270 participants took part in Yahoo!’s second Open Hack Day in London, submitting 51 hacks. (Via Yodel Anecdotal)

Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google is the title of a New York Times article on data-driven design, citing Douglas Bowman and other designers. (Via Doug Bowman (stop) on Twitter)

YIID, the service that helps you build a social identity, released some new features including activity streams for yourself and for your friends and one click registration in Communipedia.

Finally Apple started selling and renting movies in the German iTunes Store.

Taking Your Talent to the Web by Jeffrey Zeldman is now a free downloadable book. (Via Jeffrey Zeldman (zeldman) on Twitter)

Douglas Bowman left Google and wrote a blog post about his experinces as Lead Visual Designer. Graham Jenkin wrote about how he sees design work at Google. Anne K. Halsall, another designer, explains her reasons why she has left Google.

Last.fm announced that subscription will be required to listen to Last.fm Radio execpt for USA, Canada and Germany. (Via Last.fm - the Blog)

Jonathan Snook will be leaving the life of freelance and will start working at Squarespace. (Via Snook.ca)

Flickr has a new people-picker for FlickrMail and contact list page, that let’s you find someone faster. (Via Flickr Blog)

The WaSP InterAct Curriculum is an interesting and nice designed curriculum based upon web standards and best practices.

Google Chrome got updated and has some new features. It is 25% faster and has form autofill, full page zoom, autoscroll and tabs are dragable. (Via Google Chrome Blog)

WeFollow is a new, nice designed Twitter directory by Kevin Rose. (Via Twitter / Heiko Hebig)

Seesmic announced Seesmic for Facebook, an Adobe Air Facebook desktop client. Beside status updates it will support pictures and videos soon. Seesmic’s popular Twitter client twhirl will have Facebook support integrated in future. (Via Seesmic Blog)

After leaving FastCompany TV Robert Scoble’s new project will be Building 43, a content and social networking community. (Via TechCrunch)

socialmedian, a social news service acquired by XING in December 2008, uses now Facebook Connect to let people login and participate on socialmedian. (Via socialmedian Blog)

Google Quick Search Box can now update your Twitter status. There is an instruction how to tweet on the Google Code site for Google Quick Search. (Via Twitter / steverubel)

Apple has approved third party web browsers for the iPhone. (Via Mac Rumors)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes leave of absence until June, because health-related issues are more complex than he thought. Meanwhile Tim Cook will be responsible for Apple’s day to day operation. The company’s shares had dropped 7.8 percent after the announcement. (Via NYTimes.com)

Web design company Blueflavor launched 97bottles. It is a community site that lets you add, review and get to know different types of beer. It is for the ones who drink beer what is Corkd for wine lovers. 97bottles is very nice designed and supports OpenID. Would be nice if microformats would be supported too.

YouTube disables audio tracks that have not been authorized. It seems there will be a lot of silent movies like this one. (Via Twitter / Christian Heilmann)

Flickr launched the nearby-feature. For photos with geotags it is possible to see other photos that have been taken nearby this location. Just click on map link in the Additional Information section of a photograph, then click on the “See nearby photos and videos”-link on the bottom of the pop-up layer to see something like this. You can filter by whom and when the photos were taken. (Via Twitter / Dunstan Orchard)

Google is not only cutting stuff, but Google Catalog Search will be discontinued, Jaiku will be release as open source, dodgeball.com will be discontinued, developement on Google Notebook will stop and uploads to Google Video will no longe be allowed. (Via Search Engine Land, Inside Google Book Search, Jaikido Blog, Google Code Blog, Google Notebook Blog)

Google hired Joshua Schachter, who created the social bookmarking service Delicious and left Yahoo! some months ago. (Via ReadWriteWeb)

Think Vitamin, a site offering articles, interviews, reviews and more web related things, has a new layout and even a RSS feed. Think Vitamin is a produced by Carsonified. (Via Twitter / Brian Suda)

Full articles of Scroll Magazine number 1 are avaible online now. Scroll is a print, PDF and online magazine for web professionals by Maxine Sherrin and John Allsopp and designed by Veerle Pieters.

Google Friend Connect has integrated with Twitter. Beside Plaxo Twitter is the second non-Google service that is part of Google Friend Connect. (Via Official Google Blog)

Wikipedia launched an official mobile site. (Via Steve Rubel)

Google Reader added statistics for each subscribed feed. You can see them when showing the feed’s details. (Via Steve Rubel)

Apple launched Apple Developer Forums for everyone taking part in the iPhone Developer Program. (Via TidBITS)

MTV Music is a new nice and clean designed site features a large library of music videos. It’s possible to rate and comment videos and they can also be linked to and embedded. (Via Daring Fireball)

The Belgium design studio Duoh! has a new site. Duoh! is the brain child of Veerle Pieters and Geert Leyseele. More on the new design in a blog post by Veerle.

Finally Yahoo! revamped the profile page to make it a universal and central profile and control panel. (Via Yodel Anecdotal)