Marc Andreessen's Ning is a platform for thousands of social networks. Mick Balaban and Spencer Forman's WidgetLaboratory builds and sells add-ons for operators of those social sites. Or did, until August 22. That's when Ning general counsel Robert Ghoorah wrote Forman to say that WidgetLaboratory would be booted…
Fired Reddit cofounder and noted nontrepreneur Aaron Swartz says developers shouldn't roll out software with a Hollywood-style launch, as the rock-star coders at collaboration-software makers 37 Signals say. Swartz favors "the Gmail Launch," he writes on his blog, Raw Thought. The gist of his argument, below.
The Wall Street Journal got an advance look at the Republican candidate's proposals for supporting U.S. technology. After picking through the article to figure out exactly where he stands on what, we gave it the 100-word treatment:John McCain will unveil a technology agenda that bundles previously announced…
TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's latest barbed-arrow barrage is aimed dead-center at the foreheads of the most annoying people in our inbox: The PR professionals who hawk startups.
I feel sorry for Twitter founder Ev Williams. The self-appointed A-listers who've flocked to his service are building an echo chamber worse than the blogosphere circa 1999. Today's pretend crisis: Williams has set an arbitrary limit that allows most Twitter users to follow no more than 2,000 other users' updates.…
After sitting through 200 10-minute company pitches for his upcoming TechCrunch50 event, Mahalo Chief Opinionator Jason Calacanis emailed around a 2,500-word guide to presenting a new company and/or product, aimed at novice startup founders who haven't figured out the ropes yet. Having suffered through many such…
We didn't even have to condense the latest statement Waggener Edstrom uberflack Frank Shaw sent on Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock's comments at today's shareholder meeting about Microsoft's botched negotiations to buy Yahoo: "Yahoo is attempting to rewrite history yet again with statements that are not supported by the…
"Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization" is the new cover story from Adbusters. If you're not familiar, Adbusters is a fun, angry, Starbucks-hating publication whose credo states that we've all been brainwashed by advertising and mass media into an orgy of overconsumption that lets the American Empire destroy…
Career crank Nicholas Carr's cover story for The Atlantic asks, "Is Google making us stupid?" Oh come on, Google chief Eric Schmidt told an AdAge-sponsored conference in New York. They said that about color TV forty years ago. You can watch Schmidt here, or you can pull up your pants and read Carr's 4,000-word…
Web 2.0 wunderkinds Tara Hunt and Chris Messina hooked up, broke up, and now leave their company and a San Francisco magazine profile behind. Can Internet People run their relationships like their businesses?, we're meant to wonder, the tease of a question splayed out against the story's backdrop of conference-going…
Flaxen-locked funtrepreneur Jason Calacanis says Google has been a content company for a while now. With Knol, the Googlers plan to become the Internet's reference library rather than just its card catalog. I used the editorial equivalent of gzip to compress Calacanis's arguments down to 1/10 size.
Twitter needs help staying up. Maybe that help is you! But before taking that job offer — or an offer from any startup — Venture Hacks has 10 questions you should ask. We've condensed their list down from 1,250 words to a version you can read comfortably on your iPhone 3G before your next interview, below.
Did Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer really need 1,300 words to say the company has to do better against Apple and Google, with or without Yahoo? No, but he just can't help himself. A version you could get through before Microsoft's next reorg, below.
We rarely miss a chance to pick on relentless egoblogger Robert Scoble. But today, RoboScoble is hurting, and his hurt hurts like our hurt. Only his hurt runs about 2,000 words longer. How has tech blogging failed Robert since the halcyon days of 2003? Here's the executive briefing:
AllThingsD's Kara Swisher spends an epic 1,367 words on Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's complete personality makeover — and her pivotal role therein. The key words:
Have you noticed that you don't always get the exact terms you searched for anymore on Google? Instead of oh-so-literal keyword matching and filters such as +site:valleywag.com, Google lines up a team of technologies that try to guess what you're really looking for. Information retrieval specialist Amit Singhal…
Over the past month, Facebook has shown itself to have a quicker trigger when it comes to banning applications from its site for rule violations. It's part of the reason, observers say, that venture capital for Facebook-app startups is slowing down. The punished include apps from major developers RockYou and Slide.…
Snake, meet tail. The voyeuristic ouroboros that is Julia Allison's love affair with Valleywag got even more play in her coveted Wired cover story than her own startup did. Don't let us waste your time when you could be hustling us for fame; here's the 100-word version of her "secrets" to self-promotion.
In today's Los Angeles Times, reporter Jessica Guynn calls LinkedIn founder, Facebook investor and PayPal veteran Reid Hoffman "Silicon Valley's biggest social networker." Guynn means that just the way you'd think, reporting that Hoffman gains about 10 pounds per year, refuses to see a trainer and "doesn't step on…
Google has come under increasing fire for a lack of transparency in how it does everything — from keeping porn off YouTube to calculating advertising rates to determining which search results go where. I may personally distrust the wise benevolence of markets, but information asymmetry is a time-tested business…
