While YouTube has thousands of content partners, the top rung is made up of Vevo, Warner Music Group and Machinima -- together which accounted for almost 1.5 billion streams in May, according to new data from Nielsen. “To put this into context, YouTube continues to be the top online video destination in the US with over 136 million unique viewers who streamed 16 billion videos during May 2012,” Nielsen explains. It’s clear that Vevo is a major YouTube partner, leading the top five partners in terms of total streams (695 million), while Machinima averaged the most streams per viewer, 24 …

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, has been named the first woman to the company’s board of directors. She joins CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Adreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen, James Breyer of Accel Partners, Reed Hastings, the chairman and CEO, Netflix and Founder’s Fund Peter Thiel, among others. “Given the pressure that’s been on Facebook to increase diversity on its board, Sandberg’s appointment does not come as a total surprise to the tech community,” Forbes writes. “Women are a significant minority among those employed in technology jobs.” Although women comprise 48% of the U.S. workforce, they hold only 24% of science, engineering, technology, and …

Have you heard about Apple’s forthcoming iPhone map application? Well, it will reportedly include Yelp’s “check-in” feature, which will let users broadcast their current locations to friends. Apple Maps is set to replace Google as the default location service, and debut later this year. According to materials that Apple distributed to software developers, it will also allow users to communicate through Yelp without exiting the app. “The Apple developer kit, which was given to programmers earlier this month and examined by Bloomberg, includes screen shots of Yelp check-ins within Apple Maps,” Bloomberg News reports. “Integration with Apple Maps may help …

As part of its ongoing battle with Netflix, Amazon’s LOVEFiLM has entered into a major multi-year content deal with Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution. Per the deal, members of Amazon’s video-on-demand service will now have access to ton more movies and TV series. Specifically, LOVEFiLM members will have instant, exclusive on-demand access to what is known as “the second pay television window” of Twentieth Century Fox film content, reports The Next Web. “The film deal starts with titles theatrically released in the UK in 2011, which will be made available to subscribers to the LOVEFiLM service in around March 2013.” The …

The New York Times this weekend announced plans to put the entire newspaper on Flipboard, the popular social news-reader app. Beginning Thursday, Times subscribers should get access to articles, videos, photo slideshows, and blogs produced by the paper -- all within Flipboard -- while nonsubscribers will have access to a limited sampling of content. “The partnership is being touted as a first for both companies,” CNet writes. “It marks the first time the startup has persuaded a large publisher to make its content available on its platform. Indeed, Flipboard says the authentication process and navigation experience was designed specifically for …

From dropped calls to clueless clerks, service shortcomings inevitably leave their mark on offending brands. For that reason, Twitter can’t be happy about its severe server outage on Thursday. And, of late, the micro-blogging leader had been performing so well. “After nearly a year without any significant periods of downtime, using Twitter [has been] almost nothing like the early days of being on the service,” AllThingsD notes. Yet, “After nearly six months of site reliability above 99 percent, Twitter was unreachable across the Web and mobile devices multiple times over the course of [Thursday], with intermittent periods of uptime and …

Gluttony is the least attractive of all sins. But that isn’t keeping Amazon from trying to hog a horde of new domain extensions. If the ecommerce and networking giant gets its way, it will soon control 76 new extensions. “Most observers had expected the company to apply for .amazon and .kindle, but it seems that was just for starters,” CNet reports. “Amazon's ambitions also include a host of generic terms, including the likes of .free, .like, .game, and .shop.” Indeed, “Amazon is looking to nab a slew of compelling names, and if things unfold the way Amazon hopes, the outcome …

Facebook is about to become a bit more manicured and, most likely, grammatically correct. That’s because the social network is soon to roll out full comment editing tools for all users, including brands. Facebook currently lets users edit comments within a few seconds of posting. Now, however, users of all stripes will have unlimited time to make changes to comments, which means that Facebook will open up their entire comment history for editing. Yes, It’s “a gift to the clumsy, hurried, and drunk,” writes WebProNews. “Comment editors shouldn’t think they can abuse this system [as] there will now exist an …

In other Yahoo news, The Web portal is reporting in talks to resolve its patent-infringement dispute with Facebook. According to a court filing obtained by Bloomberg News, lawyers for Yahoo have asked U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White in San Francisco for a two-week extension on deadlines to file replies in the lawsuit while the companies hold discussions. Yahoo’s lawyers also apparently asked for a two-week delay in a motion hearing now set for Aug. 10. “The parties are currently engaged in settlement negotiations to resolve this dispute,” Kevin Smith, a Yahoo lawyer, said in the filing. “The parties believe …

Thanks in part to a deal with Getty Images, Yahoo this week unveiled visual improvements to its image and video search services. Thanks to an extended partnership with the stock photo agency, Yahoo plans to give searchers access to more than 20,000 new photos, daily, while dishing up news-related images. Reading into the initiative, VentureBeat writes: The Sunnyvale company, still reeling from the ouster of discredited CEO Scott Thompson, is putting on a sunnier disposition in search with high-quality digital images.” Part of a larger rebranding effort or not, Getty photos will be pulled into the Yahoo search experience within …