Gossip

If Google's rumored $500m acquisition of Yelp goes through, the search giant may finally get a solid lock on the "hyperlocal" Web. But it'll also be acquiring a big community site--and those are notoriously hard to wrangle.

Restaurant industry blog Eater might have put it best: "One can only assume that with Google's muscle behind the site, the millions of users who log on to complain about restaurants would be able to say stupid stuff faster, and with more efficiency," editor Amanda Kludt wrote on Friday.

All snark aside, it's the same … Read more

We didn't know much about Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies before it invested $200 million in Facebook this spring. But it's been in the news a lot more recently: Russian newspaper Kommersant reported Thursday that the firm has purchased more Facebook stock, sending its stake in the massive social network past 5 percent at a $10 billion valuation. Its original stake was 1.96 percent. It's reportedly still looking to buy more.

A Facebook representative told CNET via e-mail that because it's a private company it opts not to discuss shareholder percentages.

According to the … Read more

This isn't particularly Earth-shattering news, but it's sort of hilarious.

Dustin Moskovitz, one of Facebook's co-founders and its head of engineering until he left last year, will be played by the little boy from "Jurassic Park" in the tell-all flick "The Social Network."

According to details in the Internet Movie Database, the role of Moskovitz has been filled by Joseph Mazzello, the actor best known for playing Timmy, the skinny 8-year-old who fell out of trees, nearly got electrocuted, and narrowly escaped getting eaten by all kinds of meany dinosaurs in the 1993 … Read more

It looks like the brouhaha surrounding social-app moneymaker Offerpal Media is bigger than founder Anu Shukla's "sh*t, double sh*t, and bullsh*t" response to the accusation that its business is built on scamming consumers. It's got upcoming developments in two lawsuits, one in which it's the plaintiff and one in which Shukla is a defendant.

VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi reported Thursday that a lawsuit was filed in an Alameda County, Calif., superior court against Shukla and co-founder Michael Liu on behalf of Kevin Halpern, who alleges that he helped found the company and … Read more

What's former MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe up to these days? He wants to be the next big name in the social-gaming craze, we hear.

In late July, TechCrunch floated a report that DeWolfe was hitting up big private equity outlets to amass cash, at least $100 million, for a new venture that would involve "a roll-up of an Internet industry vertical," but TechCrunch didn't specify what that sector was. Three months prior, DeWolfe had been ousted from the troubled MySpace and replaced by former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta.

Now, several well-placed sources have told CNET … Read more

We've been hearing a few sneaky tips from folks within earshot of the Boston, Mass., set of "The Social Network," the Columbia Pictures movie about the contested origins of Facebook. This week, the film crew has been on the Charles River working on scenes in which Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the identical twins who had a lawsuit against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, are depicted at a Harvard crew practice.

That Boston Globe report about the Harvard heavyweight crew team getting cast in the background? Not quite.

Ivy League athletic restrictions bar current athletes from being film extras, … Read more

Now, these are some guys you don't see at the average Silicon Valley hackathon: The Harvard heavyweight crew team is filming scenes for "The Social Network," according to a Boston Globe gossip column on Tuesday. Film crews have been on the Charles River in Boston recently, the column reports.

That's because two of the main characters in the juicy, David Fincher-directed tell-all about the origins of Facebook are Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, would-be social-network entrepreneurs who claimed that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole the code and business plan for their project, ConnectU. The identical twin Winklevosses … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Tim Armstrong is such a tease.

The AOL CEO, speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday, didn't have any high-profile announcements like many of the other speakers at the conference. But instead, he hinted that one might be on the way.

"We have been working on something for the last three months that I think is a fairly substantial shift in our technology," he said. "When that's ready to announce, maybe we'll come back and talk to you about it."

Interviewer and conference organizer John Battelle tried to pry more … Read more

Microsoft executive Qi Lu will reportedly make a big announcement onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco later on Wednesday morning: that its search engine, Bing, has inked deals with both Twitter and Facebook to bring real-time status updates and tweets into search results. That's something you can't find on Google.

According to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, neither partnership will actually turn into a product for "weeks, if not months," and that both Twitter and Facebook have also been talking to Google about similar deals.

When asked about the deal announcement earlier on … Read more