T-Mobile's G1 phone, which runs Google's Android operating system, just doesn't have the cultural icon status of Apple's iPhone. But HTC, the Taiwanese company that makes the G1, revised its 2008 sales forecast up to one million, from an initial 600,000. (For context, Apple sold a million iPhones in the first 74 days.) Silicon Alley Insider asks the burning question: Who here bought one? Are G1 owners somehow different from iPhone evangelists who need to show their superphone to everyone on the bus?

With a name like SearchWiki, you know it's going to be clever, yet stupid. Google has spent ten years and I don't know how many hundred million dollars refining a rocket-science algorithm for ranking Internet search results. Now, a few Google coders have whipped up a feature that lets you boost or cut the scores of individual websites from your own future searches. For example, grudge-o-matic TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington can click his own posts to the top of any Google search he performs. With one more click, he can remove Valleywag entirely from his life. That frees us to post as many photos of Big Mike's girlfriends as we want. Everybody wins! Personal note to Google engineer Amay: Next time you make a video, try to go longer than seven seconds without saying "cool."

Google has shut down Lively, a service where people log on to chat and explore 3D virtual spaces, after a few short months. The MBAs of Silicon Valley have a pat phrase for the arrival of a competitor on the scene: They say it "validates their space." What does it say, then, that Lively is gone? It means that Second Life, the best known of these unreal universes, is doomed, too.The notion of a metaverse has long fascinated geeks. The idea of "avatars" — three-dimensional representations of the self rendered in pixels, often fantastical or surreal in nature — wandering through a computer-generated environment has been explored in the science-fiction novels of Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, among others. The Matrix trilogy introduced the idea at multiplexes from coast to coast. And yet unreal worlds have never taken off in actual reality. Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, once showed me screens at the headquarters of his company, Linden Lab, which monitored in real time the number of people logging in. They peaked at 50,000, the maximum simultaneous capacity of its servers. That's not a virtual world; that's a midsized town. Anecdotally, many of Second Life's users are there for virtual sex. (The company has banned gambling, so there's little other reason to go there.) The PG-rated Lively, censored by Google, did not even have that; its only draw was innocuous chat, with the occasional subversive attempt by users at raciness. No wonder that news organizations, drawn by the visual appeal of the service's 3D graphics, aren't writing stories about Second Life anymore. Reuters, at the height of the frenzy, opened up a bureau; its Second Life correspondent stopped filing copy since September, having left to write for a blog, and the wire service has not replaced him. The most recent noise to come out of Second Life has been an uproar over price hikes. Second Life users periodically hold colorful protests in the virtual world — probably the most entertaining thing that ever happens there — over this new rule or that new rule. They are likely to become more frequent, as Linden Lab, to survive, focuses on squeezing more revenue out of its existing customers, who pay the company "taxes" on their virtual real estate and convert real money into the company's imaginary currency, Linden dollars. Online 3D environments are not a fad; millions inhabit them for hours, sometimes days at a time. But they do so in networked videogames like World of Warcraft, where there's a clear purpose to being there — even if it's just having fun and wasting time. Second Life, Lively, and virtual worlds like them amount to glorified chat rooms, and while chatting is a fundamental human activity, it's hard for anyoen to make money on it.

Microsoft, harried by regulators in the 1990s, once lobbied Congress to cut spending on antitrust enforcement. Now, it's profiting from their efforts. The software giant's lobbying budget nearly doubled from 2006 to 2008, helping it sink Yahoo's deal to have Google sell ads for its search pages. The failure of that deal helped speed Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang out the door, and could set Microsoft up to win Yahoo's search business. CNET News]

NASA deemed successful a month-long test of image transfers to and from the Epoxi space probe, currently 20 million miles away somewhere near Mars. Alleged Internet inventor Vint Cerf helped NASA design the enabling technology, known as Delay Tolerant Networking, a decade ago. (I know: What does that guy do now?)For NASA, DTN means not having to send exact signals at an exact time to a spacecraft. A missed connection can be tried again until it succeeds. If you've been around long enough, it sounds conspicuously like USENET back in the acoustic-modem days. NASA touts the technology's usefulness in communicating with deep-space robotic craft. Who are they kidding? The real win is that when human beings inevitably go back into space, they'll be able to keep up on Earthbound puppycams. (Illustration by NASA)

Is Google becoming the king of the Web? Well, duh — that happened about five years ago, before anyone really noticed. But activist groups, now and again, worry about whether Google knows too much about us. Yesterday, Consumer Watchdog's John Simpson quizzes Google CEO Eric Schmidt about whether his company is doing enough to guard our privacy.You have to admire how Schmidt bats the question aside: Google engineers have thought long and hard about this, and concluded that protecting users' privacy would make pages load too slowly. What he doesn't mention is that this is a problem because the slower pages load, the fewer Web searches we make; and the fewer Web searches we make, the fewer ads Google can sell. Google could make the Web safe for our secrets, in other words — its whiz kids know exactly how to do it — but it would just take too long. The king has spoken.

No man is above the law — not even multibillionaire Google CEO Eric Schmidt. At least that's what we hear from a well-placed tipster, who says Schmidt recently confessed to having been pulled over by the cops last month in Los Angeles for talking on his cell phone while driving. (California law recently changed to require the use of a headset.) Oh, but it gets worse for Schmidt.We haven't gotten anyone from Google or Yahoo to confirm this bit, but we're told cops interrupted a call Schmidt was making to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to discuss how to get a proposed advertising deal past government regulators. The deal was blocked. Schmidt, who endorsed Barack Obama late in the election cycle and got tapped to his board of economic advisors, could use his newfound political clout to get the pesky law overturned. The cell-phone rule, or the antitrust one — we're not sure which one is more bothersome to him. (Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

Among the many windmills Jerry Yang tilted at in his brief career as Yahoo's CEO was his devotion to Web search. It veered on an obsession for him. It played into his decision to resist Microsoft's offers to shower him with cash, first for his whole company, then for just its search business. Is it a coincidence, then, that Yahoo's top search engineer has left a day after Yang stepped down? A tipster tells us Sean Suchter resigned yesterday, and speculates that he may be joining Microsoft.If so, Microsoft may have gotten Yahoo's search business on the cheap. Our tipster writes:

Nothing, it seems, can stop Google — except the overweening hubris of its employees. Every time Googlers venture outside the Googleplex to demonstrate their charitable embrace of the digitally unfortunate, they end up just reinforcing their snobby superiority. So it went with the search giant's job-swap program with starchy old-media marketer Procter & Gamble.Tim Armstrong, the Google sales guy who came up with the program, had the best of intentions. Wall Street will keep punishing Google's stock until the company can prove it has another trick besides selling text ads linked to search terms. Television advertising is a huge market — in the U.S. alone, it still generates $70 billion a year. Google wants a piece of that business. At $8.7 billion a year, Procter & Gamble's TV budget is the largest in the country; who better to learn from? The only problem: A detailed look by the Wall Street Journal at the program, which had two dozen Googlers and "Proctoids" — P&G employees — spending weeks at each other's employer showed the Proctoids learning and the Googlers laughing. For example: P&G marketers snagged actress Salma Hayek for a Pampers promotion, but, to the disbelief of a Googler, didn't invite any mommybloggers. A useful insight: Pampers brand managers corrected the omission. Proctoids also learned how to track the popularity of online search terms. What did Googlers learn at P&G? When a Proctoid presented a 1950s-era television ad, and told them it reached 70 to 80 percent of the audience, they scoffed. That kind of historical data did not fit their algorithm. A fruit of the companies' joint work was a campaign for YouTube users to create spoofs of P&G's "Talking Stain" commercials. That's vastly cheaper than running a television advertising campaign; Google, which has hardly figured out how to sell ads on YouTube, foots P&G's bandwidth bill for the videos, and gets little visible in return. Google's Armstrong may have hoped his salespeople would learn how to pitch Procter & Gamble for a piece of its multibillion-dollar ad budget. They were too busy giggling while their counterparts at the staid soap-and-diapers company were learning how to market their products cheaply online. P&G got the beter end of this bargain: It may well save money, but it's not clear Google will get much of it. At that rate, P&G will have the last laugh.

Pictures from Life's centuries-old archives will now be available as part of Google Image Search. The images will be hosted on Google servers, however they carry no clear usage instructions. At least it's now easier for bloggers to spice up their posts with something that has a bit more gravitas than 4chan images. (Image via Time Inc.)

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like to talk about their hopes of "changing the world." Yes, of course: Changing the world from one in which they are poor to one in which they are fabulously wealthy. The question in the air is whether the founders of companies do a better job at creating wealth, for themselves and their investors, than professional managers. With Yahoo announcing Jerry Yang's plans to step down as CEO, it would seem like a losing time for founders. But Yang is an exceptional case; he took his hands off the steering wheel when Yahoo had a mere five employees, and never really ran anything until he stepped in as CEO last June. Most founders of successful startups eagerly seize power, and have to be forcibly dislodged from the driver's seat. The best never let go. Just take a long-term look at the stock market, and you'll see why.

Mark Zuckerberg's social network has lost much of its swagger over the past year. He once thought nothing of poaching Google's best and brightest; then Google started poaching back. After Facebook's flacks learned that Google had scheduled its holiday press party on December 8, the same day as Facebook's planned media fest, they rescheduled for December 10, rather than fight for reporters' affections. Embarrassing — especially considering that Facebook's top PR guy, Elliot Schrage, came from Google himself.

It's becoming a holiday tradition: Google announces a holiday party for Silicon Valley reporters at its Mountain View headquarters, and Valleywag's invite gets mysteriously lost in Gmail's ever-canny spam filters. The invitation for the December 8 event, held again at the Googleplex's Cafe Slice, is nontransferable, so we can't accept any pass-along invites, alas.But here's a clever idea: The RSVP form allows you to suggest a colleague in your place. It would be a pity if jealous colleagues at, say, the New York Times filled out the form for John Markoff and suggested they attend in his place. I just declined on behalf of AllThingsD's Kara Swisher — though she could always crash as the guest of her wife, Google executive Megan Smith. Here's the full invite:

It's been more than three years since the debut of Writely, the free, browser-based alternative to Microsoft Word quickly snapped up by Google. Nearly two years since the formal release of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, now known as just Google Docs. Let's admit it: Google Docs is no YouTube, Gmail or Google Maps. A survey of 2,400 American Internet users by Clickstream found that half of them use Microsoft Word, but only one in a hundred uses the free, instant-access Google Docs. Obama's going to change all this, right?

How long ago did we learn Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, was pregnant with the couple's first child? April, which was seven months ago. What a clever idea, to have a baby as a publicity stunt for her startup! It got her on Oprah. On the talk show, Wojcicki disclosed that she's nine months pregnant. "Please have the baby right now!" said the talk-show host. Wojcicki then jumped right into an infomercial for 23andMe's genetic-testing service and her nonprofit work on Parkinson's, a condition for which Brin is at risk. Free advertising for someone whose husband is worth billions of dollars: There is a reason the rich are rich.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, left, sits at a campaign event for Barack Obama in October. YouTube's growing role in politics makes Schmidt an unelected Washington player. Can you think of a better caption? Leave it in the comments. the best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: jasonnellis, for "That's not a sweater, honey." (Photo by cjwoolridge)

Is YouTube making Google a political player? The video-sharing site, with its stratospheric bandwidth bills and questionable new ad formats, may never pay Larry and Sergey back in cash for the $1.65 billion they shelled out to buy it in 2006. But it doesn't have to. YouTube, having conquered online video, is taking over political broadcasting. The conventional unwisdom in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., is that this election made YouTube. Pah! It's true that campaign videos spread faster than ever thanks to YouTube. But they made up a tiny fraction of clips and traffic on the site. Politicians owe YouTube a debt that Google is just starting to collect on — and hosting President Obama's 21st century fireside chats is just a down payment.Google has plenty of business in Washington these days, from the Federal Communications Commission to the Department of Justice. Convenient, then, that CEO Eric Schmidt endorsed Obama weeks before the election, joining his board of economic advisors and appearing in Obama's primetime infomercial. Schmidt doesn't need a government job — he's clearly volunteering to be America's CTO in his spare time. Schmidt is savvy enough to realize that YouTube's growing prominence as a media outlet could help the company become a larger political player — which is why the site sponsored two campaign debates. Traffic? Come on. YouTube hardly needs the help. Schmidt — who attended one debate with a mistress on his arm, like an old-school power broker — orchestrated the events to maximize Google's political influence. The outgoing administration has not been friendly to Google, whose management team tilts strongly to the left. The Department of Justice's threat to sue Google if it proceeded with a deal to sell search ads for Yahoo may have been, at least in part, politically motivated. Google mostly wants a free hand from Washington to cement its lead in online advertising — but it also wants help bullying telephone and cable companies into letting its services and ads flow unimpeded on high-speed broadband lines and cell phones, a cause it has dubbed "network neutrality." Network neutrality is an abstract issue. But YouTube, helpfully, makes it very concrete to politicians, who have long understood the power of the moving image to influence the public. It's easy to picture Google lobbyists pulling up a politician's YouTube videos, and asking them, "Now how would you feel if Verizon slowed down your videos? Wouldn't it be wrong if AT&T didn't let customers view them on their cell phones?" Even in its copyright enforcement, Google can club politicians. The McCain campaign complained about YouTube's takedown policy, which has a mandatory waiting period before videos whose rights are disputed can be reposted to the site. Will Democratic politicians — or any politician who votes the right way on network neutrality — find that a YouTube account manager is glad to make that kind of problem quietly go away? It's a symbiotic relationship, to be sure. Google helps politicians reach young voters on YouTube and hosts their videos for free. YouTube benefits from the free content and the traffic political videos generate; even if it doesn't sell ads directly on the pages, it's estimated that it could make $1 billion a year on search ads — and in that business, merely cementing YouTube's traffic lead helps Google make money. In that light, isn't there something that stinks about handing the president's weekly addresses to a single commercial outlet controlled by a political ally of the president? Obama's YouTube chats amount to a large, unspoken, behind-the-scenes government kickback. Every election has something dirty about it. And there's no question Google won this contest.

As a stunt, Google has wrapped subway trains in New York City with ads for Google Maps. Inside, ads give specific directions to tourist landmarks like Madison Square Garden. Unfortunately, they misplace Grand Central Terminal by several blocks, directing people to subway lines which do not run through the station. A mistake we can see someone sitting in a cube in Mountain View making — but doesn't Google have a large New York office full of employees who might have been called on to vet the ads in their 20 percent time?

This week's Democratic Party weekly address by our audaciously hopeful President-elect will not be on boring old NPR. Barack Obama's going to upload to YouTube, reports the Washington Post. The WaPo says the Obama administration will also make "online Q&As and video interviews" part of its communications strategy. Think this is payback for Google CEO Eric Schmidt's late-to-the-game Obama endorsement?If so, it's scant reward for America's CTO. If transition co-chair Valerie Jarrett's two-minute talk yesterday is any indicator, most of these clips will be no more exciting than a White House press release. Obama himself, though, has one of the most awesome telepresences I've ever seen. Mr. President, get yourself a bulldog and a skateboard and you'll blow Avril Lavigne and Justin Laipply right off the Most Viewed (All Time) page.

Google's oh-so-clever ad system has an Achilles heel: As consumers cut back on spending, they also cut back on Google searches for stuff they want to buy. Furthermore, many shoppers now click on more links in search of a bargain. An official statement from IAC, which uses Google to serve ads on Ask.com, says search trends "have not been good over the last 30 to 60 days ... particularly on commercial-oriented queries." On the upside, the WSJ's reporting didn't find an analyst willing to forecast anything gloomier than 11% growth for Google in 2009. On the downside, 11% growth at Google means no more buying jets to park at Nasa next door.