rumor

If two months' worth of perpetual hype and hearsay about Facebook have given you social-networking fatigue, it might be time to chug an energy drink--looks like we will see another serious entry into the field on Monday.

Launched by contact and schedule management service Plaxo, this will apparently be a sort of midpoint between the strictly business LinkedIn and the still-full-of-frat-party-photos Facebook.

The rumors started, as they often do, with a single blog post from a well-read blogger. After attending the "Lunch 2.0" event at Facebook's offices last week, Robert Scoble started up a minifirestorm of … Read more

The New York Post is reporting that green-centric uberblog TreeHugger may have been purchased by Discovery Communications as a companion blog to its forthcoming new cable network, Planet Green. The new channel is slated for a launch in the first quarter of next year, and has already built up some buzz for its series Eco-Town, created in collaboration with actor and Prius poster boy Leonardo DiCaprio; an already-trendy eco-blog would indeed be a desirable companion for the company.

According to the Post's Peter Lauria, the price tag for TreeHugger was somewhere around $10 million.

The New York-based TreeHugger, which … Read more

I'm starting to wonder how many people are taking advantage of the Internet age, and the volatility around anything to do with Apple, to make some money.

Apple's stock fell $9.71, or 6.87 percent, to $131.72 during today's trading on the Nasdaq. The stock was up early in the morning, but started to fall around mid-morning Eastern time, apparently after rumors started flying that Apple was cutting its iPhone production goals in half.

At around 12:30 pm in New York, TheStreet.com came out with a report saying that financial analyst firm Miller Tabak … Read more

When former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki launched Truemors two months ago, the site was not well-received. The quality of the user-generated content on the site was low. The U.K. tech site The Inquirer called it the "worst Web site ever discovered."

But it's been a while, and the site has improved. Although Kawasaki is using the site as an example of what can be done on the Web when your personal brand is high and Web developers are cheap -- he says, "You can do a stupid thing for $12,000. Life is good!" … Read more

Based on a post on a Japanese Web site, Gizmodo has decided to put its rumor mill into high gear, speculating that Blu-ray camcorders will be available by the end of the year. Of course, news that Hitachi is working on a Blu-ray camcorder is nothing new. As CNET's News.com reported in October of last year, Hitachi showed mock-ups of some Blu-ray camcorder designs at the Japanese trade show Ceatec. At the time, the company said that it planned to have such a camcorder on the market in one to two years. Kazuto Shimagami, senior manager in the … Read more

A hobgoblin the Macalope knows who works in the Apple retail world (yeah, yeah--"Aren't they all hobgoblins?"--har-har, yeah, that is sooo goblinist, man) says Apple reps are asking everyone to make sure their inventory reports are up-to-date by the end of the day today (Monday). That's possibly a sign that new hardware is coming Tuesday as those reports determine what price protection resellers get on outdated hardware.

It's also possibly just a sign that Apple knows that hobgoblins are perpetually late on their paperwork.

Ooh. That's sooo goblinist.

Social networking's current hottie, Facebook, might be considered a pretty sexy acquisition target (to put it lightly) for new media's biggest players. But if an intriguing job posting on Facebook's site is to be believed, the service may be headed for an initial public offering instead.

The job listing, which was dug up by Valleywag on Monday, reveals that the company is seeking a "Stock Administration Manager" to work in its main office in Palo Alto, Calif. The job description also asks for "proficiency in stock option administration applications," a minimum of four … Read more

Here's a rumor we didn't see coming. The U.K.'s The Times is reporting that News Corp., the Rupert Murdoch-helmed company that purchased MySpace in 2005 for $580 million, may be willing to trade it. According to Times writer Dan Sabbagh's article, News Corp. is mulling a swap of MySpace to Yahoo in exchange for a 25 percent stake in the dot-com.

Interestingly enough, The Times is itself owned by News Corp. The parent company is allegedly "interested in a deal even if it means losing some control of MySpace because it would give the … Read more

SECOND UPDATE: Check the end of this post for some more information from Facebook and ViddYou.

I think most of the Web has reached the consensus that Facebook Platform, the social networking site's new initiative to open up its service to third-party companies' specially-designed applications, has been a resounding success. Anecdotally, I can say that "techy" people I know, who had originally dismissed Facebook as a glorified address book, are now starting to think that it has a whole lot more street cred. And I know some people who are more or less addicted to some of the new features (throw a sheep at me, will ya?)

But whispers have been spreading that perhaps Facebook--generally known for being methodical and well-organized, choosing to roll out features incrementally rather than going for huge revamps--might not have predicted just how popular the new Platform would be, and wasn't ready for the onslaught of bandwidth activity. Yesterday, there were some rumors going around that Facebook had had to sell a full 10 percent of its shares in order to purchase enough hardware to handle its rapid user increase. Looks like the original story was reported on the Web site of the U.K. newspaper The Times and was then pulled. (Conspiracy theorists may point out the fact that The Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which also owns Facebook's chief rival MySpace. Personally, I think it's more likely just a case of some reporting that turned out to be based on unsubstantiated rumor.)

If true, basically, it would indicate that Facebook, often singled out as a red-hot potential acquisition target, wasn't as financially stable as the tech community would have thought. Tough to believe, since we've had every indication that the company is extremely well-funded, financially efficient, and has pulled in adequate advertising revenues. So, like most others following the social networking scene, I dismissed it as speculative gossip.

And I still think the original claims in The Times were untrue, but some more concrete signs have indeed indicated that Facebook wasn't fully ready for the whirlwind success of the Platform. While logged onto Facebook this morning in an attempt to engage in a SuperPoke war with one of my friends, I saw this:… Read more