Pixazza, a startup founded by Netscape veterans, wants to turn Web photos into cash. "It might just work," says BusinessWeek's Rob Hof. On Wednesday, the company unveiled a service that lets publishers apply tiny yellow-and-blue price tags to photos on their sites. Mouse over one of the price tags and a box appears that lists the product, like a coat or a pair of shoes, along with the price and the retailers that offer the product. Click on the box and you head directly to the retailer's site. Pixazza is basically an ad network, albeit a small one at …

Michael Arrington wonders about the wisdom of crowds in his reaction post to Facebook changing its redesign because of user backlash. He and other bloggers argue that many great products would never have been built if the designers had asked for customer input. Robert Scoble, for one, argues that a Porsche would be a Volvo if the company let its buyers decide the features. Says Arrington: "The bottom line is, when you listen to your users, you get vanilla. Feature creep. Boring. It takes a dictator to create the iPhone and change the course of an entire industry. Imagine …

Interestingly, Twitter's first real foray into advertising comes by way of Microsoft. But don't panic, says Peter Kafka: "You won't be getting come-ons for Vista in your Twitterstream" or anything like that -- the new Microsoft ad buy is relatively mild stuff. Via Federated Media, John Battelle's conversational marketing company, the software giant is sponsoring a new product called ExecTweets, which is basically a page that collects tweets from various noteworthy executives. Twitter gets an undisclosed payment for Microsoft's sponsorship and for promoting the site on its service. According to Kafka, this is the first of many programs FM will …

Is imitation really the highest form of flattery? If so, Facebook and Twitter should feel honored (not threatened) that aging Web giants Yahoo and AOL are preparing news feed offerings for some of their more popular Web services. For those unfamiliar with the surging phenomenon, news feeds, also called "life streaming" services, allow users to broadcast their daily lives via status updates. According to GigaOm's Om Malik, Yahoo is working a life-streaming product called Yahoo Updates, while AOL is working on a product called "Site Social." However, unlike Facebook and Twitter, Yahoo is planning to integrate the new tools with …