Google finally dropped the "beta" label from GMail. A bit hasty, no? The product launched just half a decade ago; its inventor left Google barely 18 months back. Why the rush to commit?

The Independent has a massive piece today on YouTube and how, despite having close to 350 million users worldwide per month, it's set to lose almost half a billion dollars this year. And it's all your fault, naturally.

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen has quietly left his baby behind, moving to a different Google division. Fellow co-founder Chad Hurley might leave too, PaidContent writes. Now comes a more Hollywood future for the video-sharing site.

It's one thing for little nonprofit groups like Consumer Watchdog to hound Google for how it handles privacy and competitors. Much trickier for the company: A large corporation like Microsoft, can afford to whisper in reporters' ears, individually.

Any doubts about Michael Jackson's megastardom should have ended after news of the singer's death tripped up Google and crashed AOL Instant Messenger, Wikipedia, TMZ and, of course, Twitter. A survey of the epic traffic:

With its many servers, Google devours electricity. And with search queries growing by 50%, it's only getting hungrier. The solution? Drill a two-mile-deep hole in the Earth, extracting geothermal energy and possibly destroying San Francisco with a terrible earthquake.

Genetics company 23AndMe can purportedly help you predict your health in decades to come, but we're hearing the three-year-old company can't even forecast its own near-term needs: A tipster tells us the company laid off seven employees.

• New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson "isn't happy with the media." She'd also like to make it clear that the company is not currently up for sale, so please put your dollar bills back in your wallet, thank you very much. [MW]
• Ten movies will compete for Best Picture at the Oscars now, not 5. [THR]
• Sad: Dick Cheney landed a $2 million deal to publish his memoir. [NYT]
• Also sad: MSNBC, the illustrious home of blowhard Keith Olbermann, seems to think its tired prison docs are more important than covering Iran. [LAT]
• Director David Fincher is in talks to make a movie about Facebook. [Reuters]
• The always classy In Touch spent $75,000 to purchase photos of Kate Gosselin spanking her kids in public for its cover last week. [WWD, NYP]

Desperate for online advertising, newspapers have learned to aggressively optimize their content for Google. The result: more traffic. Junky traffic.

Google's complicated relationship with its founder's wife just got more tangled. Anne Wojcicki's genetic-testing startup, 23andMe, not only took a second round of funding from the company — it's now cohabitating with the search giant.

The open secret about Google's forthcoming product "Wave" is that no one knows what the hell it does. Here's the tech gibberish the Guardian used to describe the software after talking to Google co-founder Sergey Brin:

As co-host of the Wall Street Journal's $5,000/head D conference, reporter Kara Swisher demands best behavior from her guests. Invite her to your startup, though, and she'll taunt your chef, heckle bizdev and mock your taste.

Former Intel chief Andy Grove famously believed that "only the paranoid survive" in Silicon Valley business. Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page seem intent to inject this spirit back into fat, dominant Google. They're even worrying about Bing.

To feel like a big, happy family, Google used to take everyone on an annual ski trip. The company grew so big it switched last year to Disneyland. This year, though, the All-Google trip is dead.

In the tech world, dominance can be lost with mere clicks, which in turn spring from mere thoughts. Perhaps that's why Google and Yahoo's CEOs are so quickly dismissing Microsoft's new search site, Bing.

Here's Carol Bartz on Fox Business Network, explaining what sets Yahoo apart from Google. For one, the internet company is not all fancy sciencepants and "algothorithic" or "algomorthmic" or whatever. Indeed, it doesn't even know that word.

Rajeev Motwani, a computer science professor who mentored Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford, was found dead in the pool of his Atherton, California home. He was 47.

How does Microsoft argue its search results are more correct than, say, Google's? With a commercial in which it accidentally claims the Breakfast Club was released a year later than it was.

Silicon Valley businessmen fancy themselves unflinching hard-core capitalists. Yet they hate to compete for workers — and the New York Times found an email to prove it.

• The newspaper industry may look to take a cue from the music business in its elusive hunt for new sources of revenue. Because, clearly, if there's one industry to gleam some wisdom from, that's the one. [MP, WSJ]
• The Justice Department is looking into whether tech giants like Yahoo! and Google violated antitrust laws in their recruiting efforts. [WaPo]
• NBC's two-part White House special scored big ratings. Conveniently, it also squeezed in plugs for every other show on the network. [HP, Newsday]
• Laura Ling and Euna Lee went on trial in North Korea today. [WaPo]
• Silvio Berlusconi is feuding with Rupert Murdoch. And so now Michael Wolff says he really likes Berlusconi. Business as usual, clearly. [Gawker, Reuters]
• Here's something really depressing to chew on: Glenn Beck is No. 81 on Forbes's "Celebrity 100" list and made $23 million last year. [Forbes]