In the world of acquisitions, it ain’t over. Today, Google acquired Jotspot and Wired Digital acquired Reddit.

I’ve never used Jotspot, but Reddit has been a pretty useful tool.

It’s interesting to note this after reading Inside Facebook, a 46 page book that was available briefly to TechCrunch readers in its entirety last week (it now costs $12). Karel Baloun, the author, noted within the book that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, hasn’t had the desire to be acquired. On the other hand, Steve of YouTube was waiting for it.

It makes me wonder how many companies are out there with the intention to build a functional site with significant membership base with the goal that they will be bought out by a bigger and better company. After all, the bigger arm of these companies provides greater security with added benefits.

I wouldn’t complain if my product (whatever that may be) was bought out by the leaders of the industry, that’s for sure.

Last week, President Bush was interviewed by CNBC, and the interviewer asked him about Google. He was quoted as saying:

HOST: I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It reminds me of where I wanna be sometimes.

I suppose our next generations of presidents will be more computer savvy.

[Via Think Progress.]

Occasionally, I’ll post a little more when the hype dies down. Earlier this week, Firefox 2.0 was released (following the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0), and while I’ve upgraded both versions, I’m still getting acquainted enough with the new interface and don’t simply want to reiterate what others have been saying.

First Impressions

I have about 15 extensions, all of which I will highlight in a later post, and all except two or three (Spellbound Development being one of these — but that was understandable — more on this later) worked right out of the box.

The graphical user interface was not much different than Firefox 1.5, which has made me wonder why it was an official “2.0″ release rather than 1.6. I suppose it is due to the new features that became easily noticed: the “X” on individual tabs and inline spellcheck (this is why Spellbound was no longer needed).

I must say that I was initially frustrated by the presence of so many “X”s on the tabs, but within a day, I was using FF 1.5 on another computer and began longing for the ability to close the tabs right on the tabs — this forced me to upgrade all of my computers to 2.0, and I haven’t regretted it.

Following the ability to screenshot your website on a plethora of browsers, I’ve stumbled upon another useful utility that will enable you to install multiple versions of MSIE on a single Windows computer. This application, by TredoSoft, comes in handy for the heavy developer whose audience is predominantly stuck in an IE world (we all know the not-so-tech-savvy people are!)

Check out this useful free utility that contains IE versions 3.0, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5, and 6.0 — but note that there are a few bugs that have been reported, such as unexpected crashes.

[Via Cartoon Barry. Thanks Barry!]

Browsershots.org gives web developers screenshots of their sites across 3 operating systems (Linux, Windows, and MacOS) and a bunch of different browsers:

Don’t have MSIE 5.5 anymore — but your client does? Have no fear, this tool will show you what your site looks like on that browser. You can further limit your requests to pages with Flash, Javascript, and more.

The service will queue your request (among about 200 others) and you can specify a time period for your browser screenshots to process. The default is 30 minutes, after which the process in the queue is terminated and your screenshots are lost. Therefore, unless absolutely necessary, it’s advisable not to run a job using all the browsers listed — uncheck a few.