Click to viewDigg users should be glad merger talks with Google have cooled, writes Slate's Farhad Manjoo. Had Digg fallen into Marissa Mayer's frosting-laced clutches, the site would have probably become another startup lost in what Manjoo calls "the Google Black Hole." It happened to FeedBurner this week. And the RSS ad network, was just the latest, following Jaiku, JotSpot, Dodgeball, GrandCentral, and Measure Map. Their tales of doom in the Googleplex, below.

For the fiancées of ambitious founders, there's a new metric of wealth for their future spouses to live up to: "I don't want you to sell unless you can make Miyake money." That's the amount Google apparently laid out for Jaiku, the Euro rival of Twitter. The exact purchase price hasn't been disclosed yet. But Jyri Engeström just announced that he and his bride-to-be Ulla-Maaria Mutanen are in Tokyo, getting her wedding dress personally fitted by famed designer Issey Miyake. (Girls, note this: She proposed to him.)