Does Google have any chance at all of competing with arch-rival Facebook? Not really, former Google bigwig Paul Buchheit says. Buchheit tells us his old company will probably find it easier to land on the moon.

Google is paying some people around half a million dollars not to go to Facebook, a senior Facebook engineer has confirmed. Googlers, prepare to get spoiled and entitled again, recession be damned.

A programmer sold his iPad abroad; a reporter auctioned his mom's iPad on eBay; and a media consultant ceremoniously reboxed his iPad. The Twitterati were saying goodbye to their not-so-magical Apple slates — or watching people who did.

The father of Gmail gave his kid a pat on the back; a TV doctor defended his slang; and Ashton Kutcher's iPhone ruined his Mexican relations. The Twitterati just tried to get along.

If Steve Jobs keeps this up, he may yet set off the biggest corporate flamefest in Silicon Valley: Googlers past and present are pushing back against the Apple CEO's trashing of their corporate motto.

FriendFeed grew out of Google's casual engineer culture, and the team didn't bother dressing up to sell the social aggregator to Facebook for $50 million, either. This picture does indeed speak volumes.

Faster! In the '90s, people used to reload websites to see if they'd updated. Too slow! Hence the invention of RSS, a protocol for distributing headlines and stories over the Web. Faster! RSS takes too long to update, and requires too much bandwidth to check more frequently. Faster! Visiting multiple social networks…

Success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan — unless you can somehow spin an adoption tale into the mix. That seems to be what Marissa Mayer is trying to do. In a recent interview, Marissa Mayer tries to take credit for both Google's Gmail email service, as well as AdSense, the immensely profitable…

On Google Blogoscoped, Philipp Lenssen outs former Google developer Paul Buchheit as the man behind Google's "don't be evil" slogan. As Google gets ever larger, ever more complicated, and ever more — oh, let's say it — evil, Buchheit's brainstorm looks ever more unwanted, and ever harder to shed. Which is exactly…