They always made for an unlikely couple. Besides a Manhattan address, a burning desire for tech-world fame, ties to Digg founder Kevin Rose, and towering self-regard, Iminlikewithyou founder Charles Forman and former Star TV spokeswoman Julia Allison had practically nothing in common. And now they have broken up, with publicly delivered disses. Allison's mechanism: Twitter, where she wished for "a boyfriend who isn't a whiny bitch." Forman's forum: YouTube, where a tirade against "celebrichauns with founder fetishes" was uploaded. The anti-Allison rant:

Internet sex educator Violet Blue has asked a court to serve a restraining order against Ben Burch, a Wikipedia editor. Blue's entry on Wikipedia has been home to almost as much conflict as the fallout from her deletion from the popular blog Boing Boing: her boyfriend, Jonathan Moore, is responsible for at least eighteen of the entry's edits (as "Wikiwikimoore"), prompting Burch and others to question whether he can observe the site's requirement for a neutral point of view regarding all subjects. Blue's response, based on documents forwarded to Valleywag, is to ask a court to declare Burch a threat to her physical safety.

Letting your friends know where you are is supposed to be the point of Loopt. The location-based app for the iPhone (and for some other mobile phones no one ever talks about) would work great, too, if you still have friends after you install the thing. After people who never signed up started getting "creepy" text messages inviting them to join, actual consenting users complained back that the app had sent unsolicited texts to their entire contact lists — and ohmigod, fanboy-favorite videoblonder iJustine was one of them! So what now, blog gang? How do you make Loopt's dirty poly-polo-shirted CEO pay?

Do Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock disagree on whether Yahoo should ever sell its search business to Microsoft? Citing several sources, BoomTown's Kara Swisher says she knows what Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang wants, period:

Why would Google confess to the many problems it has had selling ads? The problems, Google ad-sales exec Tim Armstrong admitted to the Wall Street Journal, extended far beyond YouTube, where Google's bureaucracy compounded advertisers' hesitation to place commercials next to the site's free-for-all video content. Armstrong didn't point fingers, but he didn't have to: Everyone in the Valley knows that Sheryl Sandberg, the high-ranking Google executive who recently defected to Facebook, oversaw Google's automated online-advertising systems.

Why would VMware push out cofounder Diane Greene — heretofore remarkably successful — at the software company's very first sign of trouble? It's not like Microsoft's entry into VMware's market, which helped knock down VMware's high-flying stock, was unexpected. One theory: Joe Tucci, the CEO of EMC, which owns 86 percent of VMware, holds a personal grudge against Greene and took the opportunity push his rival out.

Sex blogger Violet Blue may have tried to ride the Boing Boing coattail express to microfame by airing grievances publicly. But once upon a time she waged the same kind of war on Boing Boing cofounder Xeni Jardin's side against Matthew Neal Sharp, curator of xenisucks.com, and the New York Times. Now, after the bad breakup between the two bloggers became serious business, another gentleman has put a thumb in the third eye of the popular catalog of eclectic ephemera by creating violetbluevioletblue.net — a directory of formerly wonderful things from Boing Boing that featured Blue, deleted by Jardin from the site a year ago.

As a human being with a soul in there somewhere, I've avoided blogging about the Xeni-Violet scandal. But as a wannabe comedy writer, I found myself obsessively poring over the 1,200-plus Metafilter comments on our report. I'd forgotten why I love-hated Metafilter: It's a boyzone of spiteful, pseudonymous insult comics, but many are snappy with the English language. "Instead of calling it what it is, they're going to clown us with semantics." Red meat for you guys at MeFi: The "homophobic" headline on yesterday's post was added by big gay Owen Thomas himself. Discuss.

Nearly ten years before Violet Blue vs. Boing Boing, the Internet's early bloggers discovered their new medium's killer application: Personal spats. Radar Online blogger Choire Sicha, angling for his 14th return to us here at Gawker Media, recounts blogfeuding's past. Choire: tl; dr. Only one era bears recounting: the months after 9/11.

As new media gets big, it remains small at heart - and not in a good way. Boing Boing, the popular tech-culture blog, has offered a tardy defense of its mass deletion of posts mentioning a sex blogger from its archive, and it amounts to this: Because Boing Boing started as a personal blog, it's entitled to be as petty, as hypocritical, and as inconsistent as a 14-year-old girl with a MySpace page. Never mind the fussing about so-called "censorship" - though one would be sure that, had this happened at another website, we'd be reading all about it at Boing Boing, with its editors in a righteous nerd froth. The excuse that "it's personal" would ring more true if we weren't talking about a media enterprise whose audience exceeds that of Conde Nast's Epicurious.com, or the publicly traded finance site TheStreet.com. While Boing Boing's revenues are unknown, the site formed the cornerstone of Federated Media, an online-advertising startup which has already made founder John Battelle - Boing Boing's "band manager" - a multimillionaire. Oh, and did we mention that Violet Blue, the sex blogger in question (and contributor to Gawker Media's Fleshbot), shown here at right, used to be the lover of Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin, left?

We figured something was up when former TechCruncher Duncan Riley created his own tech news spinoff, the Inquisitr. We figured there was probably even more backstory when he suddenly became one of our most reliable caption contest commenters (and occassional winner). Now there seems to have been a split between Riley and his old boss Michael Arrington, who in a rather passive-aggressive farewell said "My sincere hope is to have the opportunity to buy that blog some day and bring him right back into the fold." But yesterday, Riley bookmarked "Is Mike Arrington a Dick?" and then wrote an only slightly cryptic message:

Cyan Banister's Zivity seemed a natural choice to participate at the second Bay Area Girl Geek dinner, a networking event celebrating women in tech. At the last one in January, over 600 guests assembled at Google's HQ to hear tales of ladypower from female CEOs, founders, engineers, and VCs. Banister, a former systems administrator and network engineer, is the cofounder of Zivity, a social networking site driven by female users sharing sexy photos of themselves. The Zivity motto is "It's not porn." Call what you will pretty women getting paid for making and posting naked photos of themselves. As Zivity's Chief Strategy Officer, Banister was honored to accept the Girl Geeks' invite over five months ago, including their idea to have Zivity bring two female photographers along to lens red-carpet style shots of arriving guests who were up for it. This is where the cocktail of sex, girls, tech, and cameras got complicated, and the collective panties of some female industry "thought leaders" got blogged into a painful bunch. And it had about nothing to do with porn.

Who owns the most annoying applications on Facebook? It seems incredible that anyone would want to take credit for Vampires, Zombies, and Werewolves, three of the most useless and yet most used applications on Facebook. And yet Blake Commagere, their developer, and RockYou, the company which markets those apps, and is happy to take credit for them when raising venture capital, are getting ready to deploy lawyers to settle the question over their ownership, we hear. Adonomics, the Facebook-app measurement firm, somewhat questionably estimates the three applications' value at $6.5 million — but attributes their ownership to Commagere.

With the cool confidence inspired by sitting more than a little above the fray in the whole Microsoft-Yahoo fracas, Eric Schmidt sat down on Tuesday for a taped interview with Fox Business's Liz Claman, resulting in fifteen minutes of the smooth talker on video. Schmidt has been working a press tour leading up to the cessation of talks between Microsoft and Yahoo. At the beginning of this clip, he praises Microsoft's leadership and then suggests that they could be "hostile" with their market power. By the end, he's downplaying any presumption of antitrust litigation arising in the event of any partnership between Google and Yahoo, citing how competitive the space is. It's almost convincing.

Developers who jumped on the Google App Engine bandwagon have gotten an unpleasant surprise. Those who create Web applications using Google's computing infrastructure have found that the Mountain View advertising broker is not-so-subtly asking them to use Google Checkout to accept payments and not rival online transaction processing PayPal, an eBay subsidiary. Valid PayPal domains "accidentally" got caught up in Google's anti-phishing efforts, according to Googler Marzia Niccolai.

What does a poorly received speech today by Eric Schmidt at the Economic Club of Washington have to do with Hispanic IT workers? Nothing, really, and that's what Lista, the Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association, wants you to know. One has to admire the sheer Valley-like opportunism of Lista's Jose Marquez, who sent us five questions Schmidt didn't answer about the threat a search deal between Google and Yahoo poses to the people his organization claims to represent. One question we have for Marquez: Does your close scrutiny of a potential Google-Yahoo deal have anything to do with Microsoft's many partnerships with your organization? Marquez's curiously loaded queries:

When I met him at a book-signing party earlier this week, BrightIdea.com CEO Matt Greeley was all smiles. Now I know why: He'd just hit "Send" on a scathing missive denouncing Salesforce.com for trampling on his company's turf. (The territory in question, thoroughly obscure, involves something called "innovation management," or, as Greeley puts it, tracking ideas like FedEx packages.) Greeley's rant is worth studying for its overwrought language. He calls the enemy "Salesfarce," says it has "gotten fat and happy," and is a "rotted shell of a business" which will fall apart with a "nudge." The full email, sent by a BrightIdea employee who writes that he'd "like to pee in [Salesforce.com's] coffee pot, and I'm not speaking metaphorically":

Mark Hornick, the lawyer representing ConnectU's Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, on the "smoking gun" chat transcripts that data forensics expert Jeff Parmet may or may not have discovered on hard drives subpoenaed from Facebook implicating Mark Zuckerberg in grand theft source code: "We don't have them. The courts have them, Facebook has them, but ConnectU doesn't have them." [Silicon Alley Insider]

We have a hard time picking a loser in the contest for world's worst search-engine startup: Powerset, where the founders' love triangle proved far more interesting than its technology, or Wikia Search, Jimmy Wales's laughably nonfatal Google killer. What both have in common: Their search results prominently feature links to Wikipedia, also founded by Wales. Wikia Search, like Wikipedia, has volunteers edit its search results; Powerset uses an algorithm to analyze Wikipedia pages, and tries to answer the questions implicit in users' searches accordingly. Wales is unimpressed by Powerset. But we're struck by how much he and Powerset cofounder Barney Pell have in common — a semantic link neither search engine has uncovered.

Since leaving Twitter, former chief architect Blaine Cook has been sparring with his former employers over the cause of Twitter's outages. It's a peculiar battle of words, with Cook never mentioning Twitter and Twitter never mentioning Cook. But perhaps things aren't that unfriendly. According to Twitter, Cook (second from top and from right) is one of the reasons people should come work for Twitter.