Craigslist is reportedly being sued for trademark infringement. A real estate company in Texas called First Call Properties is saying that it began posting ads on Craigslist in March, and that after that, a competitor called AAA Apartment Locating began posting ads using phrases like "first call," "call first," and "call us first."
According to MediaPost, First Call named Craigslist, AAA and two individuals as defendants. The case has been sent to Federal Court.
Clearly, this is not the first time cases like this have made the news. It's just the first time that Craigslist has been on the receiving end of such a suit. Google has certainly been there. MediaPost's Wendy Davis points out that these cases don't usually get too far in court, but one between Google and Geico was settled.
"This is misguided in any number of ways: first, as long as the ad itself is not confusing such that the reader (or a moron in a hurry reader) would think that the ad is from the original company rather than the competitor, there's not likely to be a trademark violation," says Mike Masnick at TechDirt. "More importantly, even if there is a trademark violation, it should not be Google's liability, since they're simply the service provider. The liability (if there is any) would be on whoever created the ad."
There is another interesting aspect to the Craigslist case. According to MediaPost, First Call also says the AAA ads are libelous, and say things like "First Call Properties is a Scam," but Davis points to a section of the Communications Decency Act, which says sites can't be sued for libel based on user-generated content.
It will be interesting to see the outcome of this case. Craigslist could settle, but based on past Google experience, it will probably just disappear.
We'll admit it from the start; this development doesn't amount to Google's execs weeping while singing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." Still, a sort of self-promotional Fourth of July blog post from the search giant may be of interest to you as we head into the weekend. If you haven't figured out how you're going to celebrate the Fourth, you may be able to get some ideas by using Google Maps. Elaine Filadelfo of the Lat Long Blog Team writes, "If you'll be in DC . . . you can find a map of the various events going on throughout the holiday weekend and a map of fireworks shows throughout the entire region." Or if you're planning to spend time elsewhere in the country, there are plenty of other events maps available, including ones for Baltimore, the Milwaukee region, Myrtle Beach New Hampshire, Northern Alabama, the San Francisco Bay Area, South Central Indiana, and Western Michigan. Finally, if you intend to do your own thing, Filadelfo writes, "[Y]ou can make your own My Map to show friends how to get to your BBQ or where exactly in the park you plan to meet to catch the fireworks." Anybody who's going to be close to his or her computer might keep an eye out for a special Google Doodle, too; last year's is pictured below.
Today FriendFeed has launched a real-time search feature. Now when you perform a search on the service, you will be presented with real-time results as they roll in. That means you don't have to continuously refresh for the latest results.
If you're searching a particularly hot topic, you might find it hard to even browse results because they're coming in so quickly. Luckily FriendFeed has acknowledged this.
"While we were testing this internally, we could barely keep up with the non-stop activity regarding Michael Jackson (That's when we knew we needed a pause button)," says Jim Norris on the FriendFeed Blog. You can access real-time search on FriendFeed by using the regular search box, but you can also use advanced search options and saved searches and still get real-time results. You can also embed a real-time search on your site: On another FriendFeed-related note, the service released some new themes the other day. These allow users to customize their pages to suit their personal tastes with regards to aesthetics.
GoDaddy is sometimes hard to take seriously; its marketing department seems to be run by the same bunch of teenage boys in charge of Axe commercials. But GoDaddy is still the world's largest domain registrar, and it's poised to help Twitter with a new step in its registration process. GoDaddy seems to have made the assumption that anyone wanting to create a website will also want to establish a presence on Twitter. Adam Ostrow reports that it's actually "integrated Twitter registration into its domain manager, allowing you to see if the Twitter username that matches your URL is available, and if so, register it." This says a great deal about how important Twitter has become to the people at GoDaddy (and indeed, you can find GoDaddyDeals, GoDaddyJobs, and GoDaddyGuy Twitter accounts, with that last one being rather popular and putting out about ten tweets per day). It says something about what GoDaddy thinks its customers want, too. And since every single GoDaddy customer probably hasn't been switching back and forth between the domain registrar and Twitter while trying to name a company, this development may introduce Twitter to a lot of new people.
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