Google has announced that they will launch Friend Connect, a new service that will allow any site to be turned into a social network. No charge. Basically, Google wants to turn the internet into one huge, universal social profile. Google wanted to tap into the hundreds of millions of users that participate in social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

But when you’re Google, you don’t make a competing site and then see what happens, you launch a service that turns the internet itself into one humongous social networking platform which can be used by anyone, with no charge.

According to a report in the NYT, Grand Theft Auto IV reached sales of over $500 million in its first seven days on the market. Take Two Interactive said the game sold approximately 6 million copies worldwide since its launch last Tuesday.

The numbers significantly exceeded expectations of many analysts who expected to see around 5 million copies sold in the first two weeks. Take Two also stated that 3.6 million of those copies were sold the first day of the launch globally for around $310 million in sales. This number even exceeds the numbers we saw for the Halo 3 launch for both first day and first week sales.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer issued a letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang over the weekend stating that the company withdrawing its offer to Yahoo. Microsoft had raised its bid to well over the $33 per share, upping it by nearly $5 billion which was still not enough to sway Yahoo board members.

“Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer. After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal,” said Ballmer in the letter.

Cubans have been able to get underground and illegal PCs for a while, but the Cuban government only recently lifted the official ban on them. The first publicly-available machines just went on sale Friday. The QTECH PCs are state-approved are only available at a single store. The crowds had a chance to gawk at some not too cutting edge tech. The towers cost $780 and feature Celeron processors, 512MB of RAM, Windows XP, and come with a CRT display.

And even should they buy one, most Cubans won’t be allowed to have Internet access. Silly Cubans, the net is only for certain “trusted officials” and state journalists. The good news is that with computers now legally available, some expect black market prices on more up-to-date gear down the road.

Much like car manufacturer’s claims about MPG, you aren’t going to get all the hard drive space that’s advertised on your devices, but it’s an issue that may haunt Creative at the moment. A class-action suit was filed against the company regarding the quoted capacity of their hard-drive based media players. It could potentially result in a huge settlement for anybody who bought a device between May 5th 2001 and April 30th 2008. Of course, Creative isn’t admitting any wrong-doing.

The suit alleges that Creative knowingly misled users by promising 7-percent more capacity from their PMPs than was actually even possible, and that they exaggerated the number of songs and the total length of playback in hours. Nothing has hit court yet, but if customers can prove they bought a Creative hard-drive based player in the seven year period, will be eligible for either a 50-percent discount on the price of a new 1GB PMP, or 20-percent off a single item bought from Creative’s US online store.

Wigix is launching its online stock market platform for goods today, going up against the eBay auction model. The Wigix system is based on the bid/ask model used by NASDAQ and the other financial stock markets. Sellers offer any price for their items and buyers can pay the asking price or offer another one if they like. This new online trading model should help to eliminate problems like shilling and sniping.

Some features include: no listing fees, all trades happen immediately, sales data tracking so that users can get accurate market prices. Wigix also has some social networking and community features like blogging, friends lists, sharing, Facebook data access, and inventory tracking. Users can also become category experts and earn a share of their category sales, they can also become SKU owners: any user can add a new item which is not yet registered in the Wigix database, making them the “owner’ of this item’s SKU, they receive a share of all future sales of this specific item. Many people would say that it’s about time and that eBay should have done something like this years ago.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang on Monday shot back a letter in response to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s 3-week ultimatum for Yahoo to come to negotiations with a firm message that Yahoo has not changed their tune in regards to Microsoft taking over the search engine. Ballmer’s letter had spelled out plans for a proxy contest to unseat the exist Yahoo board of directors and that continued delays could reduce the $44.6 billion offer which would mean less for shareholders.

“Our board’s view of your proposal has not changed,” said Yang along with Chairman Roy Bostock. “We continue to believe that your proposal is not in the best interests of Yahoo and our shareholders.”

Instead of going through the negotiations Yahoo has chosen to beat their exclamation points into swords and fight back against Microsoft. Yang continued in the letter stating that the offer and proxy contest would not be in the best interest of Yahoo and certainly not part of a friendly transaction as Microsoft first proposed.

Microsoft issued another letter to the Yahoo board of directors on Saturday with a deadline of 3 weeks for the company to accept the previous $44.6 billion takeover offer that Microsoft proposed in the beginning of February. Despite some recent talks between the two companies, an agreement has not been made and Microsoft is starting to lean heavy on the search engine firm’s board by threatening to go straight to the shareholders if necessary.

“If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo! board,” the letter read. “The substantial premium reflected in our initial proposal anticipated a friendly transaction with you. If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal.”, stated Steve Ballmer’s letter to Yahoo.

Sadie Jones died five years ago and was buried with her most her cell phone. Her widower, Frank Jones, claims to be receiving text messages from beyond the grave. Shortly after his wife’s death, Frank claims he missed a call on his mobile, which didn’t even ring.

He claims the call was from his own home number, but there was nobody in the house. But when he entered the house, it smelled like cigarettes and her perfume. Frank also claims that his late wife has been sending them all SMSes from beyond the grave with words that Sadie would say, but no number. Isn’t that just like a wife? She nags you through life, nags you from the grave and just like when she was living, what the hell can you really do about it but try to block it out?

Here’s a story sure to break your heart. A group of hackers invaded a support forum that was established by the nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation. They used JavaScript code and messages with flashing animations to assault dozens of visitors who suffer from the disorder.

The Foundation learned about the problem within 12 hours of the attack. And even though the boards were closed temporarily to get rid of the messages and animations, many readers like RyAnne Fultz, pictured here, experienced headaches and seizures before help arrived. There has to be a special place in hell for people who do this kind of thing.

On Thursday AT&T said that it will start offering live mobile TV service from MediaFlo in May. It will be branded simply “AT&T Mobile TV.” The new service will operate on two handsets, the LG Vu and the Samsung Access. Subscribers will have access to eight channels of live TV and get two exclusive channels. Pricing information should be available in May when the service launches.

The LG Vu has a touchscreen and 2 megapixel camera, the Access has a smaller display and a 1.3 megapixel sensor. Both have Bluetooth and 3G data. But the main point is the TV aspect. Productivity is about to go out the window.

Chrysler, the third largest US automaker, will be the first car company to offer in-car Internet access. Web service will be via subscription from a wireless carrier and dealers will add the feature to existing cars this year. Upcoming fleets will come off the assembly line already Internet-ready.

Get ready to see a rise in accidents as drivers get distracted by their favorite blog and subsequently wake up in the hospital missing a testicle or two, smelling of chicken feathers and looking like they shaved with a bulldozer that morning, while some fat nurse picks the windshield out of their face one fragment at a time.

You might have heard about the bizarre Guitar Hero lawsuit from Gibson against Activision. They’re claiming that Guitar Hero titles violate one of their patents. Now they have suddenly seemingly gone ballistic, suing everyone in site. Wal-Mart, Target, GameStop, Amazon, Toys ‘R’ Us and Kmart.

They want the game off the shelves. I guess they don’t like making money. Gibson says that it took “this action reluctantly, but is required to protect its intellectual property.” Retailers will only say “we aren’t commenting,”.

Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction author and most famously known for his work on “2001: A Space Odyssey” and his early forecast of communication satellites, died Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

Clarke wrote nearly 100 books in his lifetime dealing mostly with the future of science and the idea that the destiny of the human race lied somewhere beyond the Earth. His writings shaped the way many people thought about science and technology and inspired a wide range of individuals ranging from scientific astronomer Carl Sagan to Gene Roddenberry with Star Trek.

If you’re one of the many who grabbed themselves a copy of Super Smash Bros. for the Wii this weekend, you may or may not be able to get the game to play, depending on how dirty your Wii is. Apparently they had some issues in the Japanese versions of the game that are now starting to pop up here in the US.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl uses a double-layer disc with a large memory capacity. This means that a small percentage of Wii consoles may have trouble reading data off this large capacity disc if there is contamination on the lens of the disc drive. So, if you are a heavy smoker for instance, you may have a hard time playing. Apparently, Nintendo has specialized cleaning equipment that can resolve this problem and they urge you not to try cleaning it yourself.