All this crying over how much this Yahoo acquisition will ruin Tumblr is a predictable part of the cycle of tech company acquisitions these days — no matter how smart or dumb the buy — and says nothing about how the impending marriage will do.
Yahoo! and Tumblr just officially announced their engagement to the world and they're already playing damage control. They're doing their best to calm your fears of Yahoo! digging its long, purple claws into Tumblr and ruining it forever.
Now that Tumblr is a Yahoo! property, just like the beleaguered Flickr, some are predicting the service's death already and the deal hasn't even been officially announced yet. Those people are dramatic teens who use Tumblr but that's still a pretty big deal.
That rumored $1 billion offer from Yahoo! to buy Tumblr? It's looking like a forgone conclusion at this point. But things are messy and speculative and there are already doomsayers predicting this is a bad idea for everyone involved. But mostly they're predicting it's bad for Yahoo!
Grist on the information vacuum around fracking, The Atlantic Cities on Google's personalized maps, ABC News on the impact of climate change on human allergies, The Guardian on the threat of flooding in London, CNN on the specter of oil manipulation.
There's another $1 billion acquisition rumor floating around. Yahoo, reportedly, is interested in coming to some sort of deal to acquire Tumblr.
The U.S. military has now had three men in charge of programs to limit harassment or violence against women accused of similar crimes revolving around harassment and violence against women in the same month. It's only May 16th.
National Geographic on how cell phone can help fight pirate fishing, London Review of Books on the recent literature of climate change, The Huffington Post on the reality of our environmental harm, The New York Times on how insurers are dealing with increasingly catastrophic weather, and Forbes on the future of energy storage.
Reports on Thursday of a Saudi Arabian sheikh dooming Twitter users to eternal damnation may seem like inexplicable hyperbole to Americans. But it's likely an escalation of attempts by Saudi authorities to crackdown on a key tool for dissent.
Among the many adventures that Google has announced at its annual developer conference this week is a multi-pronged plan to integrate Google Wallet into every aspect of your shopping life.
There's something wrong with Kepler, the sun-orbiting spacecraft at the center of NASA's mission to identify Earth-like, habitable planets orbiting other stars. And if the space agency's engineers can't fix it, one of the coolest NASA missions, ever, could end before its time.
Google unveiled its new streaming music service at their annual I/O developers conference on Wednesday. It has a very long name and some pretty cool new features. Whether it will actually do anything to upend your listening habits and the market for streaming music services, well, that's up for some immediate debate.
Researchers in Oregon claim to have solved the tricky problem of cloning human stem cells, but you're more likely to see a duplicate of a years-old ethics debate — destroyed embryos or lives saved, Bush bans or Obama battles — than you are a duplicate human.
The Atlantic on the future of human oil consumption, Associated Press on the new supply (and demand) of global oil, National Journal on the Republican boycott of the Obama's EPA nominee, Smart Planet on the United Kingdom's fracking envy, National Geographic on the recent destruction of Mayan ruins.
Google, possibly eying subscription music streamer Spotify's 6 million paying users, may be introducing a music streaming service of its own.
Rap videos from weird startup guys are nothing new, but the genre may have reached its ultimate nadir. Dave McClure's 500 Startups released this homage to Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" on Tuesday — and it's so tone deaf that you'll be begging for the bubble to burst.
Slate on why we need to remove, not just cut, CO2 emissions, Quartz on Tesla cars as status symbols, Time on recent troubles of the green movement, National Geographic on an anti-fracking activist in South Africa, and The Independent on the failure of the Clean Development Mechanism.
A mechanical technique being tested in Australia is being credited with saving the lives of three people who were clinically dead for more than 40 minutes. Here's how it works.
Considering there's a large swath of people who hate iMessage for its frequent downtime and unreliability, you would think BlackBerry would be smart enough to launch its long-popular BlackBerry Messenger app for the iPhone. Oh, they're doing that now? And for Android, too? Good. Finally. Now here's how they're going to make money off you.
According to new data, everything that you do on every website besides Netflix and YouTube combined generates about the same amount of peak web traffic as those two sites alone. Netflix itself is bigger in every metric than HBO.
Figuring out which titles are going expire soon on Netflix just got a lot harder: The company changed its public API Monday night to prevent this information from popping up on third-party websites.
Geekosystem on North Carolina's attempt to ban Tesla cars, National Journal on how Washington should make climate policy, The Guardian on how the energy politics drive conflict in Syria, The New York Times on the Earth's temperature, The Atlantic on Kazakhstan's nuclear legacy.
If you have suicidal Facebook tendencies — as in, you want off the social network but just can't bare to part with your photos, wall posts, and all those precious, precious likes — then you should probably try playing the new game Social Roulette. If you feel lucky.
Five weeks after Facebook debuted the HTC First — and four days after AT&T priced the device at less than a dollar — the joint venture appears to be unraveling.
In case you've ever doubted that astronauts are the best, Commander Chris Hadfield is here to set you straight with what is apparently the first music video recorded in space. His song choice? "Space Oddity," by David Bowie. Of course.
Are you an Android user who's been hoping for a service similar to the iOs GameCenter or XBox Live on your phone? Fear not, your wishes may be granted sooner than you think.
The organization's goal is to evaporate the container described by the Second Amendment, making obtaining a firearm trivial enough that even trying to place restrictions on gun manufacturing becomes useless.
CNN on the myth of energy independence, The New York Times on the new carbon milestone, The Washington Post on how the World Bank can mitigate climate change, Treehugger on how young people flock to public transportation, and Scientific American on the produce industry's safety strategy.
Three and a half months after Twitter's stop-motion inauspicious foray into pseudo-video began, Vine has officially made it in the Internet world, thanks to a pitch-perfect (if kinda creepy) meme built on a meme god of Internet yore (as in, like, last year).
For the cord-cutters and cable-company haters out there eagerly awaiting the next era of television, in which you no longer have to pay your provider for a bundled package of junk you never watch, YouTube officially launched 14 of its rumored pay-to-subscribe channels on Friday. It's not top-shelf, but it's a start. Just ask Washington.
The Wall Street Journal says that Amazon is expanding its hardware offerings with a whole new line of gadgets, including a lame-sounding "audio streaming device" and a pair of next gen smartphones.
If there's any phrase an astronaut never wants to mutter, it's "Houston, we have a problem." Calling from the International Space Station on Thursday evening, Commander Chris Hadfield did just that.
The iPhone game of the moment is so addictive that it's impossible to even talk about how addictive it is to play the color-coded connect-the-dots game without stopping to play another round — or 25.
The first two months of Google Glass testimonials resulted in lame sports videos and bad photos taken with the wearable machine, but a new first-person video that surfaced last night finally gives the face computer-less masses a look at what you actually see from behind the glass.
Facebook's in "advanced talks" to buy Waze, an Israeli mapping start-up, for somewhere between $800 million and $1 billion, according to multiple sources at Calcalist and TechCrunch, making it the social media company's biggest acquisition to date.
Google Glass has itself a marketing problem: the glasses might be as cool as some Glassheads say, but the rest of us non-early adopters are stuck with boring first-person videos and banal pictures of the world's foremost face computer, without any of the cool face-computer functionality.
The Onion has released a detailed account of how it believes the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into its extremely popular Twitter account the other day, providing a rare glimpse at the simple yet devious spear-phishing emails that can crack major media outlets — and probably you.
If you thought the Mars One mission (a.k.a. the one-way ticket to the Red Planet in the name of reality TV) sounded oddly appealing, you were hardly alone. Newly released numbers show that the contest has already garnered almost 80,000 applications.
It's never a good sign when a cellphone company lowers the price of a cellphone so soon after its release, which makes the new, very low $0.99 price of HTC's so-called Facebook phone so very foreboding.
It's still relatively unclear whether the Assad regime broke the Syrian Internet — even if nobody else, even "terrorists," really could — but after a 19-and-a-half-hour near complete shutdown across Syria, service started coming back today, according to multiple analytics firms.
Google may or may not introduce a new design for Google Maps at a conference next week, when the company will publicly discuss about "the future of Google Maps." But people are definitely complaining about the rumored design getting passed around the web today. Here's how.
Did the Assad regime just shut down Syrian online access again? For several hours on Thursday — beginning around 3 p.m. Eastern time, or 10 p.m. in Damascus — Internet traffic in the warring country ground to an almost complete halt, just like it did in November when the government blacked out web usage to stymy opposition maneuvers.
The masters of the heartwarming, love-your-children promotional video at Google are tugging at the heartstrings of the American family once again with a new Mother's Day spot called "Here's to the Moms" — and they mean all moms.
So far Google Glass is illegal exactly nowhere, despite an over-the-top front-page story in today's New York Times that suggests Google is already facing a bunch of legal pushback over its face computer of the future. What will Google do about all this?
Brian Lam, founder of gadget review site The Wirecutter, on his pared down media diet. "I try not to open Twitter too often. Some editors, I don't know how they're getting any work done."
The situation has turned from bad to worse to absurd in Peru, where the Ecuadorian ambassador is being forbidden from reentering the country due to an altercation at a supermarket in Lima two weeks ago.
Mother Jones on lead-filled lipstick, USA Today on how the military could go green, The Atlantic Cities on the future of public roads, MIT Technology Review on how much oil we have, and National Geographic on Pakistan's energy crisis.
The popular tech writer was already straddling the blogger/investor line as both a TechCrunch writer and a partner at CrunchFund, the VC fund started by fellow blogger-without-morals Michael Arrington. The more surprising part of today's news, then, is that Siegler would deign to work for Google Ventures after writing so unabashedly in favor of Apple all these years.
Of all the various etiquette guides to emerge with prescriptions for the inaugural class of Glassholes, there has been one recurring piece of advice that probably won't please Google: The most polite thing a Google Glass owner can do is not wear Google Glass at all.
In this definitive telling of the history of Instagram we get CEO Kevin Systrom's reasoning for ultimately choosing Facebook's $1 billion offer over Twitter's $520 million—and it has less to do with money than you might think.
Google Glass, that doomed-at-early-adoption device about which we learned so much this week, will not become a tough seell to the masses because of a bunch of white male dorks trying out the face computer of the future. It's the design itself — in form, and the function inspired by something that, well, makes everyone who puts on a pair look so frickin' weird.
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