Gossip

They say love conquers all, but apparently it can't compete with the perks of working at one of Silicon Valley's hottest companies: Facebook.

On Monday's episode of "The Bachelor," the ABC reality show in which a guy gets to choose a mate from a bunch of willing and good-looking young women--I'm generalizing, as I've never been able to make it through a full episode of this fine piece of television--studmuffin protagonist Jake Pavelka was surprised by one of his final four picks, Ali Fedotowsky.

The 25-year-old San Franciscan ditched the show because she … Read more

It's unusual for tech billionaires to wind up on gossip emporium TMZ.com, but Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen made a cameo on the AOL-owned site Monday when he happened to be standing next to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's now-famous post-Super Bowl makeout.

All eyes are on the celebrity power couple--yes, even more than usual--because of widespread reports that they were on the verge of a breakup. At the Super Bowl, where the two were rooting for the victorious New Orleans Saints, they were engaged in some fairly evident damage control. And Paul Allen factors into it...somehow. … Read more

Is "poke" the new Konami Code? Maybe not literally, but one Electronic Arts executive has hinted that at least one of the gaming behemoth's titles is headed to Facebook, further blurring the line between social-networking applications and the game industry.

In a Bloomberg TV interview, EA Sports President Peter Moore obliquely said, "you'll see us on Facebook, going forward," with regard to its storied "Madden NFL" franchise.

Blogger Nick O'Neill of Social Times quotes someone anonymous saying this does, indeed, mean that there will be a Facebook version of "Madden … Read more

I can think of some people who would pay $4,839 for the chance to wind up on a beautiful tropical island where Matthew Fox routinely takes off his shirt--even if there were man-eating smoke monsters and vicious polar bears involved.

Buzz started spreading around on Twitter that you can find something awfully funny on travel search site Kayak.com: search for a one-way flight from Sydney to Los Angeles to take place on September 22, 2010, and one of the search results that pops up is Oceanic Airlines, the fictional airline made famous by TV sci-fi drama "Lost.&… Read more

Seriously, Twitter? We thought the company had learned by now that Steve Jobs has the mystical power to instantly summon the fail whale--or in other words, that nerd chatter surrounding any kind of Apple product announcement is enough to swamp the microblogging service's infrastructure.

An hour before Apple's San Francisco event to the much-hyped tablet device now known as the iPad, Twitter had already slowed to a crawl, spitting out tweets between eight and fifteen minutes late--and sometimes out of order--on both the Twitter.com home page and third-party clients. It doesn't seem like there were … Read more

Somehow, recently, Bill Gates turned into Mr. Awesome. He's tweeting and blogging, and now, according to the New York Post, he was spotted "dancing, Paris (Hilton) style, on a banquette" at a Microsoft-sponsored party at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

"He gyrated in a VIP booth until 2 AM," a "spy" told the Post's Page Six--a gossip item, so take it with a grain of salt. "Everybody was snapping photos of him until his security rushed him out the back door after he tipped a waitress $500." … Read more

Interviews with Facebook employees are generally well-groomed and press-savvy. That's why there's something awfully intriguing about an interview posted Monday to culture blog The Rumpus, which claims to offer extremely candid insights from an anonymous Facebook employee. Above all, the piece makes it very evident that Facebook's employees have access to an extraordinary amount of information about our private lives.

Among the "revelations?" That "at least 70 percent of Facebook engineers are from Harvard and Stanford," that there are upwards of a trillion photos stored on Facebook's servers, that Facebook has fired … Read more

This one's a surprise. Twitter will have turned a profit in 2009, a BusinessWeek report claims, citing sources. What happened? Search deals with Google and Microsoft brought in a nice chunk of cash for the company, which has raised well over $100 million in venture capital and has a paper valuation floating somewhere around $1 billion.

Considering the company has not yet put forth a long-term revenue strategy, this would be one of those Christmas miracles along the lines of a neurotic mom getting home to her stranded 8-year-old by fortuitously hitching a ride with a polka band fronted by John Candy.… Read more

Maybe they read the Yelp review that says Google's headquarters is infested with skunks and raccoons.

Just a few days after reporting that Google was about 80 percent likely to be acquiring business reviews site Yelp for a totally sweet $500 million, TechCrunch has backtracked. Late Sunday, TechCrunch reported that Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman personally walked away from the deal and that company representatives informed Google over the weekend they aren't selling.

That's odd. People seemed to think it was generally a good deal. TechCrunch isn't exactly sure what went wrong but speculates that Yelp may … Read more