Heather Havenstein

Google Inc. called off its proposed search advertising deal with Yahoo just three hours before the U.S. Department of Justice was to file an antitrust complaint on Nov. 5 aimed at blocking it, according to the lawyer that the government hired to pursue the case.

In an interview with the legal blog AMLaw Daily published Dec. 2, Sanford Litvack - the attorney who would have been the lead counsel on the antitrust case - said that Google and Yahoo decided to abandon the proposed deal shortly after DOJ officials informed them of the agency's plans to file the antitrust complaint.

Google has unveiled a new gadget that allows Google Desktop for Windows users to check their Gmail accounts without having to leave leaving the vendor's desktop search application.

The new gadget will allow users to read, search and send Gmail messages while in Google Desktop, Google noted. Users can also star messages and use keyboard shortcuts.

Like his campaign apparatus, President Elect Barack Obama's transition team is embracing what some have called a Google-enabled government by loosening copyright licensing on its Change.gov Web site and by launching a feature that allows citizens to contribute to policy discussions.

Over the weekend, the Change.gov site changed its traditional strict copyright notice to embrace the Attribution 3.0 Unported License, the most liberal license available under the Creative Commons license framework.

The LinkedIn business social network last week rolled out an overhauled search platform that it says will let users more easily find who they are looking for on the site.

The new search engine uses what Esteban Kozak, a senior product manager at LinkedIn , called a personalized relevance algorithm to pick out the most relevant users in the 31 million-member LinkedIn community.

Google's new search customization tool, SearchWiki, has quickly generated criticism for its lack of an opt-out options and perceived privacy threats.

Google unveiled SearchWiki last week, saying that it would allow users signed into Google to change the ranking of personal search results. The tool also lets users delete or add comments to searches.

Whoever takes embattled Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's place will need to pare the former Web sweetheart's services to effectively compete in a market where it is under siege from Google Inc. and multiple social media players for online advertising, analysts say.

Yang, who Monday announced that he will step down as Yahoo's CEO once a replacement is found, had taken multiple unsuccessful steps in recent months to turn around the flagging Internet pioneer. In May, he fended off Microsoft's move to buy Yahoo , and then failed to consummate a planned search partnership with Google .

Artwork: Chip TaylorGoogle Monday announced that it is now collaborating with Adobe Systems Inc. to allow Google Analytics users to track Flash content .

The Google Analytics Tracking for Adobe Flash tool lets users of the free Google Analytics tool overcome the current challenges that disrupt the tracking Flash content on Web pages, Google said.

The U.S. military last week launched TroopTube, a new site to upload and share videos, more than a year after the U.S. Department of Defense banned YouTube from military networks for being a bandwidth hog.

TroopTube is designed to help military families connect and keep in touch when separated, according to a note on the new site. Users can quickly upload videos that can be shared privately with a subset of users, or with all users on the site, the note said.

"Take care of that beautiful blue marble out there in space, our home planet. I'll be keeping an eye from here."

Those were among the last words posted by NASA officials identified as the Phoenix Mars Lander on Twitter . Personnel at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab have been posting in the voice of the Mars Lander since May 25, when it touched down on the Red Planet during what mission control at the space agency described as "seven minutes of terror."

While much has been written about  the impact of President-Elect Barack Obama's successful use of social networking and other Web 2.0 tools, the campaign had been mum about the future of My.BarackObama.com, the campaign's social network, immediately after last week's election.

However, on Friday, an Obama staffer announced in a blog post that it will continue to operate and allow continued collaboration among supporters.

While enterprises face growing demands from employees for the Web 2.0 tools they use at home, IT managers continue to doubt whether most of them can provide business value to a company, according to a Forrester Research Inc. report released last week.

The report suggests that only two of the myriad tools commonly grouped in the Enterprise 2.0 category -- social networks and wikis - will find significant success in the corporate market over the next few years. Widgets, mashups, blogs, RSS and forums may find moderate success, while microblogs, prediction markets, social bookmarking and podcasts will have only minimum penetration in the enterprise, the report said.

Yahoo this week added new social elements to the beta version of its Yahoo Buzz social news site, which identifies the top news stories and blog posts based on user votes and search patterns.

On Thursday, Yahoo announced that it has added the ability to include elements from a Yahoo user's universal profile on the site by highlighting information from his friend connections. The update expands on the Yahoo Open Strategy that is aimed at opening all Yahoo platforms and data to third parties, and expanding the availability of social features.