All Things Digital

Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes says he’ll have a decision on the future of AOL “soon.” That can’t come fast enough for AOL boss Randy Falco, who we’re told is now fuming about the limbo state his company has entered: “When is New York going to sell us?” we’re told he muttered in earshot of his lieutenants recently.

Meanwhile, Matt Marshall at Venturebeat doesn’t have a timeline, but he does have a theory about who’s going to buy the company: Both Yahoo and Microsoft. Matt’s scenario, which he says Microsoft is “quietly readying” (according to “sources close to AOL”): Yahoo snaps up AOL, then Microsoft buys both companies.

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The Web is abuzz with how vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email got hacked. Hackers who obtained Alaska Gov. Palin’s email password apparently used the “forgot my password” feature of Yahoo’s email service.

The hackers evidently used information they knew about Palin–her zip code, date of birth, and that she met her husband in high school–to convince Yahoo’s service into assigning a new password for Palin’s email account.

PC World notes that the security question that Palin chose didn’t turn out to be so secure. Most online services ask questions that only you should know. But in Palin’s case, it must have been something that could easily be guessed, given all of the public information available about her.

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The Austin Game Developers Conference featured one of the first official public dissections of the Lively by Google virtual world (or virtual room), and I got a chance to sit down with the project’s creative director, Kevin Hanna, in advance of that talk.

One of the news tidbits: Lively could be expanded into the casual game space as Google plans to release guidelines for more interactive components, meaning games, inside Lively spaces.

“We’re about to open up the API for interactive gadgets–meaning games,” he said.

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Carriers have long worried that they’ll be relegated to being “dumb pipes” as more developers churn out applications for mobile phones. But some new figures are now making those carriers change their stance, as we heard during today’s keynote debate on “Open Networks” at the CTIA conference happening in San Francisco this week.

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Mobile software operating system Android is coming soon, at least on one device–and that device will have a way for third-party applications to get access to users. The Google-led software initiative will offer a service called Android Market, a way to find, maybe purchase and download third-party applications (and maybe other content?). This is like what Apple’s App Store is for the iPhone and iPod. But there are some differences, according to the Android team post about it today.

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The micro-messaging service Twitter Tuesday suspended the accounts of users don_draper and peggyolson. If those names sound familiar, you’re probably a fan of the hit AMC show “Mad Men.” Those two Twitter users take their names from two of the main characters on the show, and over the past several weeks had been providing updates, mostly in character from what I could tell.

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There seems to be some grassroots support for the idea of an emergency broadcast system on the micro-messaging service Twitter, at least from people who have emergencies to broadcast. The latest cry for help: A Chinese journalist nabbed by security forces during the Olympics and forced to go to a village far from the event.

You can see Zhou “Zuola” Shuguang’s Twitter stream here, but it won’t do you much good if you can’t read Chinese. A translation of his Tweets is on Global Voices Online. According to the article, Zuola–a childless 27-year-old–was ordered to meet with police over accusations of having two children, one more than the local limit. On meeting the police, he was placed in a car, driven to a mining town, and placed under house arrest.

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In yet another powerful showcase of Twitter’s potential power as a disseminator of information, today several people received the first information via the service that NASA has confirmed that its Phoenix Mars Lander has, in fact, found water on Mars. It’s still not on CNN.com, not on MSNBC.com, not on Fox.com. But a Twitter search query reveals it’s all over Twitter.

As a result of the news spreading quickly through Twitter, it’s also now all over FriendFeed, where some discussions are taking place on the subject. This is the kind of stuff these services are built for.

The water was found in ice-rich soil. Tests confirmed the ice was water-based.

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Google is the sleeping giant when it comes to advertising in video games. While the company dominates search advertising, it has yet to make a big splash in video games. That could change soon, as the company has been quietly testing its “AdSense for Games” product for months.

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Tech bloggers and investors have come up with a new parlor game: Guessing Facebook’s “real” valuation. Nobody seems to believe the company’s official $15 billion valuation that it announced when it raised its most recent, not-yet-closed round from Microsoft and others.

The latest guess: A new study out today by VC Experts pegs the valuation at $12.5 billion, a number derived from the firm’s proprietary valuation-calculation methodology and based on numbers from numerous public documents. Take a look. This is perhaps the most well-researched guess yet, and includes lots of details like stock prices on the dates of various funding rounds.

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Facebook has finally started integrating its new redesign into its main site. The company is betting that what users want to do is publish more information about themselves, and see more about their friends activities. The thing is, do most Facebook users actually want to do those things?

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With the influx of fresh new gamers, thanks in large part to the popularity of mass-market game machines, the DS and the Wii, more game companies than ever are jumping on the girl gamer bandwagon. Practically every booth at this year’s E3 Media and Business Summit this year had something to offer for female gamers of various demographics.

The breadth of games ranged from Nintendo DS titles like Namco Bandai’s “National Geographic Panda” and Legacy Interactive’s “Zoo Vet Endangered Animals” to Wii titles like Electronic Arts’ “Littlest Pet Shop” … and “Boogie: Superstar.”

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How do you know when one of the world’s most respected investment firms has veered off path and bet wrong? That’s the crux of the question raised by a piece in this month’s Fortune magazine, entitled “Kleiner bets the farm” that puts Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers under the lens for its recent investment decisions.

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As the video game industry gears up for its annual E3 conference in July, the reality is setting in that the one-time entertainment extravaganza has become narrowly focused on console games, with very little room for PC games.

Even Microsoft and Intel, the champions of the PC, have conceded that point. Intel isn’t holding any press conferences or functions at the show. And Kevin Unangst, senior global director of Windows gaming at Microsoft, said his team decided to show off PC games at an event in San Francisco this week to avoid being overshadowed at E3.

“As it has morphed, E3 has fundamentally become a console show,” he said. “We didn’t want to just squeeze out some time at a console show.”

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While we’ve written several times recently about the progress of next-generation, camera-based game control technologies, including the hefty funding received by Prime Sense and an earlier update on several competing companies, there’s one detail we’ve edged around: When you’ll get to use them yourself.

That’s because most of the companies developing gesture recognition technology aren’t sure themselves. The firms developing the 3D cameras that make motion-sensing gaming possible have to work through intermediaries to get their products to the consumer market, and in the Byzantine world of game development, no small company can predict which way giants like Sony and Electronic Arts will lean. However, a company called SoftKinetic recently stepped up to tell me that it thinks the moment may be close.

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