Facebook offered to buy TipJoy, then changed its mind. Now the micropayment start-up has closed, and a co-founder is working for…Facebook.

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Now that MySpace has finished its acquisition of iLike, what is it going to do with it? Don’t think music, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta stressed in a press conference today, think about “socialization of content.”

What does that mean? It means the social network has spent $19.5 million on engineering talent to help overhaul its site.

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Are you up in arms about the impending demise of tr.im, one of the many services that shorten long Web addresses? Here’s a possible solution, offered by bit.ly, the industry’s bigfoot: A nonprofit archive/graveyard for tr.im’s tiny addresses, along with anyone else who wants to participate.

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Give this to Steve Ballmer: After getting roundly hammered in the past few years for either missing out on deals (see: AOL/Google) or paying too much for the ones he did land (see: Facebook at $15 billion), he seems to be on a roll.

Last week, Microsoft was roundly praised for the way it structured its Yahoo deal. And today, the company seems to have struck a smart pact with Publicis, which will pay $530 million for Redmond’s Razorfish digital ad agency, which Ballmer never wanted anyway. Just as important: The French ad giant will agree to buy a certain amount of search and display inventory from Microsoft over the next five years.

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Want to get people to stick around and actually watch your dog-on-skateboard video? Try luring them with Twitter.

So says video-tracking service TubeMogul, which reports that Twitter users who click on a referral link to a Web video are likely to stay longer than people who get to the video from Facebook or Digg.

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We’re used to seeing Google vets leave for Facebook. Now they’re headed to Twitter.

The buzzy microblogging service has just grabbed its highest-profile Google exec to date: Alexander Macgillivray, a deputy general counsel at the search firm, is coming aboard as Twitter’s top lawyer.

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Want to work for the Minneapolis Star Tribune? Make sure you can demonstrate mastery of Facebook and Twitter. The daily is looking for a political reporter and insists that the new hire shows up with Web 2.0 bona fides.

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Depending on your perspective, this is either interesting news or heartening news: Michael Jackson’s funeral and memorial were indeed a giant Internet event. But they don’t seem to have been as big as Michael Jackson’s death, and they weren’t as big as Barack Obama’s inauguration. So, let’s call them the third-biggest Web event of the year. To date.

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Michael Jackson’s funeral service starts at 1 pm Eastern today and you will have to try very hard not to see it: In addition to wall-to-wall coverage on the news channels, any Web site capable of live-streaming the event will be doing so. Is the Internet ready for the coming traffic jam? I’m betting it is.

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Are you one of those Facebook users who worries that your boss will see photos of what you did last weekend? Then you’ll like Facebook’s new privacy policy. But if you’re part of the large group of people who think that nothing is really private on the Web and that everyone should see everything you do online, then you’re really going to like Facebook’s new privacy policy.

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Does the world need another gadget site? Yes, say two of the gadget world’s biggest stars, who are launching gdgt.com today. The site is the work of Peter Rojas, who helped build Gizmodo and Engadget, and Ryan Block, who took the torch from Rojas after he moved on. Gizmodo and Engadget are the best known and most powerful of the new generation of gadget sites, which makes Rojas and Block revered by the gadget gang and able to cobble together funding. But they’re still taking on a very crowded field.

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Another big news event means another chance for Twitter to shine. And another example of the service’s shortcomings: Trust it if you want, but I’d like to verify.

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Worried about bumping into your boss on a social media service, then having to explain some indiscreet comment you made in cyberspace? If you work for the world’s biggest companies, you can relax: Your CEO isn’t spending time on the social Web. A survey of the Fortune 100 CEOs finds that almost none of them are using Twitter, Facebook, or even LinkedIn

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The man who wants to regulate Web advertising, or more precisely, Web advertising that knows who you are and what you do, puts Google, Yahoo and Facebook on the Congressional hotseat.

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The promise of “virtual goods”–pretend things you buy with real money in cyberspace–has lured entrepreneurs and venture capitalists for years. Same goes for mobile payments–using your iPhone instead of your Amex to buy stuff. But what if you combined the two? You’d have a market that barely exists yet is worth fighting over. At least that’s what Zong and Boku are doing.

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