Microsoft Corporation today launched a redesign of its popular Internet portal MSN.com.

The company has updated the site with a far more simple and clean design, along with new social networking features that display information from various social networks you set up such as Facebook and Twitter. A new featured called TrendWatch was also implemented, which essentially scans Twitter for local news content.

The company has also now implemented full Facebook support.

Read the full story

Rupert Murdoch, the Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, sat down with Sky News today to discuss how people should access internet news content.

Murdoch, who owns the WSJ.com, argues that people should have to pay some sort of marginal premium to access the content. He argues that people should have never had access to this content free of charge to begin with.

What he’s considering now is to end the partnership between Google and the WSJ, where Google would no longer be able to index WSJ.com content. That means the WSJ feed would not only disappear from Google News, but from the entire Google search.

Read the full story

Pipl.com is a fairly new People centric search engine. It actually does seem to work very well. If you enter someone’s name, it will easily pull up all social network profiles including Facebook, Flickr, it will also return public records (such as SEC flings) that include the target persons name, and it will also provide that persons e-mail address, quick facts, and personal pictures - scary. The company is doing well, with 557,000 users in December 2008 (ComScore), and 1.35 million unique users in 2008. It still trails the number one People search engine by unique visitors, Spock, who had 2.38 million visitors in 2008.