The Target Corporation has agreed to pay $6 million in damages to plaintiffs in California unable to use its online site as part of a class-action settlement with the National Federation of the Blind.

As part of the settlement, announced Wednesday, Target will place $6 million in an interest-bearing account from which members of the California settlement class can make claims. The settlement also requires Target to use internal guidelines to make its site more accessible to the blind by Feb. 28, 2009, with assistance from the federation, an advocacy group for the blind.

The retailer and the National Federation of the Blind agreed to a three-year relationship during which the advocacy group will test the site to make sure it is accessible to the blind who use technologies like screen-reading software.

WHY? I have no clue really. I have had this installed for some time and loved it whenever I used it. I just recently tried to use it a boom, it is dead.

It is just a shame, just simply because of the expansive use of mobile devices. Companies shouldn't be retreating from services like this, but expanding them... Just a shame.

http://toolbar.google.com/send/sms/index.php

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/09/ google-send-to-phone-free-sms-in-us.html?showComment=1219426320000#c1789496352149615211

With the expansive use of OpenSocial, does it still make sense to develop in FBML for Facebook? I currently see FaceBook as an island into itself and it doesn't appear to be getting better anytime soon.

If you were to create a social network from scratch what features would you include? What features would you not include?

Here is some of what I came up with:

- It should allow networking or adding users as friends
- It should allow users to import contacts from other social networks.
- It should allow users to share music choices
- It should allow users to share tv programming, possible tivo integration?
- It should allow users to share online bookmarks
- It should allow unlimited photo storage, possible tie in with flickr?
- It should allow a tie in with youtube via the free youtube api
- It should allow users to pull in unlimited RSS feeds.
- allow location based status updates. Enable your phone to update status with where you are at currently

Basically it should enable users to do what they want to do. Anticipate things that users might want and enable that. I think that the success of myspace was because people were able to hack it and customize their displays.