Rumors are swirling that MySpace will announce a platform for application developers, like Facebook's next week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. But they're wrong, according to a source close to the company. There is a platform in the works, but it's not ready yet — delayed, like so many other MySpace tech projects. Instead, MySpace's Chris DeWolfe and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch will be in town to make some announcement related to MySpace's instant-messaging client — ho-hum news — and, more interestingly, to open up a San Francisco office. Why the need to expand from MySpace's Beverly Hills digs?

Why was a roomful of venture capitalists and lawyers clinking champagne glasses at Zibibbo in Palo Alto last week? The target of their fulsome praise was entrepreneur Anthony Soohoo, a former Yahoo executive. And the reason? He had managed to flip his website Dotspotter, yet another celebrity gossip site with thoroughly derivative social-networking features, to CBS for a quick $10 million. Dotspotter's short one-year lifepspan didn't scare off serial charmer Quincy Smith, the startup-mad head of CBS Interactive. Having bought financial videoblog Wallstrip and Web-based social music site Last.fm, we can only conclude that Smith's strategy is to buy a lot of startups, throw them against the wall, and see what sticks. Nice work, especially when CBS shareholders are footing the bill. And who's receiving the checks? One of Dotspotter's beneficiaries, we hear, is Facebook CFO Gideon Yu. Nice to have a backup plan in case all those social networks turn out to be a fad.

Michael Wallent, a general manager at Microsoft, will return to work in January as Megan Wallent. He came out to colleagues as transgender last month, first in person and then by email. Wallent says he encountered nothing but support — mixed, of course, with some awkward curiosity. That's unremarkable. Microsoft is located in the progressive Pacific Northwest, where one's less likely to raise an eyebrow at Wallent's self-discovery and more likely to worry about the politically correct term to describe it. (For the record, "sex change" is considered derogatory by many; the preferred word is "transitioning.") He's unlikely to encounter blatant transphobia on the job. He should worry instead about plain old-fashioned sexism. How will Wallent's developers react when they come to work on January 2 and it hits them: They're working for a girl?

Monty Mullig, the head of Web technologies at Time Warner's Turner division, which runs CNN and TBS, among others. Despite CNN's efforts to burnish Mullig's profile by featuring him as a talking head, touting CNN's ability to serve up millions of pageviews in crises like the contested 2000 presidential election and 9/11, you've likely never heard of him. But nonetheless, his departure now is instructive. Turner, you see, is rumored to be planning layoffs in Mullig's department. It may seem odd that Turner, whose CNN.com is a runaway success in online news, would be plotting cuts as everyone else is scrambling to staff up with Web developers. But Mullig, and his long, prolific website-building tenure, may have a lot to do with that.

These days, when I hear that Google has bought a company, I feel sorry for its founders, however rich they're becoming. Google just bought Jaiku for a rumored $12 million. Not bad for a service that's mostly a copycatan identical twin of Twitter, allowing users to broadcast short messages to friends by text message and IM. Sure, they got a nice payout. But my gut tells me that the price was dooming Jaiku to irrelevance. Google's track record of botched acquisitions — remember dMarc Broadcasting or Dodgeball, anyone? Didn't think so — just grows longer and longer. At YouTube, most of the pre-Google employees are resting and vesting, I hear — waiting for their stock-option packages to reach full value, and then plotting their escapes. If Jaiku's employees are students of history, one hopes they inked an agreement that allowed them an early exit in case things go sour. Evan Williams, who sold his previous company to Google, must be softly chuckling to himself.

When Red Herring, the troubled tech publisher, got an eviction notice, editor-in-chief Joel Dreyfuss tried to pass it off as a quirk of publisher Alex Vieux's financial-management strategy. "That's just how Alex pays his bills," said Dreyfuss. Or rather, doesn't pay his bills. Already, Vieux's Herring has been ordered to pay Comerica Bank $180,457 plus interest for an unpaid loan. But now, it looks like he don't even have the time, money, or inclination to dispute his debts. A look at San Mateo County Court records reveals that two recent cases brought against Red Herring, Inc, have been awarded to the plaintiffs in default judgments. In other words, Vieux's legal representatives didn't even bother to show up in court.

How leaky is Facebook? So leaky that new hires sometimes out themselves right on the company's own website, as tech expert Jonathan Heiliger has done. Heiliger, you see, revealed his new employer by joining the company's private group for Facebook employees, a move that's visible on the site. Heiliger, who, back in the '90s, used to be a 20something rock-star Internet executive like new boss Mark Zuckerberg, will be the company's vice president of technical operations, charged with, oh, say, making sure the site doesn't crash, spew private data, or leak code. By my count, that makes Heiliger the fourth vice president with "operations" in his title. But I think Heiliger, a veteran of bubble-era companies like GlobalCenter and LoudCloud, will spend more time regaling Zuck with war stories about what it was like to run a ridiculously overvalued Internet company. And he'll thereby get to relive his fading youth. What a job!

How many planes does one man need? Or, more precisely, three men? Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin already own, with CEO Eric Schmidt, an extensively remodeled 767, pictured here in New Zealand. Schmidt, by himself, owns at least one Gulfstream V (some reports say he has two). But we now hear that the Google trio are buying a 757. While smaller than the widebody 767, the 757 is still a commercial airliner, considerably bigger than most private jets. So why would Page, Brin, and Schmidt need four planes between them?

At least one key Yahoo executive was unswayed by Friday's revival meeting featuring Steve Jobs: Stewart Butterfield, the founder and general manager of the Yahoo-acquired Flickr photo site. Butterfield, Valleywag has learned, plans to leave to, well, spend more time with his family. It's a pat phrase that always sounds risible, but in Butterfield's case, we'll make an exception: Anyone who has seen photos of Butterfield and his infant daughter Sonnet — on Flickr, naturally — can see his complete and utterly genuine devotion. Yahoo, too, might have a claim on Butterfield's devotion, in the midst of a precarious revamp. But Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, while a big supporter of Flickr himself, is not nearly as cute. No word on whether Butterfield's wife, Caterina Fake, now a high-ranking Yahoo executive, plans any move, or who will replace Butterfield at Flickr. Update: In the comments, Butterfield says that after taking some time off in July, he's decided to take a longer paternity leave, but still plans to return to Yahoo. (Photo by mylesdgrant)

After Terry Semel abruptly resigned as Yahoo's CEO, founder Jerry Yang promised precipitous action — the hackneyed "100-day plan." But now, we hear that his new strategy is anything but swift in execution. Codenamed "Project Apex," the solution to Yahoo's woes centers around building a better version of Google's AdSense. AdSense, of course, is the service that places ads on third-party websites, matching the ads to their content. Yahoo already has a similar service called Yahoo Publisher Network, but it's "a clusterfuck," according to one Yahoo insider. The only problem? Yahoo's tech team thinks they can finish it in three years. Three years! (What's the average tenure of a Yahoo executive today? Will anyone be around to see this through?)

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Here's what you need to know about Charles Simonyi: He made billions by inventing what later became Microsoft Word and Excel, he paid $25 million for a flight into space, and he's dating Martha Stewart. Oh, about that last bit? We wonder if Stewart knows about Simonyi's dinner plans. He's in Cambridge for Technology Review's EmTech conference, where, we hear, he's meeting with Victoria Gray. Gray is an event organizer and rumored to be an old flame of Simonyi's. Of course, perhaps the dinner conversation will be all business: Simonyi is reportedly an investor in a venture run by Gray. After the jump, a paparazzi snap of Gray by Valleywag intern Jordan Golson.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Coming to a browser near you: "People who liked this article also liked these articles." That's right — according to founder Kevin Rose, Digg is getting ready to do to news what Amazon.com did to shopping. At a panel at Technology Review's EmTech conference, Rose said that Digg would be launching a "suggestion service" in a few months. It's a natural move, after Digg introduced social-networking features that let you better track the headlines your friends find interesting; mining that data to find patterns and present users with similar articles just makes sense. Still, it could spell a radical shift in news consumption — a move that brings us closer to the vision of the "Daily Me," a techie vision of a completely personalized news outlet. (Photo by Lane Hartwell for Valleywag)

How does David Hayden, the founder of Internet search engine Magellan, email-outsourcer Critical Path, and Jeteye, a blogging service, keep going? Last we'd checked, he may owe his bankers as much as $38 million — a debt he's disputing in court — and Jeteye's landlord was trying to collect on the rent. And yet Hayden is moving on to a new venture, according to a resume he's published on his Jeteye page. Archipelago Properties is a "private destination vacation club" — a sort of timeshare for the ultrarich. Hayden writes that he expects to close $40 million in financing by next January. Sounds like Hayden, a general contractor before he became an Internet entrepreneur and who bought grand homes in San Francisco and Sun Valley during the first boom, is at last getting back to a business he knows: real estate.

We hear that Marcy Simon, the PR consultant briefly installed in Google's New York office, is more than a mere mistress to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The rumors are resplendent: That Schmidt funded Simon's acrimonious divorce; that he is separating from his wife Wendy; that he is buying a $25 million Manhattan apartment in which to live with Simon. But why should anyone care about such tawdry personal details? If the latter two bits of hearsay have any truth to them, then shareholders should be extremely worried.

Marcy Simon, left, the girlfriend of married Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is no longer a PR consultant at Google. So much for her reign as the Duchess of West Chelsea. The terms of separation are unclear: Simon has maintained to friends that she quit, while other insiders say Google executives Elliot Schrage and David Lawee fired her, with Schmidt stepping out of the matter. Schmidt's recusal may not be the only way in which he's staying out of Simon's affairs. Rumor is that Schmidt is now seeing Kate Bohner, right, a journalist and ex-wife of author Michael Lewis. No word on whether a Google gig is forthcoming for Bohner, though she does have a channel on the Google-owned YouTube.

There's a truism that every corporate relocation, whatever the ostensible business reason, ends up shortening the CEO's commute. And AOL's Randy Falco has accomplished that much. By moving AOL's headquarters from Dulles, Va. to New York City, he's able to stop diverting the company jet to White Plains and go back to getting driven into Manhattan. Oh, sure, New York is a better location for an advertising-driven business. With the collapse of AOL's dial-up Internet business, Dulles's network operations are less and less important. Falco has much else to say in an internal company memo obtained by Valleywag. The full memo is printed after the jump, and I'll be back with more analysis of AOL's big changes.

The Valley's venture capitalists fall into and out of love with enterprise software. Today, with Facebook and other social networks the talk of the town, it's hard for the makers of boring IT products to get attention. But not, it seems, money. Splunk, in a lightning-fast fundraising effort, has pulled in $25 million in a third round of financing, bringing the company's valuation up to $120 million. Splunk's software analyzes server logs, and in a nod to the collaborative aspects of Web 2.0, lets sysadmins share and discuss the results to figure out if odd patterns are signs of system failures or security breaches. Think of it as a Google for hardcore nerds, but one they're actually willing to pay for. And that, in turn, made Ignition Venture Partners, a Seattle-area venture-capital firm, willing to pay for a stake in the San Francisco company. In every investment, there are winners and losers, though.

After a 15-11 loss in an ultimate frisbee match against a team of scrappy Facebookers, disc-flinging Googlers swore revenge. But the social network left the search engine, again, unable to find victory, dishing out another 15-12 tromping earlier this week. "All that free food weighing them down," snipes a Facebook-employed spectator of the match. Other Facebookers are more modest, crediting the Googlers for strongly competitive play — though some believe the Googlers may have brought on ringers who don't actually work for the company. Word is the Googlers want another rematch. What, are they trying to go for 3 out of 5? Have they seen what happened to Orkut? (Photo courtesy of the Ultimate Players Association)

We've got the answer on what Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are doing in Seville, the recent destination of their converted 767 airliner, the Google Jet. They're attending a massive company get-together, Be Connected 2007, in the Spanish city, along with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. According to this Spanish blog, more than 3,000 people are attending, including a big contingent, tipsters say, from Google's Zurich office. "The restaurants are packed with Googler," reports a besieged Sevillero. They're being entertained with free meals — no change from the ordinary, pampered life of a Googler there — as well as performance by French music group Gipsy Kings. The conference runs through tomorrow.

If Wednesday's sighting of the Google Jet — the converted 767 privately owned by company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — was accurate, we may know where they Google duo are headed next. Commenter smpte tips us that the plane, operated by TAG Aviation, took off from Moffet Field earlier today and is, at this moment, flying over Maine en route to Seville, Spain. Anyone know what kind of Andalusian adventure Page, Brin, or both might be up to? Let us know.