Internet | featured news

As July melted into August, college towns around the country began to swell with incoming freshmen, returning students and faculty, and campus bookstores began to stock their shelves.

The New York Times Company has a letter of intent to sell the online resource guide to Answers.com, an online question-and-answer site, for $270 million, according to an executive familiar with the negotiations.

...But in the past three years the animated GIF has made a comeback. A number of young bloggers and artists have found a new niche for the long forgotten GIF—it can bridge the gap between video and still photo. It’s within this niche that these flipbook-like, moving images have exploded in popularity thanks to sites like Tumblr, Reddit and 4Chan.

Kevin Systrom's smartest move was to sell Instagram to Facebook early, before having to deliver even an iota of revenue. My prediction is that we’ll look back on Facebook's acquisition of Instagram as a bust—much in the same way we now view News Corp.’s purchase of Myspace, AOL’s purchase of Bebo, and Excite@Home’s purchase of Blue Mountain Arts.

As the buzz around Mitt Romney’s upcoming running mate selection builds, some are looking to Wikipedia to find out who the pick will be. As Micah Sifry of TechPresident notes, tracking Wikipedia page edits in 2008 would have accurately predicted the VP selections: "Sarah Palin‘s Wikipedia page was updated at least 68 times the day before John McCain announced her selection, with another 54 changes made in the five previous days previous..."

AT&T is shutting down its second-generation, or 2G, wireless networks by 2017 as it continues to upgrade its systems to faster technology and better use its limited airwaves.

Electronic Arts Inc. has sued online game maker Zynga saying that its new game "The Ville" infringes its own game, "The Sims Social." EA said Friday that "The Ville" is "unmistakable" in its similarity to "The Sims Social," which launched more than a year earlier. EA says the games are "largely indistinguishable" to a casual observer.

Thomson Reuters said its blogging platform for Reuters News was hacked, resulting in multiple false posts to its website, including a fake interview with a Syrian rebel army leader.