The latest wild rumor circulating is that after doing a search ad deal with Yahoo, Microsoft will spend its cash acquiring Facebook for $15 billion to $20 billion.

At a press conference in Tokyo on Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked about Facebook's future as a standalone company. "You can tell, from our history and what we've done, that we really wanted to keep the company independent, by focusing on building and focusing on the long term," Reuters reported.

Zuckerberg declined to comment on a follow-up question regarding the prospect of a sale. Microsoft invested $… Read more

Twitter and tweeting are rapidly becoming part of the lexicon, at least among the digerati who have discovered the jouissance of followers and following. Twitter hasn't unleashed a unique technology, but an inspired broadcast pivot on existing messaging models. As the generation that has grown up texting rather than e-mailing takes over the planet, Twitter and its ilk will go mainstream.

With Twitter, you have followers (those who subscribe to your 140-character-limited tweets) and following (those whose tweets you follow). As you can see from the graphic below, Twitter usage comes in all shapes and sizes.

At the top … Read more

In the blogosphere of early and ardent technology adopters, sites like Twitter and Seesmic have justifiably gained the attention and buzz. Twitter has had a series of well documented outages, and this weekend Seesmic seized up when videos of movie celebrities, such Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford, were posted to the video sharing site.

It also caused problems at partner sites, like TechCrunch, that embed Seesmic video comments (vomments) on their pages.

These recurring problems once again demonstrate that the much loved Web 2.0, consisting of many start-ups lacking adequate infrastructure and stable code, is unreliable. The larger start-ups … Read more

The Web spirit of "build an audience and figure out the business model later" is a great filter. It allows products and services into the wild without barriers or the need to sell advertisers on an unproven concept.

Those who can build an audience, such as Twitter and FriendFeed, and before them Google, Facebook, and dozens of others who turned into giants, have the scale to develop monetization schemes that a loyal and fanatic user base won't summarily reject.

In the case of Twitter, the service is a hit, attracting millions of "tweeters," many of … Read more

The social Web is going through some birthing pains (see Techmeme). In the name of data portability, Facebook, MySpace.com, and Google made announcements last week about creating a more open social Web. For the most part, they are press releases and not yet fully released into the wild.

On Thursday, Facebook suspended involvement with Google's Friend Connect, claiming that it redistributes user information from Facebook to developers without users' knowledge, violating the company's terms of service.

Google responded that Friend Connect is designed to keep users fully in control of their information at all times. "Users … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Harvard Law and Berkman Center scholar Yochai Benkler and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales deconstructed Wikipedia and discussed peer production models at an event here Thursday.

Benkler, who is the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at the Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Center, were participating in a program marking the Berkman Center's 10th anniversary at the Harvard Law School (see my earlier coverage of the conference). Wales is a Berkman Fellow and hopes to find ways for groups to come to better decisions in his research.

During his remarks, … Read more

Dark energy powers the Internet, at least according Jonathan Zittrain.

Zittrain is the Jack N. and Lillian Berkman visiting professor for entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard Law School, the chair in Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, and a founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

With all those titles, he was the center of attention at a Berkman Center event on the occasion of its 10th anniversary at the Harvard Law School.

The author of the new book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Zittrain is being recruited to return from Oxford … Read more

Correction, 5/15, 6:15 p.m.: The purchase price for Plaxo was previously misstated. The price is thought to fall in the $150 million to $170 million range.

Comcast is adding a social dimension to its services through the acquisition of Plaxo, a deal the two companies announced Wednesday afternoon.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the purchase price is thought to be in the $150 million to $170 million range.

The acquisition is a big win for Plaxo, whose Pulse social network service, with 1.5 million active monthly users, has been overshadowed by the likes … Read more

Update at 5 a.m. PDT Wed., May 14: Andreessen's analysis of Google Friend Connect has been added.

Marc Andreessen sees a number of companies suffering from the same disease.

"...I think a lot of companies have what I call 'strategitis.' Instead of launching a product, which would apparently make too much sense, they come up with a 'strategy,'" he says. "There's a strong temptation for companies that don't have strong social networking franchises to roll out social networking 'features' instead of products, and in reality, consumers like to have products."

Andreessen is … Read more