the agents are busy “selling the neighborhood,” someone just driving by might be forgiven for wondering whether the entire neighborhood was for sale — lock, stock and barrel.

Last week there was a for-sale sign in front of No. 157, and one at No. 160 on the opposite side of the street.

There was another at 66 Burnett Terrace around the corner, two on the same block of nearby Highland Avenue, two on contiguous blocks of Plymouth Avenue, and so on. In all, there were a dozen signs within a roughly four-block area, although in some cases, houses were already under contract and the signs were being kept up during the attorney-review process.

This neighborhood of 75 to 80 houses is sometimes called the Tuscan section of town, after the local Tuscan Elementary School. The houses were mostly built in the 1920s and 1930s. The price range on those for sale was $425,000 to $599,000, except for one, a larger house at 104 Plymouth Avenue, which was recently listed for $674,900.

In Maplewood over all, there are 126 active listings, out of 5,541 owner-occupied homes, according to Patricia Ross, a Coldwell Banker agent, who says she has lived in town all her life and sold real estate there since 1984. She found the number high but not unusually so. And she noted that many residents moved from one house to another within Maplewood over the course of their lives.

Ms. Ross has a listing for a three-bedroom one-bath Tudor at 93 Midland Avenue, two blocks from Oakland Road. It has been on the market for five months at an asking price of $459,000. She declined to discuss the situation of the sellers or to say whether she was contemplating a change in strategy as more houses are put on the market this spring. But several agents selling neighborhood houses, in some instances on behalf of heirs, said that they were pressing sellers to cut asking prices because of the growing inventory.

Robert Northfield, another Coldwell Banker agent, said it was “very important for the Realtor to take sellers around to see the competition, take them to open houses so they can understand how best to price theirs.”

Mr. Northfield, who has the listing for 104 Plymouth Avenue, said he thought the presence of two houses for sale side by side, or several on a block, could be a good thing in some ways. “It helps generate traffic,” he said. “The neighborhood sells itself, and each house has a unique character and will find its own buyer.”

He said 104 Plymouth would attract a “totally different” buyer than other houses in the neighborhood, but he would be happy to have other agents “piggyback” on the open houses he schedules there — because attracting home shoppers is positive however it occurs.

On Oakland Road, No. 160 — the largest of the three for sale, and at $549,900 the most expensive — was under contract a couple of days after the first open house on Feb. 28, said Jessica Keefe, the selling agent.

“There were five offers,” said Ms. Keefe of Coldwell Banker in Montclair, “four over asking price.”

The five-bedroom house last sold in 1998 for $200,000, according to Zillow.com. Ms. Keefe said the owners had put in a new kitchen and bath, and “made the product sparkle” before putting it on the market last month.

“Fresh towels in the baths, beautifully decorated family room and first floor, a pristine basement,” were all part of the packaging, she said.

“They had already bought another house in Glen Ridge,” Ms. Keefe said of the sellers, “which was also a multiple-bid situation. They looked very carefully at the multiple listings for homes in their neighborhood, and in setting the price, we thought about the best way to create a perception of value. That’s what it’s all about.”

There are, of course, larger market forces at work right now in all neighborhoods, no matter their size or status. Real estate specialists included the following:

¶Spring is traditionally the most popular time to show and sell a house, coinciding with better weather and the rhythms of the school year.

¶As the national recession eases, a “shadow inventory” is emerging: some homeowners who put off trying to sell are starting to try now.

¶The federal tax credit program for first-time buyers expires April 30, and many buyers are trying to beat the deadline.

Focusing more tightly, though, real estate agents in northern New Jersey said a concentration of for-sale signs was often the result of sociological change, rather than change of season or economy.

“I think what happens is a natural progression,” said Perri K. Feldman, an agent based in the Keller-Williams office in Summit. “People move into a neighborhood when their children are young, and then when everyone is older, and their children have stopped boomeranging back home, one decides to put their house on the market.

“Then, all the nosy neighbors come to the open house,” Ms. Feldman continued. “And they start to chat back and forth: ‘Oh, did you hear that the house on the next street over sold, and it went pretty fast? Oh, and this neighbor and that neighbor are putting their houses up, and the other one is thinking about it.’

“And pretty soon, they start calling me, because, well, they’ve been thinking — and it’s time.”

NJ mocks MD budget

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie took a swipe at Gov. Martin O’Malley’s budget in a recent address, saying that Gov. Martin O’Malley’s $13 billion spending plan relies on “borrowing to cover current obligations” and “in doing so they are piling one problem on top of another, reducing the creditworthiness of their state, and creating a crisis that will be larger in the future.”

True Maryland is undergoing tough times. The state faces a $2 billion budget hole that O’Malley plugs using a combination of cuts and one-time accounting maneuvers. O’Malley borrows about $350 million from account that collects state income taxes to cover operating costs, a move that raised some eyebrows but did not impact the Maryland’s top credit rating.

Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown stressed that point when we asked his opinion. “Maryland has a triple- A bond rating,” he said. “We don’t take that for granted.” He also said the state’s borrowing, saying that debt is plowed back into Maryland’s economy. State financed construction projects, he said, represent 16 percent of Maryland’s construction industry.

Some on the Senate Budget and Tax Committee are not so sure and are considering major cuts to O'Malley's budget. But, regardless of the in-state budget discussion, is Maryland even in the same league as New Jersey?

A call to Fitch revealed that NJ's GO bonds just got a AA- rating in December. Also state now faces $10.7 billion hole in its $29 billion budget, according to Christie. “It is a massive deficit,” Christie told his legislature. “The largest deficit of any state in America.”

New Jersey Walmart restricts access to PA system after 'all black people leave' announcement

After a racist announcement was made
over the public-address system at a
Walmart in southern New Jersey, the store
has vowed to change its access to the
system.

Shoppers at the Washington Township store
were shocked Sunday night when a voice
came over the retailer's public-address
system announcing: “Attention, Walmart
customers: All black people, leave the
store now.”

The store says it will be reduce the number
of phones that have access to the public-
address system.

Investigators are zeroing in on two dozen
phones in the store where the racial
announcement may have originated.

The Gloucester County Prosecutor's Office
said that not all of the phones are in the
view of security cameras, and some are
accessible to the public.

WITH NEWS WIRE SERVICES

N.J. Court Rules Gmail User Accused Of Libel Can Remain Anonymous

Upholding the right to send anonymous emails, a New Jersey appellate court has rejected a request to unmask a Gmail user who accused a student of underage drinking.

The court ruled that although high school student Alexandra Zubowski alleged she was libeled in the email, she didn't submit an affidavit stating the email's content was false. Without such a document, she had not presented a solid enough case of defamation to be able to unmask the sender, the court ruled.

Zubowski and her parents sued after a Gmail user sent an email to her school alleging that she wasn't living up to promises of good conduct that she made as a member of the school's "Heroes and Cool Kids" program. The email, signed by "a concerned parent," included photos from Facebook of Zubowski and other students. One showed Zubowski standing in front of a ping pong table with plastic cups and seven beer cans on top of it.

The school forwarded the email to the police, who investigated but declined to press charges.

Zubowski sued the anonymous author for libel and a judge ordered Google to provide information about the IP address associated with the account. Zubowski learned that the Internet service provider was Optimum Online; that company notified the customer about the subpoena, after which the author moved to quash it.

A trial judge in Bergen County, N.J. agreed with the author and quashed the subpoena.

The appellate court upheld that decision earlier this month, ruling that "no reasonable factfinder" could conclude that the email was false. Not only did Zubowski fail to deny that she had engaged in underage drinking, but the anonymous author also presented several other Facebook photos that, according to the court, showed her "holding and drinking alcoholic beverages."

Courts in New Jersey have said that people have the right to speak anonymously online, and therefore can only be unmasked if libel plaintiffs show they have a potentially valid case and if their interest in suing outweighs the speakers' First Amendment interests in keeping their identity secret.

Zubowski argued that those requirements only apply when people seek to unmask anonymous online authors who post in a public forum, and not to senders of emails, which she called a "private communication" similar to physical letters.

She argued that the court should simply decide whether she had alleged sufficient facts to proceed on the libel case without then weighing that against the sender's right to anonymity. But the appellate court said it didn't have to decide whether to balance Zubowski's right to sue against the speaker's right to remain unknown because Zubowski hadn't made out a potentially valid defamation case.

"We consider all of the photographs in conjunction with plaintiff's failure to present any certification of her own, or from any other witness, certifying that she was not consuming alcoholic beverages on the occasion that is depicted in the original photograph," the court wrote. "Having done so, only one conclusion can be drawn: plaintiff has not presented prima facie proof that [the sender's] statement was false."

Twitter Turns on Its Geolocation Feature and It's Opt-in

Twitter March 11 switched on its long-awaited location-sharing feature and made the service opt-in. Twitter's geolocation feature, which works for Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome on Windows, tags users' tweets based on where they are tweeting from. The way Twitter has done this should endear it to privacy hounds that get nervous about location-sharing services. Facebook, meanwhile, is set to launch its own location-sharing service for its 400 million users. The leading social network would do well to follow Twitter's flexible approach to location.

Twitter March 11 switched on its long-awaited location-sharing feature and made the service opt-in.

Twitter's geolocation feature tags users' tweets based on where they are tweeting from. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and his team believe this additional layer of context will make Twitter a richer network. See Stone's example of why this is useful:

"Let's say I'm at my office and I hear a loud boom. It sounded serious, so I search Twitter for 'boom.' Among the first results could be someone who tweeted 'Boom go the fireworks!' This could be anywhere in the world. However, if that person had activated the new tweet location feature then the neighborhood data under the tweet would read, 'SoMa.' Now I know it's just fireworks going off in my neighborhood."

What the cool technology integration users get to see is that the key tweet word "SoMa" is linked to a Google map to let users explore the area some more. The point is that Twitter can now not only help its roughly 70 million users discuss what is happening, but where.

This is a concept that will be explored to the hilt at South-by-Southwest in Austin, Texas, this coming week. ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick said at least 25 companies will be making location-related announcements at SXSW this week.

Tweet by location works for Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome on Windows. To use the tool with older versions of these Web browsers, users will have to download the not-yet-defunct Google Gears app.

To get started, users may navigate to the How to Tweet Your Location Web page on Twitter and enable "Add a location to your tweets" in Twitter's account settings page. Twitter client applications will then be able to tag a tweet with exact location.

To tweet with location on a per-tweet basis after Location has been enabled, users must click the crosshair icon below the update box on the left. Users will then be asked to let Firefox "Remember Your Location." Double check to make sure "Remember for this site" box is checked and click "Share Location."

Location will then show below the update box. Of course, users who want to turn this off can click the "x" next to their location. This turns off Tweet With Your Location on a per-Tweet basis. Location will not be shown until users re-enable it by clicking the crosshair icon.

To disable Tweet With Your Location entirely, users must go back into accounts setting and uncheck the Add a location to your tweets box. Users may also delete specific tweets with location data, or remove all location data from all of your tweets by clicking the "delete all location data" button on the settings page.

This can take up to 30 minutes, but note that it does not guarantee the information will be removed from all thirdparty application's copies of the data or results from search engines such as Google or Microsoft Bing.

The way Twitter has done this should endear it to privacy hounds that get nervous about location-sharing services. Google recently discussed this issue -- the creepy factor associated with location-based services -- in detail with eWEEK.

Facebook meanwhile is set to launch its own location-sharing service for its 400 million users. The leading social network would do well to follow Twitter's flexible approach to location.