The Social

Liberal news outlet The Huffington Post has announced its latest venture funding round. The upswing: It is $25 million, not $15 million as previously rumored.

The funding comes from the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Oak Venture Partners. No valuation was provided, but AllThingsD's Kara Swisher suggests it's slightly under $100 million. The company has 46 employees.

Fred Harman of Oak Venture partners will join Huffington Post's board. Previous investors include Softbank Capital and Greycroft Partners.

This is the company's Series C funding round. Traffic to its Web site skyrocketed amid the hotly contested presidential election this fall, but The Huffington Post--started by a team led by political pundit and author Arianna Huffington--has been making strides to expand beyond the left-of-center political coverage that made it famous. Political news sites, many critics speculate, may see a significant drop in traffic now that there's no presidential election filling up headlines, and that's not a good thing when ad spending is tightening amid the economic downturn.

Local news, more video, and a fund for investigative journalism are next on the plate for Huffington Post, according to a press release, in addition to possible acquisitions. There is also a "world news" page in the works, hinted a source close to the company, who added that other coverage areas such as sports are discussed but are further from a launch.

The annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York got "Rickrolled" on Thursday.

If you weren't watching the parade live or on TV, you probably saw the mass influx of Twitter messages: '80s pop singer Rick Astley, whose cheesy song "Never Gonna Give You Up" became the center of a corny Internet meme called "Rickrolling,", gave a surprise performance. "Rickrolling" originally started as tricking someone into clicking on a link to the "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video by claiming it was something else, like a highly anticipated movie trailer.

From what about a zillion Twitterers said, Astley emerged from a parade float sponsored by cable channel Cartoon Network, and started singing "Never Gonna Give You Up" live. The singer was recently honored at the MTV Europe Awards, but contrary to rumors, he did not perform.

Qik user Steve Garfield streamed the whole thing. Click here for a video (embedded above).

Singer Jonathan Coulton reacts to the 'live Rickroll' at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

(Credit: Twitter)

Oh, no! They can't get Twitter SMS updates anymore!

(Credit: Second City Television)

This can't be good. Just a few months after restricting its U.K.-based text-messaging number due to cost issues, Twitter has done the same for Canada.

The microblogging service has cut outbound SMS messages for the folks up north, citing "unexpected changes in our billing." Costs had been doubling for a few months.

Basically, this means Canadian Twitter users will be able to send numbers to its short code, 21212, but not receive them that way. They can instead use the Twitter mobile site or one of many third-party mobile apps to see what their friends are "tweeting," but that requires a mobile data plan. Text messages do not.

"There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world)," a post on Twitter's blog read. "We're working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress."

Twitter, which allegedly rejected a buyout offer from Facebook, has raised a significant amount of venture funding but has yet to produce a business plan.

Lori Drew, the Missouri woman who created a fake MySpace profile that she allegedly used to harass a teenage girl to the point of suicide, was convicted of three offenses far more minor than the ones she could have been, the Associated Press wrote Wednesday.

Drew, indicted in May by a federal court after Missouri prosecutors could not find evidence of a state crime, had been charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of "accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress."

On Wednesday, a federal jury in Los Angeles failed to reach a verdict on the conspiracy charge. In addition, Meier was not convicted of the three felony charges of accessing protected computers, but was instead found guilty of three related misdemeanors.

Drew had faced up to 20 years in prison, but now faces a year in prison and a $100,000 fine for each of the three misdemeanors.

According to the AP, U.S. District Court Judge George Wu declared a mistrial on the conspiracy charge, but it is not yet clear whether Drew will be retried on it.

The harassed teen, 13-year-old Megan Meier, committed suicide in 2006. She was a classmate of Drew's daughter Sarah.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation spoke out in opposition to the charges against Drew in August, saying that millions of Americans could be considered criminals in accordance with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because of the charges' basis in a terms of service violation.

(Credit: Criterion.com)

Highbrow film company The Criterion Collection has launched Criterion.com, an "online cinematheque" for people who want to watch movies, delve into some editorial content, and socialize with other fans.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the new site is the fact that you can rent many Criterion films (a melange of old and newish, domestic and foreign) for $5 per stream, and that $5 will be deducted if you then choose to purchase the flick on DVD. Kind of a cool model that nobody seems to be using yet.

Criterion has also teamed up with a new film-centric social site, The Auteurs, to host a monthly "film festival" that makes a handful of Criterion films available for temporary free streaming and discussion. November's picks, sponsored by IFC, follow a "cruel stories of youth" theme and feature the World War II drama Au revoir les enfants as well as the quintessential nasty-kids story, Lord of the Flies, among others. No, there's no Mean Girls.

I know, I know, it's all a bit pretentious. Now go put on a scarf and down a few macchiatos and think about something deep.

Amazon has enlisted a half dozen of its most dedicated (addicted?) reviewers to act as holiday gift experts this season. They'll be responsible for providing gift picks, tips, and other advice regarding their favorite products available on the mega-retail site.

Putting a "real people" face on holiday shopping is key for Amazon in a season full of thin wallets and nervous spenders: research firm eMarketer just lowered its projections for online holiday shopping. Many of the tips provided by Amazon's reviewers, for obvious reasons, deal with cost-cutting recession strategies.

Amazon has offered customer reviews since 1995, and says that over 5 million people have submitted reviews so far. Its "Holiday Customer Review Team" members have between 367 and 1,483 reviews under their belt apiece.

The six chosen ones, in case you happen to live next door to any of them or anything, are: Mark Espinosa of Jersey City, N.J.; Debbie Lee Wesselmann of Allentown, Penn.; Marty Hogan of San Francisco; Zack Davisson of Seattle; Joseph Boone of Irvine, Calif.; and Ed Uyeshima of San Francisco.

Wow, way to ignore the "Real America," Amazon! What would Sarah Palin think?

The coastal resort that hosted the Summit Series event last weekend.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

PUERTO MORELOS, Mexico--They kept their Twitter feeds quiet and their iPhone cameras dormant. Most of them didn't want their names to be used.

There was more than a little bit of paranoia in the air as the guests arrived at last weekend's Summit Series event, formally the Young World Leaders Summit--not the most modest of names. It was a gathering of about five dozen under-35 entrepreneurs and executives at a beachfront luxury resort outside the glitzy vacation city of Cancun. Among those present at the retreat, which was fully paid for by sponsors, were a handful of executives from Facebook and other Silicon Valley start-ups, media and publishing entrepreneurs, young venture capitalists, edgy youth marketers, and jet-setting global issues advocates. As for an itinerary, there were snorkeling lessons, ample pool- and beachside chill time, and plenty of parties.

"We want to create the Allen & Co. retreat for young people," Summit Series organizer Elliot Bisnow said in an interview overlooking the Caribbean Sea, referring to the annual gathering of tech and media moguls in Sun Valley, Idaho. Bisnow had previously put together the inaugural Summit Series event in Park City, Utah, last spring, with 19 young entrepreneurs meeting for a ski weekend. He said it was so successful that he and fellow organizers Ryan Begelman and Ben Hindman decided to expand it for the Mexico edition. "It took us awhile to figure out the messaging, but we want to create an environment for the top young people in the world to get together in a fun place and talk ideas, business, challenges."

What can also take awhile, for that matter, is convincing the notoriously look-at-me young digerati to turn everything off. But for the Summit Series, they complied without protest. Given the dire financial climate, they knew that the vicious gossip-blog culture could make this all look really bad.

But why did they risk it in the first place? After the American International Group spa resort scandal and, closer to home, last month's blogospheric revulsion at a YouTube video of young dot-commers dancing poolside at a mansion in Cyprus as the markets crashed, scrutiny of executive excess is at an all-time high. And the young folks at the Summit Series event aren't stupid: they knew what investors, partners, and shareholders would think if they should, gasp, be outed having a good time.

Some said they came for the networking, and the promise of meeting interesting new people with whom they might not otherwise cross paths--or even cut a deal or two. Others said they honestly just needed a few days to get away from the business world and get a much-needed refresher during difficult times. The offer of four expense-free, breezy days in coastal Mexico was too good to pass up. (Disclosure: I paid for my accommodations.)

"The way young people do business today is much more relationship-driven than it used to be," said Bisnow, an energetic 23-year-old who was a nationally ranked tennis player before dropping out of college to start his company, a D.C.-area newsletter start-up called Bisnow on Business. "I think it's so valuable to be able to create friendships in special places, not in a stodgy boardroom." It's not quite a novelty: that's what golf courses, Ivy League alumni clubs, and Elks lodges have done for years.

So, in order to maintain a level of image control and to ensure that attendees were comfortable talking openly, the few reporters present were asked beforehand to agree to keep most of the goings-on off the record. Photographs were not permitted during the tequila-soaked evening hours.

And indeed, a brief flurry of nerves surfaced during Thursday night's dinner reception when one prank-minded marketer in attendance decided to float a rumor that a poolside photograph from the Summit Series had surfaced on gossip blog Gawker. Due to the international locale, most people there had spotty or extremely expensive mobile data access, and nobody wanted to admit to being paranoid enough to run back to his room and check the Web. Luckily, before too long, the prankster had admitted to his joke, and after that, the only thing close to mass hysteria arose when some people realized they couldn't always access Wi-Fi from their rooms.

There were a few organized activities. On one day, the young creators of socially conscious shoe brand Toms, which gives away one pair of shoes to a child in a developing country for each pair it sells, took Summit Series attendees on a road trip to donate shoes in a nearby village. Another featured a cave-diving outing. There was also a presentation from business guru and Twitter heavy-hitter Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week--"Some people really get misled by the title," Ferriss told me as we all walked to a nightclub in nearby Playa del Carmen one night.

A second presentation came from Scott Harrison, founder of Charity Water, a nonprofit bottled water company that donates all proceeds to the construction of clean water facilities in developing countries and uses Google Earth to prove it. Harrison's graphic images and his tale of transformation from hard-partying club promoter to impassioned philanthropist left some of the younger Summit Series guests--particularly the ones still cushioned by Valley venture cash and a Web 2.0 bubble that has yet to fully pop--a bit shell-shocked. After the talk, they left the room and returned to the pool, looking sheepish but eager to order another round of margaritas.

Beyond that it was mostly an unstructured gathering--and considering many of the entrepreneurs had never gone to college, this was probably the closest they'd come to Spring Break in Cancun. That said, the Summit Series' five-to-one male-to-female ratio probably put the kibosh on most legitimate debauchery--other guests at the quiet resort must have thought it was some kind of fraternity reunion or bachelor party.

Getting down to business
But business was inescapable, and that was the point. During the day, many of the Summit Series' pale 20-something men shuffled about in swim trunks by the pool, a BlackBerry in one hand and a pina colada in the other, and a copy of the latest bestselling business-productivity book under their arms--like Malcolm Gladwell's The Outliers, a just-released title about what makes some people wildly successful while others pass by unnoticed. The more outgoing ones hopped from beach chair to beach chair, making introductions. A few of the dreamier, ideas-oriented types scribbled away in Moleskine or Muji notebooks as they looked out over the beach. One young publishing entrepreneur shared his favorite beach drink recipe with some new friends: blended ice, bananas, and rum. Then they talked ad strategies.

"Dozens of deals have been done this weekend. People have sold companies," Bisnow boasted, smiling broadly. He declined to say which ones, but I could confirm at least one small deal: that one of the new-media CEOs in attendance had offered ad inventory to another guest's nonprofit organization.

The sponsorships were important, too, Bisnow added. They'd turned down plenty of requests, he said, before settling on office giant Staples, real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle, the wealth management division of Goldman Sachs, and investment firm Charles River Ventures. At the previous Summit Series event in Park City, Bisnow told me, 6 of the 19 attendees had ended up doing business with sponsor Jones Lang LaSalle.

"This is, in my opinion, one of the best sponsorships in the world," he added, and said that the dates for the next Summit Series event were already on the calendar. They'd be back in Park City, with 250 attendees and a flagship sponsorship by men's magazine GQ. Bisnow, whose broad-shouldered build and neatly trimmed haircut give off a vibe of bold, frat-president confidence, expressed no concern about financial issues getting in the way.

But still, no amount of money talk or margaritas could drown the presence of the ongoing economic crisis. One of the CEOs at the Summit Series, who runs a public company, was worried about the perception that he was at a beachfront retreat while his company's stock--like so many others'--had lost 30 percent of its value. Another left abruptly on day two of the four-day retreat, reportedly due to a "business emergency" involving funding that was in danger of falling through. And by Saturday afternoon, two or three of the investor-dependent dot-com founders, one of whom complained that the event had been too "cliquey," were vocally itching to get back to their fledgling companies.

I wondered if maybe some of them had wanted more structure, a more concrete networking plan that would make them less nervous about skipping town for a few days. "I don't like structure," Bisnow told me with a grin. "I'm young and eccentric and I want to hang out."

Over breakfast on Sunday, shortly before vans started to arrive to take the Summit Series-goers to the Cancun airport for their flights back to New York, D.C., San Francisco, and elsewhere, co-organizer Hindman, who founded an offbeat walking-tour company, said to Bisnow that some get-to-know-you activities would've been good. The Valley guys didn't spend enough time meeting the eco-entrepreneurs, for example.

"Yeah," Bisnow admitted, nodding and taking a bite of food. "That might be cool next time."

The other suggestion: More women, please.

Web-based chat company Meebo has partnered with Universal Music Group to bring ad-supported music videos to the service.

As a kickoff, Universal artists Kanye West, Ludacris, and the Killers will be featured on the Meebo home page. In return, Meebo chat rooms will be embedded on Universal artists' sites.

I'm still not quite sure why a chat start-up needs Kanye videos when Mr. West and his many pairs of sunglasses are already plastered all over the rest of the Internet, but I'll let that rest for now.

In the past year, Meebo has launched an application programming interface, partnered with media brands such as Hearst to power embeddable chat rooms, and launched a "Community IM" initiative for social sites.

But Meebo is just the latest of many video partners for Universal. Universal has made investments in Imeem, a music playlist-based social network, and Buzznet, a music fan community hub.

Earlier this year, the label struck a music video deal with Last.fm, a music-focused social network owned by CBS Interactive (which publishes CNET News) and Kiwibox, a community site for teens. Like the major other labels, it has a stake in MySpace Music.

Universal is also reported to be working on a "Hulu-like" site for its music video content. There's no word if that's still on the books, now that music video portal MTV Music has launched.

Maybe it wasn't just egregious Valley gossip-baiting when Federated Media CEO John Battelle asked Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month if his company was going to buy Twitter.

Kara Swisher of AllThingsD reported early Monday morning that actual acquisition talks held between the two companies have fallen through.

The deal would have been for $500 million in Facebook stock, Swisher wrote.

Facebook's not big on acquisitions. The only sizable purchase the company has made was of a start-up called Parakey, and that was really just a way to bring on board founder Blake Ross.

Twitter's a different story. The microblogging service competes directly with Facebook's own "status" feature, to the point where many Twitter users have configured their Facebook statuses to display their Twitter statuses. It's also, after Facebook, the most-hyped company to come out of the Bay Area in the past five years. (Sorry, Digg. You're in third.)

The two also have a moderate connection: early Twitter investor Marc Andreessen sits on Facebook's board. Then again, that kind of six-degrees-of-separation factoid is commonplace in the Valley.

The problem with the proposed Facebook acquisition was that, according to Swisher, Twitter's executives and investors thought it would be better for the company to come up with its own business model rather than sell out this early--in spite of the fact that the recession is going to make it really tough for prerevenue companies.

Plus, in addition to the "typical concerns about integration and costs" (per Swisher), Twitter reportedly was concerned about what that "$500 million in stock" really meant, given that Facebook's paper valuation is significantly different than the $15 billion "preferred" valuation at which Microsoft invested $240 million last year.

And, honestly: Facebook's still trying to evolve its own business model (to put it lightly). In this economic climate, does it really want to be handing more than $500 million in stock for a company that, while hyped, has even murkier plans for profitability? Twitter CEO Evan Williams has alluded to paid business accounts, but we still haven't seen anything concrete.

A British woman has reportedly been kicked off a jury for posting a "note" on Facebook asking her friends what they thought of the trial.

She was given the boot after the court received a tip about the posting.

The original source of the story is the U.K. tabloid The Sun, which is better known for trashy stories about Prince Harry's partying habits than for sound news about social networking.

Regardless, spilling court case details on the Web certainly sounds like pretty good grounds for getting the boot.

The Sun explains: "It was thought she did not use privacy settings, meaning the Facebook posts could be read by anyone." Well, not quite. You need to be logged into Facebook in order to read anything on the site, something that occasionally gets on the nerves of the "open Web" crowd. But if the juror had no friends-only settings in place, the note could still have been pretty public.

The woman's name has not been released, but the court appears to have been Burnley Crown Court in Lancastershire, and the case involved child abduction and sexual assault. According to The Sun, the woman posted details of the case on Facebook and added, "I don't know which way to go, so I'm holding a poll." Yeah, that's bad.

The trial is said to have continued with 11 jurors instead of 12.