“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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I cracked. I read Uncov’s post on Pownce. I still don’t know what it does. More important is the chart Ted Dziuba posted with it.

Pownce, despite being a shitty service, gives us some insight into the Web 2.0 world. I have described this before, but it is best done with imagery:

• Useless service X is released after 2 months of MySQL/CSS development.
• Arrington covers it, thousands of users signup. Mike takes his ad revenue.
• People either stop giving a shit or realize your service does not solve any problems for them.
• Fail.

Uncov is a hot little site that posts cruelly funny reviews of the same Web 2.0 companies and products that appear on TechCrunch. People who read it think everyone else does, too. They’re wrong. So: A newbie’s intro to Uncov.

Ted is the site’s star writer. A computer scientist by training, he’s naturally repulsed by the flimsy, poorly executed software passed off as world-changing innovation. He’s like Slashdot commenters, if Slashdot commenters were funny.

FAIL is Uncov’s catchphrase. Rather than meticulously grade the fine points of yet another “browser-based operating system,” Ted just stamps FAIL on a photo or screenshot.

Actual software design and development experience is what separates Uncov from generic trash-talking sites and the half-baked “technical” minds blogging away about the emergent we-future when Web 2.0 services will transform everyone into conference speakers.

Best Uncov reviews:

Zoho DB: Software as a Disservice

Believe me when I tell you that if Microsoft Access made you sigh from time to time, Zoho DB will make you want to paint the walls with your brains. It successfully imported 10,000 rows of floating point data. It did warn me that I couldn’t import more than 25,000 rows, though. Great. A database that can’t take more than 25,000 rows. Now that’s quality.

LocateTV Won’t Leave Us Alone

I search for Kevin Spacey and find out that K-PAX is on today at 1pm. Fantastic. On my media center PC, I could tell it to record the movie. Turns out, they haven’t coded that feature into Ajax yet, so Web 2.0 can’t do it. Fail.

Stixy: Thanks, I Didn’t Need That Browser Instance

No Web OS. Why? To start, you don’t even have native threads. In fact, Firefox has a single thread that interprets JavaScript and renders the page. Yeah. For all tabs. There’s nothing exceptional about Stixy, but it can free memory like a champ if you try to do anything with it.

After demonstrating how easy it is to hack into others’ MySpace accounts, a hacker discovers the site has suspended his MySpace profile. I think we call that “hacked on your own petard.” [NewScientistTech]

Source:Valleywag
TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has left the board of troubled start-up Foldera. Uncov states the situation eloquently: “This company has been fucked for awhile and the condom just broke.” [uncov]

What took Forbes so long to strike a deal to sponsor The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, now that Forbes editor Dan Lyons has been revealed as the faux Apple CEO? Fake Steve has been complaining about money woes for most of the year. It turns out that he asked close chum David Churbuck for help securing a sponsorship back in February, and lo and behold, Wired signed up as a sponsor that same month. And a couple of months later, without much ado, Fake Steve dropped Wired. At the time, Lyons, as Fake Steve, told me this:

“I dropped them. I’m weighing a few different new deals and wanted to be free of any ties while I negotiate with new partners. I do miss the money though, I must admit.”

That was mostly a fib, except for that last part. Here’s what I think is the truth.

Granted, this is informed speculation, not anything I know firsthand. It’s now blindingly obvious to me what must have happened. Lyons was forced to drop the Wired deal when he outed himself to his bosses at Forbes back in the spring. But Forbes, like many magazines, has a divide between its print and online sides, which operate as feuding fiefdoms. While Lyons’s print bosses, who pay his salary, could make him abandon the Wired sponsorship, they couldn’t get Forbes.com to pony up extra cash for Lyons to do the blog on the company dime. Until now, that is, when Lyons’s outing by the Times left them little choice.

Source:Valleywag
Anticipating an untimely demise for the virtual world, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will partner with the Library of Congress to preserve Second Life as a museum artifact so children of the future can enjoy mocking the clunky online world on class trips. [Library of Congress]

Source:Valleywag
Busted! Kyle Shank of Uncov, Valleywag’s favorite startup-snark site, acted so coy when I asked him what he and coconspirators Ted Dziuba and Matt Kent were working on. But it turns out they’ve been hiding in plain sight all this time, as commenter bushido pointed out.. Shank’s day job is CEO and founder of Persai, a recommendations system for the Internet, whatever that means. It sounds like exactly the kind of vague yet overweening ambition Uncov would mock, actually.