Sprint Nextel shares surged 20% on Thursday, as investors overlooked a fourth quarter loss that was narrower-than-expected. The company had other good news to share, too: Its exclusive deal to sell Palm's new Pre phone will last through the end of the year. CNBC.com broke the news, citing an unnamed source who confirmed that the exclusive arrangement would last through the end of 2009. The Palm Pre, which is viewed as a potentially strong competitor to Apple's iPhone, is scheduled to go on sale sometime in the first half of the year. CNBC says that that many analysts see the …

"Facebook has a lot of communication problems," writes VentureBeat's MG Siegler. Earlier this week, the company was forced to backtrack on a new Terms of Service plan that left users "feeling like they had unwillingly ceded ownership of their data to the site." Despite backtracking quickly, the damage had been done, as nearly 100,000 members signed up for a group protesting the new ToS. But that's not all: "PR glitches continue to rise," Siegler says, adding that, "the company runs the risk of being viewed as a faceless (ironic, huh?) and untrustworthy entity." Given Facebook's messy media and public relations, …

Growth in the local-ad market, which represents about a third of total U.S. online spending, is expected to shrink this year, as local businesses chop their ad budgets thanks to the recession. This is bad news for sellers, consultant Greg Sterling says, especially those that offer ad products that are very similar. According to Borrell Associates, local online spending in the U.S. is expected to grow just 5.4% in 2009 after growing a whopping 45% last year to $12.7 billion. Meanwhile, total U.S. online ad spending is expected to be flat, declining 0.3% to $36.9 billion in 2009, compared with …

Consumer privacy watchdog the Electronic Privacy Information Center claims that the recent uproar over Facebook changing its terms of service highlights the need for a privacy law. According to the BBC, the new terms, which have since been rescinded, "seemingly gave Facebook vast control over users' content." Epic President Marc Rotenberg agreed. "This row underlines the need for comprehensive privacy laws," he said. "It is great that Facebook has responded by going back to its old terms of service. That is a step in the right direction, but these issues don't go away. Before CEO Mark Zuckerberg pulled the plug …

Hulu this week showed that it's completely at the mercy of its content partners by pulling content from two of its distributors: CBS Corp.'s TV.com, and startup Boxee. The Web video provider, which is a joint venture from News Corp. and NBC Universal, issued a statement saying that it was exercising its "contractual rights" by pulling content from TV.com. That distribution deal had been in place before rival CBS bought CNet, TV.com's parent, last year. With respect to Boxee, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar issued a special blog post in which he said the decision was out of Hulu's hands. "Our …

Google better watch out: President Barack Obama's nominee to be the next U.S. antitrust chief has her eye on the search giant. Bloomberg digs up comments made by Christine A. Varney at an American Antitrust Institute event last summer in which she described Google as a monopolist that seeks to dominate online computing the same way Microsoft dominated software. "For me, Microsoft is so last century," Varney said. They are not the problem." She added that the U.S. economy will "continually see a problem -- potentially with Google" because it already "has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising." While …

On Wednesday, Yahoo celebrated the fifth birthday of its search engine by adding another Google-like feature to its service: pictures and video. Indeed, the new offerings are Yahoo's version of Universal Search, which is Google's integration of video and photo images into regular search results. According to Kara Swisher, Yahoo has been working on various versions of this and other improvements to its search engine for a year. The ultimate idea, she says, is to integrate search and display ads on the results page, "giving it the cool-looking attributes of display and the more measurable qualities of paid listings." Time …