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I'll admit it: I watched Wednesday night's series premiere of Gossip Girl, the new teen drama on the CW network that details the slightly-too-scandalous lives of privileged young New Yorkers--as chronicled by an anonymous blogger. One of the prominent characters in the first scene is a sleek LG Chocolate mobile phone. The show is packed with MacBooks, BlackBerrys, Sidekicks, and just about any other gadget that the average American high schooler could possibly want.

It is, indeed, tech-savvy. But let's face it--they aren't exactly dealing with the Gizmodo-guzzling demographic. I was betting that the word &… Read more

Bolt.com, best known as a video sharing site that didn't really catch on, has filed for bankruptcy and shut down. The site had been in acquisition talks with GoFish, which would have been able to cover the $10 million settlement in a copyright infringement case with Universal Music. Earlier this month, the acquisition fell through, and Bolt was essentially doomed.

But it was really MySpace, not YouTube or copyright woes, that struck the first blow to Bolt. Before it shifted its focus to video, Bolt was a teen-oriented social networking site in the days when Facebook founder Mark … Read more

I don't think you could quite say that Valleywag's Owen Thomas and I have started a meme yet, but we sure have been having fun with elaborate comparisons of Facebook to the tabloid phenomenon that is the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie union. Unfortunately for the Web 2.0 history books, we both claim to have been the first to think of the analogy. But, as in the now-high-profile ConnectU vs. Facebook trial, there were no contracts signed and no paper trail created, so perhaps we'll never know for sure. Consequently, I believe that I gained the upper hand … Read more

For about the longest time, the background on my Mac had been fairly dull--a Manhattan cityscape plucked from the selection at DesktopNexus. I want my desktop patterns to look good, but I'm not one to put a whole lot of thinking power into it; there are better ways to waste energy.

This morning, however, I switched when I read about Desktoptopia, a new Mac-only downloadable app that lets you easily discover aesthetically pleasing "designer desktop" backgrounds created by innovative digital artists (no generic landscapes here) and switch them up either automatically or manually with a very simple … Read more

This evening I received my first e-mail from Plaxo's new Pulse social networking service, which it launched today. What had surprised me the most about Plaxo initially was how it was far more different from social networking's queen bee, Facebook, than I'd expected it would be--in fact, it reminded me much more of fellow nascent service Pownce.

But then I got that friend, er, business contact request in my Gmail inbox. Here's a screenshot:

It looked pretty darn familiar--it looked just like the equivalent e-mails that Facebook sends when other members have requested to add you … Read more

"See, Fake Steve Jobs was like the Banksy of blogging."

I was trying to explain to the guy standing next to me why I'd just flipped out. We were at McCarren Park Pool, a massive abandoned-natatorium-turned-concert-venue in the Brooklyn hipster hub of Williamsburg (a neighborhood which any New Yorker either loves or loathes). All summer, McCarren has hosted a series of "Pool Parties" concerts, sponsored by youth-oriented "social tech" brands like Helio and Going.com, and this past Sunday was no exception. Hordes of sunburned music fans in imitation Ray-Bans and shrunken plaid shirts had crowded into the drained swimming pool for performances by I'm From Barcelona and Blonde Redhead, and while they were batting around beach balls in the mosh pit, New York Times writer Brad Stone outed Fake Steve Jobs as Forbes editor Daniel Lyons.

Upon seeing the headline on my mobile Google Reader, I may have overreacted just a bit.… Read more

In a quintessentially Web 2.0 case of "If it got funding, it must be worth a look," user-generated news site NowPublic hauled in $10.6 million in series A venture capital funding earlier this week, and now the blog community has pounced on it with accolades and criticism alike. NowPublic, in case you haven't checked it out yet, is a "citizen journalism" site devoted to bringing you news of the user-generated variety--all stories and accompanying photos, videos, and other multimedia are contributed by fellow NowPublic readers. Then, much like Digg, which remains the top … Read more

If you're the hottest dot-com in the Valley--as Facebook undoubtedly is--you're going to come under occasional scrutiny. Over the past few days, it's been circulating around the Web that the social networking phenomenon won't let people sign up with the last name "Gay," which has led to accusations of homophobia.

Online LGBT hub GenerationQ put it in the harshest of terms, pointing out that "you're allowed to be Hitler, but don't even try being Gay on social networking site Facebook."

There is indeed reason to find Facebook's blocking of … Read more

Office time-waster alert! AOL's AIM Network has launched an interesting new service, CircaVie, which allows you to create a timeline of just about anything--your kid's life, your job, your backpacking excursion in Southeast Asia, or the chronicle of last week's party's devolution into debauchery. You can then embed your timelines into your blog, share them with friends, I played around with it, and I like the concept (a lot), but this is the kind of service that's left me wishing there was more you could do with it.

It's clear that CircaVie is trying … Read more