TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, left distraught after a stranger spat on him at a tech conference in Munich, promised he'd take February off. Two days in, he's having a hard time leaving the Internet.

Someone buy something, please. Our New York sighting of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer with Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock missed one: Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, who'd like to unload AOL.

So much for a new boss ending Yahoo's drama. Why did the company's chairman meet Microsoft's Steve Ballmer at the Time Warner Center Thursday, two days after Yahoo named Carol Bartz its new CEO?

Google has axed six services, from Google Video uploads to a shopping-catalog search. But none has sparked more outrage than the closure of Dodgeball.com. Dennis Crowley, the friend-locating service's twentysomething founder, is miffed.

No one wants to buy Yahoo. And the only person who wants to run Yahoo is an insider who helped sink it. Is there any hope left for the beleaguered Web giant?

Perhaps Digg really is the future of the news business. The headline-discussion site, once an icon of the Web 2.0 movement, is losing millions of dollars a year.

The show features rich people lying to poor people and then giving them money, and it's now up on Hulu. All you need to see are the first 11 minutes. Watch Chahal give a tour of his $6.9 million nouveau gauche monstrosity of a penthouse, and fumble around trying to buy groceries. "Buying groceries, it's not that easy," he says. For Yahoo shareholders, watching him give away tiny portions of his fortune will be far too painful. As deserving as the recipients are, they'll wish Chahal was handing their money back to them.

Another day, another hare-brained scheme to buy Yahoo. This time, the player isn't Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, but former AOL CEO Jon Miller, who now runs a venture-capital fund. But the prospect of a deal seems as far off and fanciful as Microsoft, which spent most of the spring and summer trying to buy Yahoo, coming back to the negotiating table. Miller wants to buy Yahoo, but is having trouble coming up with the money, the Wall Street Journal reports. Is there no one serious who wants to buy this company?

People who use Twitter, a service which posts short updates to the Web and cell phones, love nothing more than to Twitter about themselves, and the medium they've so enthusiastically adopted. If you go by the Twitterers' collective reporting, every event, from an earthquake in Los Angeles to terrorist bombings in Mumbai, is more notable for the fact that people are writing about it on Twitter than for its inherent interest as news. The dominant narrative of Twitter is the rise of Twitter, the latest force to displace the mainstream media and roil the world's information economy. Too bad the real story of the company is one of top-to-bottom incompetence.

Earlier this year, Leah Culver appeared on the cover of a tech magazine blowing an enormous pink bubble. But the shrill-voiced San Francisco programmer no longer desires fame — even the modest sort afforded Silicon Valley's microcelebrities. The turnabout seems odd, considering how aggressively she once courted notoriety.

Microsoft's chair-hurling 800-pound gorilla slammed the door on talk of a renewed Yahoo acquisition deal at today's shareholder meeting in Bellevue, Washington. "We are done with all acquisition deals with Yahoo ... We did our best. We've moved on." In business, this often means: We'll be back. For now, though, Ballmer said he'd rather cut a deal to serve Live Search results to Yahoo users — as a vendor, not an owner. Why can he speak with such confidence? Because he's already snapped up Yahoo's key search engineers.

It only takes hearing so many jokes about Al Gore inventing Twitter to figure out that the former vice president has signed up for the microblogging service. Wisely, he's not really participating in the site, just using it to market his websites and announce his interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose, which airs tonight on Current, the Gore-backed cable channel. Current and Digg have been teaming up for a series of election-related events, including a party on election night. But Rose and Gore's acquaintance goes back almost two years.In late 2006, Gore's Current made an offer for Digg which valued the social-news startup at $100 milion or more. Wonder if Rose and Gore discussed business at all in this interview. As VentureBeat recently pointed out, Digg's traffic is flat, and it hasn't significantly increased its valuation since Rose and Gore's 2006 chat.

If wireless Internet access is such a hot technology, why is it such a dud business? I asked that question in Wired five years ago, and I still don't know the answer. Since then, eager-to-please Wi-Fi startups have gone the way of boutique ISP service. AT&T, once broken up by law for being an evil monopoly, has reassembled itself into the dominant telecom brand again — bad service and all. This morning, a press release out of Texas announced that AT&T will acquire privately held Wayport, which operates 10,000 hotspots at locations from McDonald's to the Four Seasons. For $275,000,000 in cash, AT&T will now double its number of Wi-Fi hotspots. I side with the Wall Street Journal's snap analysis: Maybe this will make up in part for all those customers canceling their AT&T home phones.

Time Warner has reported its third-quarter results, including AOL's numbers, and they are dismal. Internet-access revenues were down 26 percent, a loss everyone more or less expected, since the dial-up business is moribund. But advertising sales were down 6 percent. AOL management can't blame the market meltdown for this one, since that had barely started by the time the quarter ended. October through December, one assumes, will be much, much worse.What's odd is that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes isn't getting more criticism for AOL's numbers. As the head of HBO, he was one of a handful of Time Warner executives who loudly opposed the AOL deal. But enacting Time Warner's revenge on AOL by driving the business into the ground seems a strange way of making things right with shareholders. Bewkes's hand-picked boss for AOL, former NBC executive Randy Falco, has been a complete disaster — a short-timer waiting for the company to be sold. Bewkes and Yahoo's Jerry Yang have been holding desultory talks on selling AOL to Yahoo. But Bewkes's negotiating position is considerably weakened by these results. Why didn't he sell sooner — and when will he pay the price for mismanaging AOL?

Scott Moore, the head of Yahoo Media Group, is leaving the company, reports BoomTown's Kara Swisher. A bad sign for the company: Moore ran some of Yahoo's most successful operations, including its news, finance, and sports websites. Why is Moore leaving now, having survived most of Yahoo's annus horribilis with his charm unruffled? The first conclusion I'll jump to: Talks with Time Warner to sell AOL to Yahoo are advancing, and Moore does not like his position in the merged entity. Update: Swisher writes: "Dead wrong guess as usual. Talks are slower than ever. He had the top job over Bill Wilson." Well, why didn't you say so in the first place, Kara?

“This is not just unloading AOL for us,” a source close to Time Warner told Kara Swisher. “It is also an important strategic move for our future to get this right.” I love the way anonymous sources lie so convincingly. The truth, Swisher blogs, is both simpler and more boring: Yahoo and AOL don't really like each other. Neither company holds much attraction for the other. Important strategic move means an arranged marriage, forced on both sides by dwindling market value. Which reminds me: We should plot the number of Google engineers whose pending marriages have been "temporarily rescheduled for 2009."

Web hosting? So 1990s. Rackspace is now into "cloud computing." The company has acquired Slicehost, a small but popular virtual private server host, and JungleDisk, an online-storage startup. The deals comes as Rackspace is pushing its Mosso service as an alternative to Amazon.com's computing-power rental offerings. The question is now this, will Rackspace bring their world-class downtime to both services?

We already took our shot at what was behind Samsung's so-crazy-it-makes-sense attempt to acquire SanDisk. Samsung, we said, has supplied the memory chips for Apple's iPhone since its launch last year. That's why Samsung needs to bulk up to contend with the might of Apple, one of the largest buyers of flash memory. Now that Samsung has dropped its $5.8 billion bid, does that mean we were wrong? Well, yes. Big corporations act like teenagers. These crazy kids will eventually make up, or find other partners. Here's the official breakup note from Samsung CEO Yoon Woo Lee:

The good news: Jack Dorsey, the handsome programmer ousted as Twitter's CEO yesterday, can put his nose ring back in and stop seeing that CEO coach he hired. The bad news: His cofounder, Ev Williams, who's replacing him as CEO, is sugarcoating Dorsey's exit. Dorsey is not going to be working in Twitter's office, and his coworkers are saying their tearful goodbyes; he's effectively out of the company, though he retains the title of chairman and what is presumably a large stake in the messaging startup. So why did Dorsey get fired?"This has nothing to do with the economy," Fred Wilson, a partner at Twitter investor Union Square Ventures, told The Deal. True enough — but it does have to do with Dorsey's incompetence. One industry insider says he botched several acquisition offers — one by nattering on about his original idea for Twitter as a messaging service for ambulance drivers and bicycle couriers, an idea he still wanted to pursue after a Twitter acquisition.

Kara Swisher calls Steve Ballmer's tendency to run at the mouth "executive Tourette syndrome." Funny because it's true! Microsoft's CEO sent Yahoo's stock soaring yesterday with comments that were widely reported as suggesting renewed interest in buying the company. We'll skip Swisher's blah-blah-blah analysis and let you judge for yourself exactly what Ballmer said: