Amid reports that Facebook is finally ready to debut its Foursquare killer, er, location-based "check-in" feature, attention has shifted to the 800-pound gorilla in the room: Google's Latitude.   Largely ignored by industry pundits until now, the search giant's location-based service has some 8 million registered users, 3 million of whom are presently "active." Compare that to Foursquare's measly million-odd users, and MyTown's roughly 2 million.  "Latitude is not dead," Google's Steve Lee said Thursday on an industry panel, according to TechCrunch. Translation, according to TechCrunch: "Hey Foursquare and MyTown, suck it."  According …

Stoking the flames of the "net neutrality" wars, the FCC is about to propose regulating broadband lines under decades-old rules designed for traditional phone networks. That's "despite a recent court ruling that the commission had limited powers to do so," writes The Seattle Times. "The FCC has limited authority over information services but it has vast powers to regulate certain utilities ... It contends a combination of those powers can be applied to broadband service." "The decision, by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, is likely to trigger a vigorous lobbying battle, …

TechCrunch claims to have proof that Apple plans to give its new iAds a "competitive advantage" over other mobile ad networks on the iPhone and iPad. The blog has obtained and subsequently published a slide that was attached to an email sent to an app developer from a Quattro Wireless sales rep. In it, Apple announces a "new program launching this month called ViP (Verification of iTunes Purchase) ... aimed at app developers who use iPhone ads to drive downloads and purchases of their own apps." The program, as Apple explains, will tie the ads directly into …

YouTube aside, video sites experiencing the most success are those run by broadcast TV networks and Web-only media brands, followed by magazine sites and music labels. That according to a new joint report from Brightcove and Tubemogul. Newspaper sites, meanwhile, are lagging when it comes to both total video views and growth. In terms of how people are finding these videos, just over half -- 51.75% -- are navigating directly from the publisher's main site. After that, Google search is the next biggest source of video-viewing traffic -- 38.92% -- followed by Yahoo -- 5.58% -- Bing -- 2.29% …

On Thursday, Net regulator Icann switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters, reports The BBC. Calling the move "historic," Arab nations including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called "country codes" written in Arabic scripts. "The move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Chinese, Thai and Tamil," according to The BBC. Icann representative Kim Davies said there had previously been concerns that such a move could cause the Internet to "split," but that such worries were not credible. …

Apple's iPad might not have been designed to replace netbooks, but you wouldn't know it by looking at recent sales numbers for the low-cost, low-powered computing devices. Indeed, sales growth of netbooks fell off a proverbial cliff in January, and then shrank again in April, according to new report from Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty. The steep decline is definitely collateral damage from the January introduction and April launch of the iPad, according to Huberty. Sales of netbooks peaked last summer at an astonishing 641% year-over-year growth rate. Yet, "Her timing seems a little off," notes Fortune. "The …

Fortune just published a must-read excerpt from David Kirkpatrick's forthcoming book, "The Facebook Effect: the Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World." In one unbelievable anecdote, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts saw fit to "punk" Sequoia Capital -- despite the fact that the veneral VC firm was prepared to invest perhaps millions in the startup. "Zuckerberg and another partner showed up deliberately late for an 8 a.m. meeting, in their pajamas ... Zuckerberg showed a PowerPoint presentation David Letterman-style," Kirkpatrick writes. Who does that?! In those early days (before even Britney did …

Likely in response to Bing's more nuanced search experience, Google is making what The New York Times calls "some very noticeable changes" to its search results pages. Expected to be rolled out gradually throughout the week, the search giant is adding a new left-handed navigation panel to most results pages. According to The Times' Bits blog, this "visual clutter" means users will have easier access to tools to help them more narrowly focus search queries. Now, when users search for a type of media, they will get the option to choose between different content types, including images, …

Blockbuster Video is launching a cross-channel API designed to deliver films, reviews and real-time inventory to consumers phones, set top boxes, gaming consoles, and other point-of-sale locations (gas stations), reports ReadWriteWeb. "The Blockbuster story is another example of how companies are re-architecting through open API's to reconfigure their businesses," writes the blog. "An API strategy gives Blockbuster the leverage to give the customer a unified experience across multiple channels ... It also opens new ways to sell products as the API can present the right information at the right time on the platform of the customer's choice." …

In January, AT&T quieted critics of its coverage quality by announcing plans to spend $2 billion on improvements throughout the year. Yet, according to a new customer survey conducted by ChangeWave Research, the quality of AT&T's service has actually worsened. In a poll that asked 4,040 smartphone users in March how many dropped calls they had experienced in the past three months, AT&T came in dead last. Verizon customers reported losing only 1.5% of their calls over the past three months -- the lowest in the smartphone industry and the lowest percentage for a carrier ever recorded …