There are policies Facebook has issued, but there is always room for interpretation - and in light of current changes, the interpretation is a lot more stringent now in contrast to before.

Facebook's probably getting strict because its preparing for a relaunch of its design in July. Or — and this pure speculation — the third-party security firm Rock You's rival Slide hired to audit its own privacy might have gotten paid a little extra to take a close look at the competition and alert Facebook to any infractions. We wouldn't put it past hypercompetitive Slide founder Max Levchin and his crafty sidekick, Keith Rabois.

Melody and Kevin on Twitter

Rose wielded his power and influence, landing two tickets to a private Death Cab for Cutie show. Color McCloskey impressed.

First Rose bought her a drink. Then breakfast.

After reading these two messages, we're wondering if "ice cream" is a euphemism for something else these lovebirds might crave. Like an iPhone 3G?

Who can resist the old In-N-Out?

The clincher: what kind of girl Twitters about really fruity-sounding tea, unless she's dating Kevin Rose?

Wall-E + brunch = obviously dating.

Melody and Kevin on Vimeo

On her Tumblr, McCloskey introduces this video: "Such a good song. Also cute cameo at the end :)" Skip to 1:12 to see who she means. Here's a hint: It's Rose.
Melody and Kevin on Flickr

On Flickr, we find Melody and Kevin sharing a drink through two straws. Haven't we seen Rose pull this move before?

Yes, yes we have. Rose and New York dating columnist Julia Allison similarly shared a milkshake at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami earlier this year. Rose ended that fling not long after it started. Apprised of Rose's latest, Allison told Valleywag: "He's missing out."

Missing out? Not judging by this final Flickr shot of the cute noncouple:

Whatever Block does, he'll do it at full throttle. The guy pioneered live, realtime photo shoots from gadget industry events, uploaded while top mainstream media photgraphers puttered with their lens cases. Check out his first-onto-the-Internet photos of the iPhone's unveiling. Having worked both with and for him now and then at Engadget, I'm just glad I won't have to compete with Ryan Block anymore — as, I'm sure, are my colleagues at Gizmodo, the rival gadget blog owned by Valleywag publisher Gawker Media. Someone else is about to start losing a lot of sleep.(Photo by mroth )

First, one anonymous tipster provides some background:

I heard that after friendfinder moved from palo alto, the executives managed to upset the whole operations team by seating them into a crappy fishbowl (semi-official name for the room). It is just a matter of time when the whole team leaves the company. Consdering their convoluted infrastructure, this will most likely hurt the operations and site availability a lot . They have been trying to hire new senior sys admins for months without success (see craigslist postings) and latest took months to ramp up at work. Mostly the issue was Tony Previtt's reluctance to hear the employee issues and comment about being able to replace the whole team in short notice.

That was followed shortly by a second source who sent us this email — which, eventually, the first forwarded as well, serving to corroborate their access to information. Sneakily, Previte only notified employees of the morning meeting the night before, and after business hours:

From: "Anthony L. Previte" <********@pmgi.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:24:23 -0400
Subject: Several Issues
To: **@friendfinderinc.com
CC: Natalie Cedeno <*******@friendfinderinc..com>,
Carmela Monti <******@pmgi.com>
Precedence: bulk
Thread-Topic: Several Issues

1) I noticed there were only two people in the operations center after 5:00 today. I also observed that several of you leave the building for long stretches of time, in some cases for three hours. I would like each of you to email Jourdan and me with your current working hours. Also, if you are going to leave the building for more than an hour during the day, please get either Jourdan or my permission in writing.

2) There is a mandatory meeting tomorrow at 10:30 AM PST tomorrow. I am going to have a discussion about workplace ethics and attitude. I have a zero tolerance for violation of company policy and insubordination. I want to make sure everyone is crystal clear about this.

3) I would like everyone to update the project board with what you are working on..

She was recently spotted in New York's startup-laden Flatiron and Chelsea neighborhoods, making the rounds. New York VC Fred Wilsion is an unabashed fan, and the two have already invested alongside his Union Square Ventures in Etsy. Might the pair break hearts in both San Francisco and Vancouver by moving to Manhattan instead? As for New York, all I can say is been there, done that. Head back to Canada for Sonnet's sake, guys. American citizenship ain't what it used to be.

We've heard Lu's been frustrated at Yahoo for some time now. Assigned to Project Apex, the advertising dashboard Yahoo wants investors to believe will save the company — Lu heavily recruited fellow Yahoo Eric Boyd to work on the effort. Didn't happen. Instead, in April, Boyd turned him down and joined ad startup Mochi Media. A blackjack star, Boyd has a knack for making good bets: Since then, the word has been that Apex is underfunded and undermanned — short on everything but flashy PowerPoint presentations.

Commagere, in the past, hasn't helped clarify matters. Last year, he told GigaOm that RockYou hosted his applications and provided some cross-promotion, then hastened to give the company more credit:

At this point I’ve partnered with them on the app and they are contributing far more resources than just infrastructure. It’s eased my pain of looking for more programmers and I’m now enjoying being able to focus more on the creative aspect of it.

He must now regret those comments, which won't help his case in breaking free from RockYou — if that's even his goal. Talk about your words coming back to bite you.

HotWired FAQ

What Is HotWired?
HotWired is new thinking for a new medium. We call it a cyberstation, a suite of vertical content streams about the Digital Revolution and the Second Renaissance with an integrated community space. While HotWired is currently bound by technological limitations that restrict bandwidth, it represents the genetic blueprint that will evolve into the overarching media environment of the next century.

At the core of HotWired's editorial is point of view. We are not in the content business, we are in the context business. People today don't have the time or inclination to make sense of the data flood. HotWired is Wired's answer to the need for professionalism in a new medium that has been filled until now with something that resembles public access television programming.

HotWired is live, twitching, the real-time nervous system of the planet.

What Does HotWired Look Like?
HotWired is a stunning reinterpretation of the World Wide Web. Developed by Creative Director Barbara Kuhr of the award-winning design firm Plunkett + Kuhr, HotWired's look is clean and bright, filled with playful logos by Dutch designer Max Kisman and bursting with world-beat colors.

HotWired can be accessed on the Internet via the World Wide Web and a client application such as Mosaic or NetScape (though be warned, NCSA Mosaic for Windows has a bug which makes it unusable).

How Is HotWired Different?
HotWired doesn't look like any online service out there - it zigs where all the others zag. (HotWired's unofficial design watchword was "war on bevelled edges.") Its content and perspective are as innovative as those of its mothership, Wired magazine, while at the same time being utterly different. Its community space is technologically unrivalled - the first graphical conferencing system for the World Wide Web.

Isn't Advertising Anathema on the Net? The Net community does indeed react negatively to invasive advertising - the kind of spamming conducted recently by the Arizona lawyers Canter and Siegel, which elicited a massive rejection by the Net's immune system. The advertising on HotWired is the opposite of invasive.

Each advertiser is accessible only through a single discreet banner at the head of a content section. Most advertising is 90 percent persuasion and 10 percent information; advertising on HotWired reverses this ratio. And the privacy of members is guaranteed by HotWired's unqualified commitment to never divulge a member's personal information to advertisers.

Why HotWired, Why Now?
Because while Big Media and the telecom behemoths have been busy forming "strategic alliances" to build the "information superhighway" and sending out press releases about the tests they're launching any day now, thousands of companies and millions of people have quietly built a new interactive medium called the Internet.

This medium is not magazines with buttons, any more than television was radio with pictures. It's a new medium with a new aesthetic, a new commercial dynamic.

Many media companies shovel their leftovers into the online world and call it content. HotWired is not one of them.

Where Wired is a clear signpost to the next level, HotWired is operating from that next level. HotWired is a constantly evolving experiment in virtual community. It's Way New Journalism. It's Rational Geographic.

Today is like 1948; a new medium has reached critical mass. We're trying to help define the future of that medium before it ends up like television.

So if you're looking for the soul of our new medium in wild metamorphosis, our advice is simple. Get HotWired.

What Does HotWired Cost?
HotWired is free to members. HotWired's revenue model is similar to broadcast media - content supported by sponsors. HotWired's sponsors are some of the bluest chip advertisers in America, including IBM, AT&T, Volvo, Sprint, MCI, Zima (Coors), Internet Shopping Network (Home Shopping Network), Club Med, etc.

What Hotwired Is Not HotWired is not Wired magazine with another name (Wired works perfectly well in print, thank you). It's not a so-called online magazine (print content reduced to ASCII and shoveled into another medium, narrowband interactive). It's not video-on-demand (a pie-in-the-sky marketing concept created by out-of-touch old-media executives to justify their headlong rush into a new medium they don't understand, broadband interactive). It's not an online service like Prodigy or AOL (now rendered obsolete by the explosion of interest in the Internet and the development of the Web and graphical browsers).

And like Wired before it, HotWired is not a cold, marketing concept, but the heartfelt expression of the passion of its creators.

What's interesting is the timing. A source familiar with the talks says Google and Digg reached an agreement last month; it's not clear whether the offer was verbal or a formal termsheet. So why the delay? One possibility: Digg may have been exploring whether it could hire a rock-star CEO and raise more money. Adelson has long been flying cross-country, twice a month, to San Francisco from his upstate New York home, and privately complains about the commute to friends. But so far, I've heard nothing about Digg raising a new venture-capital round, or Adelson making way for a higher-profile hire.

Of Digg's possible acquirers, Google is the company's most natural home — despite Digg having a multiyear advertising contract with Microsoft. Google desperately wants to get a handle on social networking; it has struggled to sell ads profitably on News Corp.'s MySpace. More importantly, Digg could help Google improve the relevancy of its search results, especially with the news articles Digg readers vote on and discuss so vociferously. That might be worth more to Google than any ads it might manage to sell on the site.

The deal may not happen. Insiders are already mystified by its lack of progress since word first started spreading last month. As Sarah Lacy revealed in Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Digg has held a series of deal discussions that never came to fruition. That history makes it hard to take any new Digg-sale rumor seriously. But we hear these discussions are close enough to take seriously. Cupcakes, anyone?

(Photo of Rose by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us; cupcakes by a_cooper)

Clever of Stone, in a post promising increased Apple-related Twitter usage won't bring the site down, to suggest that Twitter and Apple are up to something together. Especially after past hints of a Twitter-Apple collaboration had the companies' mutual fanboys so revved up.

A friend of mine who works at Facebook told me that they have recently revoked the $600/mo. subsidizing of rent in Palo Alto because too many employees were banding together in groups of 4 or 5, renting a "chill pad" in Palo Alto, and pocketing the rest. Some pocketed as much as $300/mo. My friend told me the bandits [were] actually living in SF.

"Bandits" indeed. The whole point of the Facebook housing subsidy was to foster community by keeping Facebook employees living near each other in Palo Alto, in walking distance of headquarters. Ganging together to rent small apartments in Palo Alto while living in San Francisco is fraud, plain and simple.

But should we be shocked it happened? Many Facebook employees, some of whom make as little as $34,500 per year, are cash poor, and even the better-paid employees can hardly afford a Palo Alto mortgage. Zuckerberg's resistance to selling out has kept the company independent, but it also means employees' shares are only worth something on paper. Keeping Facebook independent may validate Zuck in his quest for peace in the Middle East, but some of his overeducated, underpaid, Camus-reading troops would prefer that their Meursault just shoot the Arab.

Seen over Memorial Day weekend, Apple built a full scale store on a sound stage at the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles. On Memorial Day they proceeded to shoot a commercial that will be part of Steve's announcement on June 9, a la Steve's favorite team at TBWA/Chiat/Day. This was no small feat. This was a full scale and fully operable store, complete with laptops, iMacs, the kids pod, software and accessories on the shelf, functional genius bar. Everything you'd see at at the Apple store, was on the lot/soundstage (same one that The Perfect Storm was filmed on) in working order. The store took 2 days to build. Tear down was complete Monday evening (memorial day). Only a handful of people were allowed to stay for the shoot and no extras/actors were seen in the "store" when the shooting commenced.

(Photo by ifoApplestore.com)

Through its .Mac subscription service, Apple currently offers Mac-only versions of email, bookmarks, file storage, and photo sharing. Google offers all the same services for free, though it charges for extra storage. Apple might well hand its Web businesses over to Google, in exchange for a share of the revenue. Competing with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft in online applications would seem like a fool's game.

Why it might not happen: Steve Jobs has long bragged about being the only company that "makes the whole widget," by which he meant hardware and software. Nowadays, the whole widget means hardware, software, and services. Apple has proved it can develop software for Windows with iTunes; ceding the Web to Google might be too much of a blow to the corporate ego.

Publishers rarely stick with ad networks when they reach a certain size, and Glam has a reputation for signing up new sites with expensive guarantees. (A Glam spokesperson claims it's not seeing sites leave after the guarantees expire.) Ultimately, though, Glam's sites have two fates: Either they never get large enough to matter, or they grow too big for Glam to justify its cut of sales. At that point, they'll likely leave or get bought outright by Glam — a considerable future liability for shareholders.

None of this means Glam won't sell. Glam CEO Samir Arora sold a majority stake in his startup NetObjects to IBM in 1997. Four years later, IBM sold the company off in parts for a pittance. Glam backer Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson profitably sold similar lemons — Hotmail to Microsoft, and Skype to eBay. We doubt Glam's viability. We don't doubt Glam's backers ability to sell the company. To suckers.

First they raise way more than any private Internet company —- ever! Then, they pre-announce via some strange conference call that they will have a flat to down revenue year, now they are cutting these rent subsidies.

Something is wrong with this picture. Does anyone recall these types of occurences as Google was making their climb? Nope, me neither.

My guess is that their expenses are running way ahead of plan and their revenues are way behind. Why? Because Beacon failed, which is probably why Owen [Van Natta] got fired, and they have no viable back-up plan. They also have a very high strike price so it's hard to raise traditional VC money at this point. Watch these guys closely —- their revenue and overall story doesn't match their growth/traffic numbers. Something is broken IMHO!

Lame lame lame Guitar Hero world tour demo ... Paula Abdul is judge

Rumor has it Sandberg was also the one who forced Facebook to drop out of a scheduled beer pong game against CollegeHumor. Poor Facebookers. On one hand, they've got a CEO in Zuckerberg who won't take Microsoft's $10 billion because he wants to keep the company independent until a magical IPO in 2011 or 2012. And on the other, there's Sandberg who's taking all fun out of being an independent company. Surely, you people need to vent. We're here to listen.

According to my sources, Steve Case's Revolution Health has signed a deal to act as the exclusive ad rep for DailyStrength.org and its 40 MM+ pageviews with minimum quarterly revenue guarantees. The deal reportedly includes traffic assignation in comScore.

However, word is that Revolution may not issue a press release on the deal because they may be afraid ComScore is looking at whether Revolution really fits within the Health category. The representation of advertising and traffic for Daily Strength, a social networking platform that could be best described as a "feel good Facebook-lite," isn't likely to help their case.

A source tells us that the site's founder, who's never taken funding and brags on the Newgrounds "about page" that "we're still 100 percent independent and love what we do," is said to be happy collecting "millions" in revenue and is uninterested in a sale. According to Quantcast, Newgrounds sees about 1.5 million monthly uniques.

And there's no sign of ongoing talks after Microsoft's bankers were rebuffed. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was recently spotted walking down University Avenue in Palo Alto, mere blocks away from Facebook headquarters. "He never called to say he'd be in the neighborhood," a Facebook insider told us. If he were actively courting Facebook, don't you think he would have at least dropped by for a round of Xbox?

Helio wants the deal because it will put them into the prepaid market and Virgin wants the deal because it will put them in the subscription market. They also feel that a combined company will give them more clout with Sprint — or T-Mobile if Sprint get purchased. If Sprint is not purchased, look for the combined company to inject a few billion into Sprint and also giving them a 20-30 percent stake in the new firm.

To us, the details seem obvious. New Macs always have better speakers and better cameras, don't they? But perhaps the rumor's very obviousness lends it more credibility. You have exactly 37 days to discuss, oooh and ahhh about it. (Photo by Andrew*)

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures once described Hype Machine as "the best thing to happen to music since the Rolling Stones!" But for a founder like Volodkin, taking nearly all of a $10 million offer must surely seem more attractive than rolling the dice by taking venture capital and trying to get a smaller slice of a larger jackpot. Some VCs have resorted to bribing founders — buying shares outright, rather than just increasing their paper wealth — to dissuade them from selling, as Automattic's investors did with Matt Mullenweg. VCs like to talk about making entrepreneurs wealthy. But they like to arrange things so they hitch a ride to the payday.