The devil is in the details, and the details of the Yahoo-Google search advertising deal reveal the desperate, possibly neurotic state of Yahoo these days. Quite simply, it looks to me like Yahoo is effectively paying Google off to step in and (1) keep Jerry Yang, Sue Decker and the current board of directors in [...]

Social networks are, first and foremost, vehicles for personal expression and interaction. But for all the wall posts, direct messages and pokes, one means of communication is conspicuously missing: email (Yahoo understands this, if little else). Apart possibly from the phone numbers you keep on your mobile phone, there is no better electronic indication of [...]

Blog search engine Technorati, which was simultaneously pitching a sale through Montgomery & Co. as well as a new venture round, raised $7.5 million in a fourth round of financing according to a regulatory filing. Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital and FG Incubation.I spoke with Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra this evening, who [...]

Stay out the summer heat and get into these cool summer conferences.Supernova starts this Monday. It’s June 16-18 in San Francisco, CA. TechCrunch readers automatically receive a $200 discount here. Come join TechCrunch as we co-host the Mobile Connections forum with Kevin Werbach Monday at 5:15 pm at the Mission Bay Conference [...]

Mobile social network Loopt is making a big push this summer.CEO Sam Altman already took stage at last week’s Stevenote prior to the unveiling of iPhone 3G. He was there to present the friend tracking software Loopt has been developing in time for the iPhone App Store launch on July 11th.But while Altman describes [...]

Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division, sent the following letter to Microsoft employees today. He outlines the deal that Microsoft offered Yahoo, and argues it would have been better for Yahoo than the Google deal. Specifically, he estimates Microsoft’s offer would have added $1 billion to Yahoo’s operating profits. [...]

Web video production house Next New Networks is looking for a new CEO. Founder and current CEO Herb Scannell, who will remain as chairman, announced it on the company’s blog. Previously, Scannell was vice chairman of MTV Networks and president of Nickelodeon, where he launched the career of SponegBob SquarePants. (Not that he’s [...]

Google launched Gears last May, and for the first year of its release it was considered a minor, niche product that a few developers and users may take advantage of to allow offline access to web applications. You can probably recall the arguments at the time: who needs offline access, connectivity is everywhere anyway, [...]

Even if they could, few people have the time to write a book. But what if they could Twitter one? For all those aspiring novelists out there, Quillpill might be the app to get them started.

Twitter clones have been cropping up all over the web in recent months with most of them replicating the “What are you doing?” concept in one way or the other.

Quillpill takes a totally different approach by wanting to know what stories you would like to tell. The site is primarily aimed at aspiring authors and readers of fiction. Quillpill is currently in private beta but available to the first 500 Techcrunch readers to sign up by sending an e-mail to techcrunch[at]quillpill[dot]com.

In order to compose a so-called book, users first choose a title and then submit posts with a maximum of 140 characters. Entries belonging together are displayed one below the other in a thread-like structure. Authors are able to create any kind of text-based content over time, including diaries, short stories, poems or even novels. Here is an excerpt from one called Saijo City Notebook by Eric Rice:

I remember reading in school about the controversy about broadcastingpublic executions– a quaint and kitsch idea, considering the failure.

Serial entrepreneur Farhad Mohit is at it again. Back in 1996, Mohit founded BizRate, one of the first consumer review sites, and then shopping search engine Shopzilla. He sold both to E.W. Scripps for $570 million in June 2005. Now he has a new super stealthy startup called DotSpots. The startup [...]

In a new filing with the SEC, Yahoo spells out the terms of the search-advertising agreement it announced yesterday with Google. Most of the filing fleshes out known details about the agreement. But it also discloses something Jerry Yang and Sue Decker didn’t want to talk about yesterday. The deal includes an [...]

I don’t believe that there is anything Yahoo could do at this point to further destroy their business that would surprise me. At 1:35 pm EST yesterday we posted that we believed Yahoo would announce a search marketing deal with Google, essentially ending their negotiations with Microsoft and, pending government approval, sealing Google’s monopoly position [...]

At Google, it’s all about speed. That’s doubly true for mobile applications. Google made some improvements to its mobile search, making it load faster on most mobile browsers. It does this by caching the page.Google also added an iGoogle link to its mobile homepage. It also now allows you to customize [...]

Facebook announced its second F8 Developer event earlier today, to be held in San Francisco on July 23, 2008.It’ll be hard for them to top last year’s announcement of Facebook Platform at the first F8 event. Facebook Platform transformed the idea of social networking from an activity to a platform to engage users. MySpace’s [...]

It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore and shown above. Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each [...]

Los Angeles based social network MySpace, which has 115 million monthly visitors worldwide (Comscore, April 2008), will be redesigning its site next week. The first phase will launch on Wednesday June 18. The changes affect five major areas of the service: homepage, navigation, profile editor, search and the MySpaceTV Flash player.The screenshots above show some [...]

Yahoo and Google have confirmed that they are indeed entering into a partnership around search advertising, a story we broke earlier today. Google’s blog post on the agreement is here.—The deal is non-exclusive. Yahoo will be able to run Google ads alongside Yahoo ads or other ad providers.—The deal is expected to add [...]

Here are our notes from Yahoo’s conference call today discussing it’s new search advertising partnership with Google. CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker spoke and took questionsJerry Yang: Our discussions with MSFt have concluded, after a number of meetings, including a meeting on June 8 in which chairman Roy Bostock and management participated. [...]

Well, it was a little later than we expected, but Yahoo has announced a non-exclusive deal with Google around search and search advertising. Yahoo’s press release is below and their blog post is here.Additionally, Google’s press release on the announcement can be found here and their blog post here.Yahoo! to Strengthen Competitive Position in Online [...]

Not to be outdone by competitor Flixwagon, Qik has just released its own demonstration of live video streaming from the iPhone (see below).The demo comes just hours after Flixwagon made a similar announcement. However, Qik is one-upping Flixwagon by promising to release its software next week, not further off in July. It will presumably work [...]

Yesterday we reported that Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s network division, had submitted his resignation. Now we are hearing of two more prominent departures from the beleaguered company.NYT Bits is reporting the departure of Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and EVP of research and strategic data solutions, which is expected to be officially [...]

Yahoo formally announced today that it is no longer in discussion with Microsoft for a deal of any sort. Both companies had renewed discussions once again exploring either an all-out acquisition or the sale of Yahoo’s search business. But Microsoft was “not interested in pursuing an acquisition of all of Yahoo!, even at [...]

Yahoo and Google will make a joint announcement at 1:30 California time this afternoon, we’ve heard from a reliable source close to one of the companies. What is the announcement? The very likely answer is, a search partnership between the two companies that outsources all or part of Yahoo search marketing, and possibly search itself, [...]

Could the purple logo to the right represent a new Yahoo branding initiative? Or just a photoshop hit job?Ben Sweat, a product manager at Snap, claims to have spotted it at the top of the Yahoo homepage in Firefox 3 this morning (see shot below). But when he tried to replicate the logo in Internet [...]

Seven months after we first saw video on the iPhone in action, Flixwagon appears to have beaten its better-known rival Qik to the punch by getting its streaming video service to work on unlocked iPhones (or at least by demonstrating to the public first that it has done so). Qik is undoubtedly looking to support [...]

Swedish startup Twingly opened up its blog search engine to the public this morning. It now covers 30 million blogs, and results can be sorted by authority (number of incoming links) or most recent posts. There is also a spam-free search option that only brings back results from the hundreds of thousands of white-list [...]

Six Apart has introduced an iPhone version of their BlogIt software, which allows users to quickly post updates to their blogs, Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Facebook. The current version of BlogIt is a traditional iPhone web-based app, though we can probably expect a native version on the way (Six Apart announced a native [...]

Going to the mechanic is like going to the doctor. When something needs to be fixed, for most people there is no easy way to tell if they are being charged the going rate or are being ripped off. Enter RepairPal, a new site launching publicly today where you can get price estimates [...]

I am as much an iPhone cultist as the next guy, but Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster is taking this cult thing a little too far. He estimates that by the end of 2009 there will be 55 million iPhone users and that the iPhone App store alone could be a $1.2 billion business. [...]

Gaycities, a review website for members of the LGBT community, has revamped its interface and introduced a number of new features that should help make their reviews more relevant.Founder Scott Gatz says that the LGBT community is very diverse, and that many reviewers have dramatically different tastes. To help deal with the diversity, Gaycities [...]