Social networking for
sassy divorcées?

Agencies and Marketing Execs:

• UK-based Photobox, an online community for photo printing and personal publishing, appointed Romain Bertrand Head of Acquisition and Partnerships. Bertrand hails from T-Moile International, where he was Sr. Marketing Manager.
• Keith Bencher joins Federated Media as SVP, Strategy & Development.
• Yahoo hired Joanne Bradford as Head of Advertising Sales. Bradford formerly sold ads for MSN.
• AOL purportedly "whacked" 5-10 members in its new "Shared Services" group.

Biz Buzz:

• Wendy's debuted "Crazy Lettuce," its virgin stab at online video and the "viral" craze.
• Disney outranked Hulu with the number of video streams it delivered in July — 187 million (comScore) to Hulu's 105 (Nielsen).

Gaming

• At Apple's Rock On event on Tuesday, the iPod touch 2G was positioned as a standalone portable gaming device.
• Forrester Research admonishes marketers to start taking games seriously. Read GigaOM's take.

Mobile:

• Research in Motion launched the first BlackBerry flip phone, a variant of its Pearl product. It boasts a 2-megapixel camera and music-listening capabilities.
• Telus Mobility lists the top five phones for women. The HTC Touch Diamond tops the charts, followed by the pink BlackBerry Peal 8130.
• Through Greystripe, NBC plans to disseminate over 900 ad-supported apps and games for mobile units.

Search:

• Google plans to use satellite technology to bring internet access to Africa and other emerging markets.
• Google's Marissa Mayer contemplates the future of search, and demonstrates how she poses searches to conduct her own personal and professional research.

Social Networks:

• AOL announced plans to sync third-party content from social networks across AOL.com.
• A new social network is born. First Wives World is for divorcées — or soon-to-bes.
• Still looking for reasons to dip into Twitter? Explore the Twitter Handbook.
• Los Angeles-based Yammer wins the TechCrunch 50, gleaning $50,000 in financing for its business model: in-house microblogging for companies.
• At week's end, all Facebook members will be transitioned to the redesigned site, which has been available for the past seven weeks. As always, Facebook users have begun to rebel.
• MySpace ad sales exceeded expectations this spring, says News Corp.
• Since its debut three weeks ago, Bebo-based web series Model.Live has been viewed over one million times. It is unclear whether "views" counted viewers that did not watch episodes in their entirety. The show is sponsored by Express.
• Bebo has agreed to syndicate video content from ESPN.

User Experience:

• Creativity must be a CMO's core competency, argues Mark Hans-Richer of Advertising Age.
• Kara Swisher at All Things Digital urges Google to walk away from its sponsored deal with Yahoo.
• Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, remarked that Internet Explorer is falling behind other browsers, in part because of its ability to render scalable vector graphics — which websites use with increasing regularity for applications like maps.