Doesn’t it feel like we’re back in 2000 and 2001? All the high-profile tech companies seem to be putting their ambitious growth plans on the back burner as they desperately seek ways to cut costs and become (more) profitable. And now you can add social news site Digg to the list.

Having failed to sell Digg to various potential buyers, Digg CEO Jay Adelson says the social news aggregator is no longer for sale and will now focus on building a profitable, independent business.

Apparently, Digg will aim to triple sales before the end of 2009 and turn a profit within 1-2 years. It will do so by:

• Cutting back on expansion plans
• Reducing costs
• Renewing its focus on increasing sales
• Inserting ads into RSS feeds
• Buying Digg ‘clones’ to expand overseas
• Adding new features to increase more clicks on the site

Source: Nicholas Carlson, “Jay Adelson’s Six Step Plan To Make Digg Profitable”, Silicon Alley Insider, December 2, 2008

Google has opened its research and media measurement tool Google Ad Planner to anyone with a Google account. The tool also sports new features, including support for search queries and geo-targeting (to specific states or metropolitan areas).

Google has expanded the demographic audience data to include France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. Users will also be able to choose between three new ranking methods to display results from the sites they’re considering advertising on. A new ‘bubble chart’ also enables you to visually compare frequency, traffic, and unique visitors.

Source: Robin Wauters, “Google Ad Planner Opens Up To Everyone With Fresh Features”, TechCrunch, November 11, 2008

The new version of Flock, Flock 2.0, offers at least two exciting new features: support for MySpace, and support for Media RSS, a technology that delivers real-time image and video streams in a standardized format.

In particular, Media RSS allows users to receive automatic, timely image and video feeds in both their Media Bar and “My World” page.

Despite its social media innovations, Flock – a browser based on Firefox – remains very much a niche browser. It has only received 6 million downloads in total (3.8 million since its 1.0 release) compared with over 500 million downloads of Firefox.

Source: Sarah Perez, “Flock 2.0 Launches: Adds MySpace, Media RSS, and More”, ReadWriteWeb, October 14, 2008

Opera has launched the latest version of its web browser, Opera 9.6.

According to ReadWriteWeb, Opera 9.6 offers faster speeds and better performance, as well as several new features. Among these are an attractive magazine layout to view RSS feeds.

You can download Opera 9.6 and read about its new features here: http://www.opera.com/

Source: Sarah Perez, “Opera 9.6 Launches, Now Includes Magazine-Style RSS…Sort Of”, ReadWriteWeb, October 8, 2008

Skype 4.0 is due for release any day now. According to Josh Silverman, president of the eBay owned Internet phone division, this new version of Skype will feature a dramatic redesign and better integrate audio calls, video calls, file-sharing and text chat.

Among the new features will be having the “call” and “video call” icons beside each user’s name to make video calls easier. The new version will also feature records of previous communications beside each user’s name to make it easier to view past conversations.

Of course, commercial considerations are likely to be the main driver behind the revamp. Since eBay bought the company in 2005, Skype has grown dramatically in terms of both users (now 309 million) and revenues (now $126 million). Even so, it seems that eBay may have spent too much on its acquisition, having bought Skype for $2.6 billion and needing to take a huge write-down on the purchase in 2007.

Consequently, the company hopes the redesign will more effectively channel more users to the paid Skype services. For example, future initiatives as part of the Skype 4.0 revamp will include making it easier to use PayPal to send money via Skype, and access to Skype Prime. Skype Prime will involve third parties providing paid services via Skype, for which eBay will receive a commission.

Source: Brad Stone, “A Redesign at Skype”, The New York Times, June 17, 2008