WebProWorld

Sony has plans to launch a new online service next year that will allow users to download music and movies to their televisions.

"I’d like it to get off the ground as quickly as possible," said Kazuo Hirai, executive vice president of Sony and head of its Networked Products & Service Group, in an interview at the company’s Tokyo headquarters. "Earlier in the year is more preferable."

It looks like the eBay-Skype spectacle has finally come to a close.  Despite all of the arguments (legal and otherwise) that cropped up at one point or another, representatives of both companies announced last night that the sale of Skype to an investor group is complete.

Back in the summer, Twitter announced that it was working on an API to give developers the ability to geotag tweets. The company has now made that available.

There is no geotagging on Twitter.com yet, but Twitter apps will now be able to support it. So potentially, you will be able to geotag tweets and show the location from where you tweeted.

There’s a lot of change going on with Twitter these days. Recently we got the highly-anticipated Lists feature, which helped us to organize our streams and discover new, interesting people to follow.

For all of the great opportunities that can come from social media, there are plenty of negatives that come with it as well. This is of course why many businesses are hesitant to adopt social media strategies and/or let their employees engage with different social networking tools. It is also why many of the companies that do have social media strategies in tact, and do allow employees to use these tools have guidelines in place.

Update 3: Twitter is now telling me that I am part of a beta test group for the retweet features, so I guess it is no longer on hold.

Those who are part of the test get the following message:

YouTube is readying the launch of an automatic captions feature for the site’s videos. This and a new automatic caption timing feature will make it easier for anyone to add captions to their videos, and will enable anyone to read captions on more videos.

Fortune 100 companies don’t quite know what to do with Twitter, according to a new report.  Public relations firm Weber Shandwick instead painted a picture of big corporations just staking out their territory and then occasionally issuing the 140-character equivalents of press releases.

Update: Google has officially retired the Google Base search page. The company announces:

Most companies try to improve themselves over time.  Twitter, unfortunately, hasn’t managed to do so.  A downtime report from CheckMySite indicates that Twitter’s still suffering problems on a regular basis, and that it hasn’t done well at all in comparison to Facebook and MySpace.