• nope Reportedly, new Google employees won’t be able to use Windows as one of their OS options anymore; it’s just Mac and Linux.
• why? Blame it on security concerns in the wake of Google’s whole hack thang with China that happened a few months ago. source

• » The real question: How many of their employees are holdouts working on Amiga or BeOS? Really, we want to know. If this is a company of nerds, there has to be at least one.

• 20% the size of the raises Apple is giving FoxConn employees so they stop committing high-profile suicides
• .7% the amount the raises will raise the outsourcing cost of the iPad’s sale price, from 2.3 to 3 percent source

• We want to have babies with this RSS reader. OK, maybe not babies, but definitely some sort of spawn. Our statistics meet your cool little boxes in a dark room somewhere, and things might happen. After all, you’re my wonderwall. (Thanks TechCrunch for the tip. This $3.99 pile of awesome, created by a bunch of recent Stanford grads, is totally worth it.) source

• 2 million sold in just 60 days; they’re totally just showing off source

• 25,260 users plan to actually quit tomorrow source

• It was the first truly social music service. While Lala took a little while to get its footing, when it finally did, it was nothing short of magical. With Apple’s purchase of the service back in December, we knew this day was coming, but May 31st will still be a sad day for a lot of music fans like us. Here are some reasons we’ll miss Lala but will remain hopeful about its future as part of iTunes.

A quick history of Lala

• 2006 Lala launches as an easy way to trade CDs, similar to Netflix in some ways.
• 2007 Lala adds a free, on-demand way of listening to music. It doesn’t work at all.
• 2008 The company finally nails its most popular form, a 10¢ cloud music model.
• 2009 The company runs out of cash and sells itself to Apple for around $20 million.
• 2010 Apple shuts down the site, possibly to launch a similar iTunes version. NO! *sob*

What Lala had that nobody else did

• Simple, cheap options With songs available for a mere ten cents a piece and completely free to listen to once, it created a low barrier of entry that encouraged new listening habits.
• Easy sharing You could put a Lala embed on your site and share music with other people, legally and free; a number of sites took advantage of this model, from the AV Club to Pitchfork.
• Cloud-based freedom You could put your entire library on the site and listen anywhere. Sadly, Lala never got a chance to do what would’ve really made it a big hit – put it on the iPhone.

Why Lala got away with it

• We said, ‘consumers shouldn’t have to worry about where their files are, they should be able to play their music.’ It’s actually a huge benefit for the labels, because once Lala knows the music that you listen to, it makes perfect sense to say, ‘hey, Wilco has a new album coming out.’
• Lala CEO Bill Nguyen • About the benefits of the cloud music service to record companies. They were able to sell the model to them on the idea that they could provide information that might encourage future purchases. One thing that Nguyen noted is that when people were billed by the service, they bought one out of every five songs, most of which they found through discovery. On Lala, people weren’t simply listening to their collections. They were trying to find new songs. The model worked for eMusic already, but they broadened it.  source

So, what’s next, anyway?

• Well, it could be the next iTunes. Or not. With the service’s recent acquisition by Apple, it’s entirely possible that they’ll take this model and completely make it theirs. Or they might ditch certain parts of it and focus exclusively on the cloud service. Lala was out of money by the end, so they couldn’t see the idea through. But Apple, as you might know, has a ton of money and clout to pull this idea off. Or they could stick with their walled garden approach. We’ll see.

Let’s remember how great it was, guys.

• Post on Twitter about how much you’ll miss the little music locker that could, and we’ll reflect it here. Might as well, right? The tags #riplala or “lala.com” will work just fine. source

• That’s right. Even Microsoft doesn’t want it. The company’s Australian arm has created an advertising campaign to make some of the wind out of IE6’s long-working sails. Clever approach. Will it work? source

• what Some companies have chosen to stick with IE6 essentially because sites like Facebook and YouTube aren’t really usable with it anymore. Which is annoying as sin.
• why Ever see the movie “Up in the Air”? Similar concept, except with Facebook. Companies are afraid of outright saying they’re blocking Facebook. source

• Kevin Rose just combined Digg with Facebook and Twitter. As you may know, we think that Digg has a relevance problem. It also has an over-influence problem. And a sexism problem. And let’s face it, it’s kind of a pain in the butt to submit articles to. Fortunately for Digg, it has a coming redesign that looks pretty awesome.

• Fixing the faults Digg had a lot of problems and this update has turned it into a viable source that we might actually use. It’s also way ahead of Twitter and Facebook in the way it handles RSS feeds. (Making it easier for content to gain influence organically, just like Twitter.) The mix of news, friends and tastemakers is kinda brilliant.
• Reddit’s co-founder just jealousOne of the co-founders of Reddit has posted about it, and has trashed it as a crass move to please venture capitalists, but we completely disagree. And, if we’re being completely frank, Reddit still has these problems and always will as long as it treats content promotion from legitimate sites like spam. source