When Twitter, one of San Francisco's flagship startups, threatened to ditch the city over tax complaints a couple years back, the city caved. Twitter received a giant break, in exchange for a promise to help the struggling neighborhood around its office. Did it? Sort of.

I don't have any problem with Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt's online ogling if his wife doesn't have a problem with it. Do you. But someone must've taken issue, because his Instagram account, bikini babe follower list and all, is deleted. Sort of.

Amid this hellish, malarial rant about innovation, or something, startup founder Francis Pedraza says one interesting thing: Snapchat is so simple, even the destitute can use it! We all need to think about the way "tech people" view the rest of us.

The FarmVille dust bowl continues. Today the company announced that the number of people playing its games is rapidly shrinking: "Daily active users were...down to 39 million from 72 million a year ago, and monthly uniques declined to 123 million from 193 million," says Kara Swisher.

If there's one thing you should know about Google's Director of Open Marriage Engineering, Eric Schmidt, it's that he loves to fuck. He's also following a select, interesting assortment of people on Instagram, and by interesting I mean a lot of models and women in swimwear.

Silicon Valley has no time for the dictates of supply and demand: if a programmer wants to eat at one of San Francisco's most exclusive restaurants, he's going to get that fucking table by exploiting the place's website, because fuck you, that's why.

If you were thinking about donating some money to help Spike Lee get back on his feet, maybe think twice: this guy just raised over $120,000 to make a game, and then just walked away with all the money. Contrary to what The Crowd Economy preaches, strangers can still screw you.

Every app wants to be like Snapchat: it came out of nowhere, without much planning, and now devours attention spans across North America. It's also worth $800 million, mostly through word of mouth. Most companies can't copy this, but they'll sure lie about it.

If you're a "normal married dude," who also happens to have a ton of sex on the side, you probably go to a motel or the back of a Jeep, I don't know. But if you're Google's executive chairman, knee deep in it with billions to spend, you have this soundproofed third base Xanadu.

For the past couple of years, bored tech writers have been telling this spooky ghost story about teens bored with Facebook. Today, during Facebook's latest earnings report, Zuckerberg denied the youth exodus, and TechCrunch's resident Facebook sleeper agent can barely keep it in his teen pants.

Stock analysts are usually happy with nothing except insane, impossible financial performance (see: Apple), but today investors are content. Facebook's earnings are huge—Sean Parker wedding huge—particularly in mobile ads, where it's needed most.

When a company tells you that it was insecurely broadcasting your exact GPS location and Facebook profile for mere "hours," you hope you can trust them. That's what hookup app Tinder told us about its recent vulnerability, and it turns out, no, that wasn't true.

Have you ever put sliced cheese between bread, and exposed it to heat? Did you think this activity, on a larger scale, warranted a $10 million investment from a tech titan? Probably not, because it's sandwiches. But Michael Moritz of investing mammoth Sequoia Capital thinks otherwise. And here's why! Sort of.

Between the rolling green hills of Aspen, monied tech chums have convened at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech 2013 conference, a vague confab about innovation, or something. On the agenda: defending their own existence.

Quartz's Zachary Seward reports that Tinder, the hookup app du jour, was leaving your physical location and Facebook information open to prying eyes. It fixed the bug, but how long was your secret sexting identity open for the stealing?

You know the story: Mark Zuckerberg and his (largely liberal) friends want to hire more foreign engineers, so they're pushing for an immigration bill that needs strong conservative support. They've had to play dirty—and their latest TV ad is maybe the silliest sellout yet.

There's a cult-like crew in Silicon Valley that thinks the days of going to "college" in a "place" are numbered—that if our country's higher education system is broken (probably), the fix lies in browsing websites (hmm). A test run in California says otherwise.

Meagan Cignoli, her website says, simply, "is an international fashion, advertising & portrait photographer." What it doesn't say so simply is that she makes thousands of dollars for a single seven-second Vine clip. Here's the job that'll ruin your day.

Back in May, Summit Series—a sort of upmarket Burning Man, or Sun Valley for less important people, depending on your vantage point—raised $40 million from investors like Peter Thiel and Tim Ferriss to buy its very own "Narnian" mountain in Utah. The event organizers are currently hosting their first invitation-only conference there, a four-day hippie-ish affair dubbed Summit Outside.

Spike Lee is an American cultural treasure. He's also rich. So why is he trying to get other people to pay him $1.25 million for his next feature film?