Microsoft has acquired Seattle based social networking site WebFives.

WebFives was initially founded in 2004 by former Microsoft engineer Mike Toutonghi as Vizrea and offers social networking with a focus of mobile media, including video, music and photos. Users are provided with standard social networking profile pages complete with blogging, and have the option of accessing their sites via computer or via a WAP specific page.

According to The Seattle Times, Toutonghi told WebFives users that the service will stop at the end of the year because of the Microsoft acquisition, making the acquisition a technology buy as opposed to a community buy. Toutonghi went on to encourage users to sign up to MSN Spaces and/or Windows Live for their social networking experience.

Price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

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Money-back assurances on subprime-linked securities are costing some leading banks billions

Google’s Streetview was celebrated at launch, but caught some flack when they were captured the public in some embarrassing situations.

Google’s hoping to avoid similar issues when they complete their launch overseas. According to Google’s senior privacy council, Google will begin altering photos to make sure that faces and license plate numbers aren’t recognizable. The move’s more aggressive than how unflattering photos or personal information are being handled in the U.S., where users have to write in for image take downs. But if it’s embarrassing enough, chances are it’s already been plastered all over the internet.

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Ed Zander’s exit was hastened by a failure to anticipate demand for 3G phones. Can Greg Brown help Motorola regain market share?

Jakob Lodwick, the co-founder of IAC owned video site Vimeo, left the company today. The reason? Apparently Lodwick didn’t see eye to eye with the IAC brass on creative issues, and specifically had a run in with IAC chief Barry Diller three weeks ago.

That’s not surprising, given the picture Lodwick chose to include with his goodbye post. A source close to Lodwick says “he was let go.”

Lodwick’s girlfriend, Julia Allison (who made a scandal at our August Capital party last summer - see video here), wrote a blog post saying “Dear Jakob, I wish I hadn’t found out you left the company you’ve been with for the last seven years from your blog. Love, Julia.”

Lots of drama out in NYC this evening.

Vimeo

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New figures released by comScore show that YouTube remains the outright leader in online video.

Based on videos viewed, Google owned sites (YouTube + Google Video, but mostly YouTube) commanded a 28.3% market share in the United States in September with Fox Interactive Media (FIM) sites (MySpace and others) on 4.2%. The figures (see chart) demonstrate that YouTube doesn’t dominate video viewing as much as would be expected, suggesting that the long tail is alive and well in the sector given the top ten video sites only hold 45.2% of all videos viewed online.

The unique viewer numbers for video destinations also show Google leading, but by a smaller margin of 39.4% vs 22.6% for FIM sites. These figures are for people visiting the actual video sites themselves suggesting that much of YouTube’s dominance comes not from YouTube.com itself, but from people embedding YouTube videos (28.3% of all videos viewed vs 4.2% for FIM).

Notable in its absence from both top ten charts is the IAC owned Vimeo, who according to this post fired founder Jakob Lodwick today. Clearly Vimeo isn’t performing although it has positioned itself well with support for HD video. IAC usually takes long term positions in companies it owns (Ask.com for example) so it’s not on Deadpool watch yet but you’d expect IAC will be looking at ways of improving its performance going forward.

YouTube

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MySpace

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Vimeo

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