“Google’s Search Party,” Ken Auletta’s 6,264-word opus on the search engine’s grudging embrace of D.C. lobbying, has proved tough to condense. Until I reread it again this weekend, and realized it can be boiled down to the final observation made by CEO Eric Schmidt:

What kills a company is not competition but arrogance. We control our fate.

Control fate, or tempt it? Google, improbably, is managing to do both.

Source:Valleywag

No, I don’t understand Paul Boutin’s fixation with Bono, either. But he brought a fistful of sunglasses to Moose’s on Friday, and before we knew it, everyone was putting them on. The bar’s lighting is already moody, and let me tell you, when you put on a pair of Bulgari, it gets murkier than an open-standards discussion list. Things got even geekier when the boys from Uncov rolled in. And then, out of nowhere — well, out of Las Vegas, really — Julia Allison and Meghan Asha showed up to glam up the evening. Did we say “happy hour“? Our apologies. We practically closed the place. Next Friday: Natali Del Conte’s going-away party.

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Forget Facebook fatigue: The new symptom sweeping the Valley is Facebook addiction. A brief outage this morning made most Valley workers more productive — but left some, like strung-out addicts, completely unable to function. One particularly sad case expressed his relief that Facebook was back up. “I’ve already forgotten the cold panic, the unbearable neediness,” he wrote. Also left unable to function: Facebook’s PR apparatus, which promised a statement about the outage that has yet to materialize. Perhaps spokeswoman Brandee Barker was hoping to send it out through the Facebook group she normally favors, instead of boring old email, for press releases?

Source:Valleywag

Attention, Valley residents: Julia Allison, the Star editor-at-large, TV commentator, and notorious nobody from New York, is still in the area. Valleywag has learned — from Allison herself! — that she cancelled plans to fly back yesterday at the behest of imperious TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who ordered her to “fucking stay.” As startup entrepreneurs already know and Allison is learning, one disobeys Arrington at one’s peril. So strap down your menfolk and lock away your sysadmins, people: Allison and companion Meghan Asha are still on the prowl. They’re from the Big Apple, they’re way underdressed for the weather, and they’re not going to leave until they land a beau who can whip up a jazzy CSS file and upgrade them to Movable Type 4.0.