Gossip

This one sure snuck up on us: "The Accidental Billionaires," author Ben Mezrich's presumably tawdry take on Facebook's origins, is hitting bookshelves on July 14.

Last we'd heard, it was getting released this fall.

You probably know the plot by now: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, along with Harvard classmate Eduardo Saverin ( a co-founder who is no longer affiliated with Facebook and has had some legal beef with Zuckerberg over the years) allegedly started the site to meet women. In due time, they got rich and out of control. Or at least that's how Mezrich, … Read more

It's been a big week for Mark Zuckerberg.

First of all, the young Facebook founder and CEO finally turned 25. That was last Thursday. But more importantly for the tech rumor mill, he's had to deal with a fresh flurry of speculation: did the company really turn down a $200 million funding round at an $8 billion valuation? Has it raised $150 million specifically so that employees can cash out their stock?

Needless to say, in Zuckerberg's interview Tuesday at the Reuters Global Technology Summit, he didn't answer any of those questions concretely. His response to … Read more

Well, this was something nice to wake up to on a Friday morning: No access to my Gmail account. I was greeted with a "Temporary Error (500)" and the message, "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes." Ugh. Thanks, Google.

I went over to Twitter Search to see what other people were saying, and sure enough, a search for "gmail" produced plenty of complaints about outages, with hundreds more rolling in by the minute. Many of them, given … Read more

Guess what! Google is going to buy Twitter! No, Facebook's going to buy it! Or Yahoo--oh, wait, they can't afford it anymore. The latest and most absurd rumor, floated by Valleywag, suggests that Apple has been looking at buying Twitter, too.

Yes, Apple. It's a hardware company that really only markets and hypes up software as a means to sell more hardware--like how iTunes really exists to sell iPods--and yet apparently it wants to buy Twitter. I'm not sure Twitter could convince me to buy any hardware, except maybe a water balloon to carry around in … Read more

Something's afoot at Twitter. Well, something's always afoot at Twitter, but this time the founders are leaving everyone hanging by Twittering about it.

CEO and co-founder Evan Williams posted to his Twitter account on Thursday morning: "Tomorrow just became a very big day. (Sorry for the teaser--more later.)" Ooh! Fascinating!

So what's up with his fellow co-founder, Biz Stone? He's in Boston, which happens to be where one of Twitter's big investors, Spark Capital, is headquartered. Spark led Twitter's $15 million Series B funding round last year.

"It's almost midnight … Read more

Everybody's playing the Facebook valuation game again, in light of persistent reports that the social network is in need of more cash to fuel its rapid and expensive global expansion.

The rumors aren't too surprising. Given the recession and the tough advertising climate, the numbers getting tossed around are some of the lowest we've seen recently.

Currently circulating: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected a fresh round of funding that would have valued the company at $4 billion. Another: one potential investor submitted a term sheet for a valuation in the neighborhood of $2 billion.

What we've … Read more

I won't believe it for sure until we see grainy paparazzi shots of actor Michael Cera walking around on a movie set in a North Face fleece and Adidas flip-flops, but it looks like things are moving forward on the film based on the early days of Facebook.

And, Business Insider hears, Facebook may be warning former employees not to talk to people involved with the making of the movie.

This is consistent with something I heard last fall from an early Facebook employee who is no longer with the company. This former Facebooker said the company had told … Read more

So should News Corp. buy Twitter? That's what Vanity Fair columnist and pundit Michael Wolff speculated this week in an article on Newser.com, the aggregation site he founded.

"There may not be anything less than Twitter that can distract Wall Street from News Corp.'s stubborn and, at this point, unnatural newspaper fetish," Wolff wrote, "and, as well, convince it, for one last hurrah, that (CEO Rupert Murdoch) isn't...well, gone."

The catalyst for Wolff's recommendation was the recent hire of former AOL chief Jon Miller as head of News Corp.'s … Read more

On Tuesday night, a Los Angeles Times blog post pointed to an soundbite that Facebook "gaming guru" Gareth Davis produced at the GamesBeat conference in San Francisco: that the company is "looking at" offering a virtual currency to developers. The virtual goods industry, the article notes, is a $1.5 billion behemoth.

This would mean that games and other apps with a presence on Facebook could use a universal "Facebook currency" that would not only be interoperable between apps, it could also line Facebook's pockets with some extra cash. But Davis' language ("… Read more