The Social

Discovery Communications, parent company of the Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet, has made plans to acquire HowStuffWorks, which calls itself "the leading source of credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works."

The news was originally reported in The Wall Street Journal, which named a price of $250 million.

Atlanta-based HowStuffWorks, which was founded in 1998 by North Carolina State University professor Marshall Brain (yes, that's his real name), pulls in about 3.8 million unique U.S. visitors per month, according to ComScore. Instead of issuing a press release to announce the … Read more

Business social network LinkedIn is following in Facebook's footsteps and opening up an application programming interface (API) to allow third-party developers to contribute to the site. But Dan Nye, the company's CEO, recently spoke with the New York Times' Saul Hansell and explained that it's going to be limited, in the interest of keeping things professional.

"We're not going to have people sending electronic hamburgers to each other," Nye told the Times, in a not-so-subtle reference to the utter ridiculousness of many Facebook developer applications.

Rather, LinkedIn's platform API will invite developers, who … Read more

Rumors started flying on Thursday morning that CBS had picked up celebrity gossip site Dotspotter for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million. Valleywag reported the dirt first, and the strictly-business PaidContent said that industry sources had confirmed it.

Dotspotter has not yet responded to a request for comment.

CBS' interactive division, headed by Valley veteran Quincy Smith, has been acquisition-happy in recent months, snapping up social music site Last.fm and finance video blog Wallstrip. It's not yet clear whether Dotspotter--or CBS' other digital acquisitions, for that matter--will remain standalone or ultimately be integrated into the media company'… Read more

Tech gossip blog Valleywag is attempting to counter the TechCrunch-spawned rumor that MySpace.com will be following in Facebook's footsteps and opening up its site to developers.

Sources in touch with the Gawker Media-owned blog allegedly said that MySpace is indeed brewing a developer platform strategy and that the News Corp.-owned social networking site will be making an announcement at next week's Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco--but the two are unrelated.

The announcement, according to Valleywag blogger Megan McCarthy (no relation), will instead deal with MySpace's instant messaging client. Additionally, she wrote, MySpace will … Read more

The lengthy legal fight between social-networking scion Facebook and onetime rival ConnectU isn't over yet. New developments in the dispute on Wednesday probed deeper into the question of exactly what happened in 2004, when both sites were early-stage start-ups run essentially out of Harvard University dorm rooms.

The best-known component of the court drama has been ConnectU's allegation that Zuckerberg pilfered the former's business plan while he was a student at Harvard with ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (they're twins) and Divya Narendra. In a San Jose, Calif., courtroom on Wednesday, however, the conversation turned … Read more

On Tuesday morning, tech gossip blog Valleywag posted a rumor that TechCrunch's small blog network might not be doing quite as well as its parent brand: Valleywag editor Owen Thomas said that gadget blog CrunchGear had made significant pay cuts and that at least one blogger had been fired. In a message to Valleywag, CrunchGear editor John Biggs attempted to clear the air, saying that some writers are "on hiatus" while the gadget blog works out its new ad sales program and transitions from a per-post model to a monthly salary.

Some blogging insiders, CNET News.com … Read more

When I walked into midtown Manhattan's flashy Arena nightclub on Tuesday evening for an event celebrating the introduction of RealNetworks' Rhapsody music service on TiVo, a waiter approached me with a tray full of tumblers containing a clear liquid accompanied by slices of lime.

I was thirsty. "Is this water?" I asked him.

"No, it's an HD Crystal Clear Cosmo," he replied matter-of-factly, "so, no, it's not water."

A little bit of journalistic digging--i.e. finding a sign detailing the evening's signature drinks--yielded that that the HD Crystal Clear Cosmo … Read more

Have you gotten sick of the word "platform" yet? Sorry.

According to a post on TechCrunch, MySpace.com is planning to follow in Facebook's footsteps and open up a set of application program interfaces (APIs) so that developers can create "MySpace apps" in the vein of Facebook apps.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, who apparently got the details from developers who have been consulted on the project, wrote that we may be seeing this as early as next week--potentially at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

More specifically, this is allegedly going to be … Read more

Earlier today, my colleague Elinor Mills covered the announcement that Google had purchased the Helsinki, Finland-based microblogging company Jaiku. It's the third oddball move in the mobile (or semi-mobile, as microblogging is) social-networking space that Google's made in the past few years, with its reported acquisition of Zingku late last month and the ill-fated buy of Dodgeball in 2005.

RedMonk analyst James Governor thinks this may not be the last microblog acquisition we'll see. In fact, he said, Google rival Yahoo may be after Jaiku rival Twitter, the company that put "microblog" in everybody's … Read more