Google’s social networking effort Buzz shut its doors last year but has popped up yet again, for what may be the last time. In an email that just went out to former users, Google noted it’s packaging Buzz data into two files which will be stored on their Drive accounts. One is private, which will hold all of their posts both public and private, and another is public, which will contain a copy of any of their public Buzz posts, accessible to anyone who has a direct link (old Buzz links will redirect here.) One important note, is that your comments on others posts will be saved to their Drive files, and you won’t be able to delete them once the shift happens “on or after July 17th.” Need to do a total wipe / some selective editing? Check the link below to see your profile or the text of the message for a more thorough explanation after the break.
Source: Buzz Profile
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At the end of last year, Netflix suffered a prolonged outage because Amazon’s cloud services, which Netflix uses to host most of its infrastructure, went down. At the time, Amazon’s own video services continued to function without any issues. Last night, it was Amazon’s turn to suffer from a multi-hour outage. According to a number of tips we received, as well as a number of reports on Twitter and other social networks, Amazon’s Instant Video service and Prime Instant Video went down sometime in the late afternoon yesterday and remained offline for a large part of the evening. So far, Amazon hasn’t publicly acknowledged last night’s outage and its @amazonvideo account has remained silent since the first reports came in. Amazon Web Services, which powers Amazon’s Video Services, continued to work without issues last night. One of our readers provided us with a boilerplate email he received from Amazon last night after he complained about the outage: Hello, We’re sorry for the trouble you had while trying to connect to Amazon Instant Video. If you try again, you should be able to connect without encountering further problems. We look forward to seeing you again soon. We have contacted Amazon for more details about this outage and will update this post once we hear back from them. Hey @AmazonVideo maybe mention VOD is down right now. It's nice when the marketing tweets come with useful info between them.— Ry4an Brase (@Ry4an) March 30, 2013 Seriously, I get emails from @amazon every day, you'd think they could use one of those to let us know why @AmazonVideo is down.— Aaron Gardner (@Aaron_RS) March 30, 2013 @amazonvideo #fail. A little notice of when you're going to do maintenance would be nice. I expect a credit, or will cancel Amazon Prime.— (@djdeedle) March 30, 2013
Here’s a familiar scenario: You’ve become bored with the current blogging platform you’re on or it decides to shut down like Posterous did after Twitter acquired it. What do you do with all of your posts? Sure, you could hop from one platform to the other, but you need a safe and trustworthy place to store all of your important thoughts. I spoke with Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg yesterday about the topic, and he gave me some insight on how WordPress.com provides a consistent and simple import process for a lot of the popular publishing platforms out there. And it seems that WordPress, after all these years, is still the place people come to with their content. In the past 30 days alone, 15 million posts have been imported into the platform. The top two services that tend to migrate to WordPress are Blogger and Tumblr, Mullenweg tells me. And then there is Posterous. As soon as Twitter announced Posterous’ shutdown date, the Posterous founders jumped into action with a service called Posthaven, promising to keep it alive forever. The new service has since seen 850K posts imported. However, there has been a spike in Posterous imports to WordPress.com in the last few weeks and 2 million total since WordPress began supporting the platform in July 2010. Mullenweg discussed why WordPress is an important and longstanding platform in the blogosphere and how the freedom is really in your hands. TC: When did you start seeing a lot of activity coming from Posterous? Matt Mullenweg: We’ve seen two big spikes: in March 2011 when they de-emphasized blogging to focus on group sharing and events, and in March 2012 when they were acquired by Twitter. The latest spike started in January but wasn’t as big as those first two. TC: As far as importing, what are the other services that you get content brought in from the most? Matt Mullenweg: The top two by far are Blogger and Tumblr, with residual amounts from Movable Type and LiveJournal still. In the past 30 days we’ve imported over 15 million posts. Tumblr and Blogger are always the two highest because they’re both good at introducing people to blogging, and in Blogger’s case they get huge promotion and integration from Google, but people quickly run into their limitations and look for a more flexible platform. TC: How many Posterous posts all time have been imported and how many have been imported since the April 30th shutdown
The $ 25 Model A Raspberry Pi has gone on sale in Asia, following its launch in Europe last month — suggesting a U.S. landing can’t be too far off for the most affordable of the Pi Foundation’s two low-cost microcomputers. One of the Foundation’s distributors, RS Components, said today it is now shipping the Model A Pi in Asia.
Last night, Microsoft announced that it was taking its new webmail service Outlook.com out of beta and starting to transition its huge Hotmail user base over to the new interface and platform. That transition is scheduled to last until the end of the summer, when the old Hotmail interface will be retired and the currently optional upgrade will become mandatory. During the first twelve hours since Outlook.com left preview, Microsoft’s senior director of product management Dharmesh Mehta just told us, more than 1.5 million users have already opened new accounts.
In an effort to show the rest of the corporate world how “cool” and “spontaneous” their jobs are, hipster office workers 
Japanese messaging app Line has just reported that new users in Hong Kong have been doubling each day for the past week since January 29.
Twitter 
Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com.
Rovio, the Finnish makers of Angry Birds, said they crossed 263 million monthly active users in December, with 30 million downloads in Christmas week alone and 8 million downloads on Christmas Day. The figure is about 30 percent higher than the 200 million monthly active users the company had at the end of 2011. For perspective, 263 million monthly actives is nearly as many as Zynga has. Zynga reported 311 million monthly active users in the third quarter of last year, and tracking site AppData says that the company currently has 264 million monthly active users on Facebook. Rovio, which found its landmark hit on the iOS platform on its 52nd attempt at launching a game, has set increasingly lofty (and some say, crazy) goals year after year. At an interview I did with the company in November, the company’s chief marketing officer Peter Vesterbacka said he wanted Rovio to be the first entertainment brand with 1 billion a users a day (or as many as Coca-Cola interacts with). The path to that involves not just smartphone games, but loads of licensed merchandise, animated shorts, a feature length film, and potentially hundreds of activity and amusement parks in China and throughout the world. China recently became Rovio’s biggest market by daily active users. The company expects that around half or more of its revenue will eventually come from real-world goods (not virtual ones).
Instagram just got a lump of coal in its stocking: a
Facebook’s 
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