Twitter Inc.'s been spinning quite a turnaround story in the press lately. The microblogging service "has finally turned a corner," declares the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek. "It's a juggernaut," a company executive tells the magazine. But the hard numbers we've been provided paint a very different story.

Stand proud, America. People might say we're a nation of self-obsessed simpletons who make no redeeming contributions to the world economy. But Ashton Kutcher knows different. And today, he said so.

Hot on the heels of Google releasing its Groupon clone, Facebook has announced it will push online coupons, too, via a new product called Facebook Deals. Unlike its competitors, Deals will show up in your Facebook news feed. Great.

In January, Demand Media looked like the "future of journalism," as CJR put it. Flush after a soaring IPO, the content farm planned an acquisition spree. Now, thanks to some Google tweaks, Demand Media's stock is plunging.

If you want to know how to get rich in tech on the strength of other people's ideas, look no further than Jason Calacanis, the web entrepreneur taking the not-so-delicate art of copycatting to its logical, but increasingly bitter, extreme.

Google's instant search feature seems targeted at digital crackheads, and that makes perfect sense: It turns out Google users are, in fact, pretty cracky. They punished the company hard for slowing down by just one tenth of one second.

Facebook's board somehow distilled a hugely successful strategy from threadbare briefings by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who explains in this video how he would scrawl all the board's Facebook news on a single sheet of yellow paper.

Gilt Groupe, the bargain luxury e-tailer, is expanding further into Groupon's local shopping business. Emailed coupons still seem like too much trouble for Gilt's upscale customers, but apparently the grinding recession has even the rich looking for deals.

It's all very simple, as far as AOL's CEO is concerned: The Web is ugly because it was designed by Silicon Valley nerds, so let's hire creative geniuses like the Jonas Brothers to redesign it.

What happens when a small business owner gets on Google's bad side? In Ryan Abood's case, the answer is, "your business gets crushed and you spend a year and a half in internet Siberia." Do not trifle with The Google.

Twitter has confirmed a report that it's testing inline video and images, just in case the microblogging service wasn't distracting enough for you already.

A skanky mannequin has been discovered in the San Francisco headquarters of Yelp. The doll is supposed to represent a Yelp user, but she also makes the perfect mascot for the self-consciously trashy local ratings site itself.

Facebook's privacy rollbacks may have pissed off users, but the bottom line has been just fine. That may yet change. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that the social network's rapid growth has finally slowed.

VillageVines.com will shave 30 percent off fancy restaurant meals without a tacky coupon—the discount is discretely applied to your bill. But, oh, the hoops you'll have to jump through. It's the online discount club model taken too far.

Investors are pouring money into tech "incubators," hoping to kindle the next Foursquare or Twitter. But there's a cautionary tale in the trend for entrepreneurs, such as the guy who sold his stuff and moved across the continent for nothing.

From here forward, only Twitter, the company, will be allowed to sell ads posted to Twitter, the microblogging service. Twitter wants to avoid crass commercialism and shilling. Too late, guys.

Once upon a time, building computers was as solitary an affair as using one, and a smart executive named Steve Jobs exploited this cloistered secrecy for fun and profit. But Apple's hermetic seal has broken, and there's no restoring it.

Yelp has surrendered. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman announced his local-reviews site will stop selling merchants the ability to select "favorite reviews," which push negative feedback further down profile pages. So now how will Yelp make money?

Google is hiring bond traders, according to a job listing discovered by Business Insider, casting in a new light CEO Eric Schmidt's recent disclosure that the company thought about trying to predict the stock market.

Everyone expected Twitter to unveil an advertising strategy at the South by Southwest conference in Austin today; instead, the microblogging startup plotted further media domination Actual revenue is "going to take experimentation." Oy: That's a billion-dollar company talking. (Pic)