When the White House invite list for "top tech executives" got out yesterday, a few names stood out for the wrong reason. What would former Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, who stepped down in July after layoffs, a stock price free fall, shuttered games and a exodus of executives add to a discussion Healthcare.gov and NSA surveillance?

After Valleywag called out Circle, a contact list-bombing social network no one asked for, the company's CEO apologized via bloggy mea culpa, and pledged to be less annoying. Good!

Last night, the paparazzi and their tech blogging equivalent gathered at Pravda, a once trendy Soho hot spot, to celebrate apps with fly girl jail bird Lindsay Lohan.

After years of (silently) being the most powerful gay man in technology (and perhaps the entirety of corporate America), Apple CEO Tim Cook is starting to get personal. A recent speech on human rights organized by Auburn University shows a welcome side of the fiercely private executive.

After months of chanting We could have done sooo-oo much better, TIME reports America's tech sector will have a chance to school President Obama on Healthcare.gov and NSA surveillance. But he probably should have reconsidered some of these choices.

The bedtime story about disruption goes like so: a big bad useless government financed by greedy incumbents is the only reason that authorities are concerned about issues like public transportation or unregulated genetic testing. That's why Airbnb's non-profit astroturfs for donations for "the sharing economy."

A series of events: the New York Times writes about how insulated Twitter is from its destitute urban surroundings. Twitter engineer writes that, well, if you've made it into the company's offices, you've deserved it.

The Bitcoin Forum got a vicarious thrill over the weekend when crypto kiddies found out that Nasir Jones is now a Bitcoin investor. The news came courtesy of a PandoDaily article that admired the rapper's deal flow.

For several hours on Saturday, Uber was maybe the most hated company in America. Some of the year's most atrocious weather dumped across the Northeast, and the transit company of the future hit customers with the worst price gouging we've ever seen—it would cost over a hundred bucks just to drive down the block. Get used to it.

We have no idea what Katie Couric is going to do for Yahoo! other than get people talking and writing about Yahoo!, but we do know she'll be paid handsomely for it: TMZ is citing a $6 million per year paycheck. And it's a part-time gig. Yahoo indeed.

Mark Zuckerberg is a success story, having gone from Hollywood sociopath and interview nightmare to mere super-dork. He's awkward, but much of the alienating superweirdness has been coached away. But Instagram honcho Kevin Systrom is still one bizarre, robotic dude.

What's more irksome than a stream clogged up with tweets about a TV show you don't watch? Unsolicited alerts from Twitter that your friends are talking about a TV show.

In the end, the tech industry's most egregious imposition on society may not be ruthlessness of its founders or the hubris its financiers, but rather its corruption of the English language. For evidence of this, just Google "startup learnings" and weep.

If you're considering a $400 subscription to The Information, the new tech reporting venture from star Wall Street Journal alum Jessica Lessin, you're buying more than news. As her Pacific Heights mansion launch party made clear, Lessin is still (uncomfortably) close with her Facebook husband's executive friends.

#Followateen is not just a hashtag, it's a business model. Kik, one of the apps competing to be your backchannel of choice, has ridden "teen interest" to 100 million users. According to CNET, "Youth in the Western world are gravitating" to the app because you don't have to give a phone number.

Insiders are not wrong when they insist this tech bubble is nothing like the last one. For one, the corporate war chests of Google, Yahoo, and Facebook—and the need to compete against them—have financed soft landings and acqui-hires for stalled out companies as far as the eye can see. But here's a new twist: not letting a moribund startup die.

After an investigation by the inspector general, NASA says what we already knew: Google's top brass use tax-subsidized gas to go on pleasure trips around the world, saving millions of dollars it could easily afford.

Not only do you not need to make money to be deemed a worthy investment, you can be widely loathed: Bitstrips, an online "web comic" and Facebook annoyance so bad, BuzzFeed made a guide to blocking it.

After all that jazz, Snapchat confirmed to TechCrunch that it only raised $50 million for its Series C round from a little known hedge fund called Coatue Management. Although Evan Spiegel says the cofounders didn't cash out this time around, Dan Primack has a theory that secondaries might have been sold separately.

While Airbnb funneled some of its $326 million in venture capital toward movie replica conference rooms, a skee ball machine, and corporate myth-making at its shmancy new Soma headquarters, the company's non-profit partner is soliciting non-tax deductible donations from regular shmoes to keep the sharing economy in the margins to which it has become accustomed.