GigaOM

As a few hundred scruffy protesters gathered in Ottawa yesterday to support Net Neutrality, busloads of teenagers on school trips to visit Canada’s seat of government walked past them, blissfully unaware that the fight to keep Facebook free was happening right next to them.
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Yahoo is following the footsteps of other technology giants by launching its own desktop/web hybrid application called BrowserPlus. The plug-in is only available as a sneak peak with a few demos, such as using BrowserPlus to drag-and-drop photos from your desktop into Flickr. Yahoo’s product clearly isn’t ready for prime time yet, but perhaps the [...]

Today at Google’s developer conference, MySpace said it would use Google Gears to power search and sort functions for its email, giving users a highly sought-after functionality at little cost to MySpace infrastructure. The move is a great one for MySpace, which is really pulling out all the stops in its rivalry with Facebook.
Making social [...]

File-sharing service Zecter has opened up in private beta, for which the Silicon Valley-based startup that has taken funding from Y Combinator and Tandem Ventures has provided GigaOM with 150 invites that can be accessed here.
The service has numerous features aimed at simplifying the sharing process, including the ability to sync files, track file [...]

Strands, a Corvallis, Ore.-based startup that has shown success in the music social recommendation space, is relaunching Strands.com into a private beta online activity aggregation service. The company hopes to take the lifestreaming features offered by Web 2.0 darling FriendFeed a step further by adding the ability to build a “taste profile” based on [...]

Virtualization superstar VMware said today it would purchase Israeli startup B-hive Networks for an undisclosed amount. The B-hive team will form the base of VMware’s development center in Israel and give VMware a better way to track performance among virtualized machines.
Typically, performance mapping and monitoring software measures how well servers talk to one another, but [...]