Valleywag
marissa mayer
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hackers
YouTube users in virus panic
Hasn't YouTube always seemed too good to be true — all those video clips, for free? We must be getting away with something. That's why rumors about a new YouTube virus have spread so far, so fast. More » -
perks
Google's austerity campaign
The best place to work in America is becoming like every other big corporation. Google, at its heart an overgrown advertising agency, is most famous for its lavish perks. Now those are disappearing. More » -
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censorship
Google's censors really sorry about violating freedom of speech
If a YouTube video gets yanked, if a Blogger blog gets deleted, if a website disappears from Google's search results, chances are Google lawyer Nicole Wong had something to do with it. Wong has kept a low profile, aside from the occasional post on Google's official blog, but after a profile in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, it's likely she'll be hearing more pleas than ever from frustrated users whose works have vanished from Google's sprawling Web empire. More » -
rumormonger
Henry Blodget wants you to think Eric Schmidt will quit
Two weeks after Valleywag stopped believing that President-for-Change Obama might steal Eric Schmidt from Google, Silicon Alley Insider editor Henry Blodget has weighed in with the same speculation. His bullet list of reasons Schmidt might quit isn't crazy, but here's the six-word version of Blodget's post: "We have no inside knowledge here. " I have enough inside knowledge to say this: true Googlers don't see Google as a stepping-stone to a government job. Government is part of the problem. Google is the solution. (Photo by Reuters/Carlos Barria) -
rumormonger
Google to lay off 10,000?
"Up to 10,000 jobs could be on the chopping block according to sources," writes Daya Baran. Can I just say it? No. Google will not dump 10,000 of its roughly 30,000 workforce. "Sources" are wrong, although Baran's tales of Google shuffling its so-called temporary employees around to game SEC rules are true. Google's most likely action will be a stealthy attrition of maybe around 2,000 underperformers. That'll be bad enough. -
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smartphones
Googlephone sales 50 percent better than expected
T-Mobile's G1 phone, which runs Google's Android operating system, just doesn't have the cultural icon status of Apple's iPhone. But HTC, the Taiwanese company that makes the G1, revised its 2008 sales forecast up to one million, from an initial 600,000. (For context, Apple sold a million iPhones in the first 74 days.) Silicon Alley Insider asks the burning question: Who here bought one? Are G1 owners somehow different from iPhone evangelists who need to show their superphone to everyone on the bus? -
toogle many googlers
Google now lets TechCrunch pretend we don't exist
With a name like SearchWiki, you know it's going to be clever, yet stupid. Google has spent ten years and I don't know how many hundred million dollars refining a rocket-science algorithm for ranking Internet search results. Now, a few Google coders have whipped up a feature that lets you boost or cut the scores of individual websites from your own future searches. For example, grudge-o-matic TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington can click his own posts to the top of any Google search he performs. With one more click, he can remove Valleywag entirely from his life. That frees us to post as many photos of Big Mike's girlfriends as we want. Everybody wins! Personal note to Google engineer Amay: Next time you make a video, try to go longer than seven seconds without saying "cool." -
virtual worlds
Second Life's death knell
Google has shut down Lively, a service where people log on to chat and explore 3D virtual spaces, after a few short months. The MBAs of Silicon Valley have a pat phrase for the arrival of a competitor on the scene: They say it "validates their space." What does it say, then, that Lively is gone? It means that Second Life, the best known of these unreal universes, is doomed, too. More » -
A taste of their own medicine
Microsoft, harried by regulators in the 1990s, once lobbied Congress to cut spending on antitrust enforcement. Now, it's profiting from their efforts. The software giant's lobbying budget nearly doubled from 2006 to 2008, helping it sink Yahoo's deal to have Google sell ads for its search pages. The failure of that deal helped speed Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang out the door, and could set Microsoft up to win Yahoo's search business. CNET News]
