Rather than rest on its laurels as the video world's top dog, YouTube has been kept busy lately adding new features and design elements. The Google-owned site just rolled out HTML5 support, its first video rentals, and a new music feature dubbed Disco. Today, it debuted a new "Watch" page that does its best to better focus one's attention on the real star of the show: video. YouTube has removed nearly all labels and extraneous text, resulting in a much cleaner feel, "and one that feels more Googleish," writes TechCrunch. To boot, YouTube has dropped it star rating system for …

Over three years after Microsoft announced a deal to sell ads on Facebook, and two years since shelling out $240 million for a 1.6% stake in the network, the relationship appears to have run aground. Microsoft has already lost part of Facebook's ad business, and, while it's presently renegotiating the agreement, the software giant still faces the possibility that more ads will be pulled, writes BusinessWeek. "Facebook stopped using Microsoft this month to sell graphical banner ads in some international markets," BusinessWeek reports. It may also drop those ads in the U.S., Robin …

Outside of school and sleep, young people now spend "practically every waking minute" connected to one digital device or another, according to new research from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Today, those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with some sort of device. By contrast, they were connected less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. What's more, those numbers do not even include the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones. Overall, …

CrowdFlower, which helps companies "crowdsource" menial tasks, has raised $5 million in a first round of institutional funding. The San Francisco-based startup's service is best fitted for basic tasks that can't be automated by technology, such as tagging photos, according to VentureBeat. There are a number of services that already provide the infrastructure for this type of crowdsourcing, chief among them being Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Rather than competing directly with incumbents, CrowdFlower is serving up analytics on top of crowdsourcing platforms including Mechanical Turk, to make the results more useful. CrowdFlower is claming that more than 8 million tasks from …

Apple is reportedly in talks with Microsoft to replace Google as the default search engine on its iPhone. Citing unnamed sources, BusinessWeek is reporting that the talks have been under way for weeks, and reflect the accelerating rivalry between Apple and Google. Google is now marketing its own branded smartphone, the Nexus One, that competes directly with the iPhone, while it has championed the development of a mobile operating system that rivals the iPhone OS. The move would represent a huge win for Microsoft, which has been widely criticized for so far failing to put forth a …

In what's being interpreted as a preemptive strike against Apple's tablet device, Amazon is offering a new royalty option for its Kindle platform under which authors and publishers can receive 70% of list price net of delivery costs. The goal, according to ZDNet's "Between the Lines blog, "is Amazon is getting a jump on any looming Kindle threat from Apple and a bevy of other companies entering the e-reader race." Amazon said that the 70% royalty option is in addition to an existing program for the Kindle Digital Text Platform, and will be available by the end …

Are AT&T's coverage issues about to bite it in the butt? Rumor has it that Apple has chosen Verizon as the official carrier for its soon-to-launch "tablet" device. Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar, for one, is convinced based on the fact that the new device will feature a wireless chip made by Verizon partner Qualcomm. "This makes sense for Apple," Nielsen Wireless analyst Roger Entner tells The Street. "It behooves them to build a relationship with a company they haven't worked with yet." Verizon's involvement could bode well for urban consumers who've complained endlessly about AT&T's spotty …

Ending nearly a year of rumors and speculation, The New York Times on Wednesday confirmed plans to implement a metered pay system, which will give non-paying readers access to select stories, while limiting full access to paying subscribers. The kicker is that the paper doesn't expect to employ the new model until early 2011. According to The Times' David Carr, the delay allows executives to "land" the announcement -- like one lands a blow -- "with some authority, but not much impact." Adds Carr: "People who remain reflexively bullish on free ignore that …

Online publisher Mobile Entertainment is reporting that comScore has questioned the findings of a new Gartner research report, which determined that Apple's App Store accounted for 99.4% of all mobile app downloads in 2009. Commenting on the Gartner numbers during a presentation at the Mobile Games Forum in London today, comScore's (very Brit) analyst Alistair Hill said: "I think somebody's missed something out on the maths there ... I find that hard to believe ... We know iPhone users buy a lot more apps than anybody else, but that [the Gartner claims] still doesn't work." According to ME, Hill …

Has the world's most popular micro-blogging service jumped the shark? Well, after peaking at a growth rate of 13% last March, Twitter has seen its growth slow dramatically, according to new data from HubSpot. Last October, Twitter's growth rate had fallen to just 3.5%. On the bright side, the research indicates that the average active user on Twitter today is more engaged than six months ago. HubSpot also found that more Twitter users now include bios -- 54% -- links --65% -- and location data -- 41% -- in their profiles. Overall, however, most Twitterers have fewer …