RIP Google Wave - CNN

Google's attempt to reinvent e-mail has fizzled. The company said Wednesday it is pulling the plug on Google Wave, a collaborative tool that drew intense attention when it debuted last year.

"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president of operations, wrote in a post on the company's blog. "We don't plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects."

New web address surfix assigned for Arabic websites ".masr" - ICANN

If English is your first language, you probably take it for granted that all website suffixes - the .com's, .org's, .gov's and the like - come nicely packaged in Western characters, like the ones you're reading now. But what if you spoke only Arabic? Or Chinese? Or Russian? All of those languages make use of a completely different alphabet. And, until this week, none of those alphabets could be used in place of the ".com" portion of an internet address.