There's a heated turf war going on inside the New York Times over the iPad, pitting print die-hards against people focused on the Times' digital future. The outcome will determine pricing for some marquee content on Apple's tablet.

Amid its quest for profits, Twitter Inc. has a proposition for programmers: Whisper a password, hand over five hundred dollars, and prepare to pound the microblogging startup's servers hard, all night.

It would seem our conspiracy theory is coming true: Facebook's big push to give you "more control of your information" is actually an initiative to get you to give up control of your information. Step one: Frame greed as concern.

Silicon Valley pundits like to talk about social media as a potential geyser of cash. What they leave out is that one of the only ways social networks like Facebook, MySpace have done that is joining league with online scammers.

Tech bloggers are in a tizzy over the prospect of tech giants Google or Microsoft getting real-time access to the thoughts of Twitterers, but Valleywag has learned that cash-hungry Twitter is already selling access to its "firehose" of data.

Here's an extraordinary video of eBay CEO John Donahoe bragging about how the company has sidelined what was once a core competency: Online auctions. Why solve a hard business problem when you can run away from it?

What advertising depression? Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook is cash flow positive a year ahead of schedule, hitting 300 million users and growing ad sales. Great. Now the social network needs to achieve actual profit, and ditch its beloved funny numbers.

Without a clear reason for being, Twitter is about to flail its way into a "cyber-ghetto" for the aimless, alongside second-tier social network MySpace. At least that's the argument of a provocative post from Cody Brown, NYU's new-media wunderkind.

Facebook has long been the wet blanket of social networks. Its latest bucket of cold water: No more searching for people by relationship status. Because then you might conceivably get laid, and we can't have that.

Zivity, the much-ballyhooed site where you can buy pictures from amateur models, is stripping itself of most assets and employees. Appropriate, in a way, but if amateur moviemaking and journalism can work, why not user-generated porn? Some clues:

How will Twitter ramp its revenue from nothing to $21 million a month in less than two years, as its managers forecast? Maybe by simply monitoring what you tweet about, and then targeting ads at you.

For three years, Twitter made no money. But the microblogging company will supposedly be taking in more than $1 million per month by the end of this year and twenty times that much in 2010. Ah, the miracle of spreadsheets.

There was something innocent and pure about Twitter's total lack of income. But don't worry, the microblogging startup's first advertisements are sufficiently adorable.

Tech blog company GigaOm is starting a subscription research service to drum up cash; some think TechCrunch could soon follow. It would seem everything old in tech media is new again: Bloated dot-com magazines attempted this same tactic amid the popping of the last financial bubble.