Over the summer, Google launched a Second Life-esque 3D chat product called Lively. It seems Lively is not exactly living up to its name. Google is killing Lively at the end of the year.

While Lively is certainly not the first Google product to head to the chopping block, its shelf life did seem a bit short. Still, Google says it needs to focus on its flagship areas of search, ads, and apps.

Teens who use social media such as MySpace and Facebook are not just wasting time, they are in fact developing important social and technical skills online, according to new research from the MacArthur Foundation.

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Kvetch is a site that displays "Kvetches," or funny complaints that are sent to it via Twitter. One "Kvetch" is displayed at a time on the site's home page, and you can either give it a thumbs up or thumbs down.

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So much for the idea of a second Second Life.  Lively, launched by Google this July, has already been deemed something of a failure, and the search giant's issued a notice that it will more or less kill the collection of virtual rooms at the end of December.

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Not unlike President-Elect Barack Obama's campaign for the Presidency, protestors fighting for gay rights are using the Internet as one of their biggest weapons in the battle for equality. More specifically, countless websites (and social network groups) have sprung up in support of gay rights. Sites like JoinTheImpact.com and MarriageEquality.org to name a couple.

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Yahoo has released the beta version of a new service called Yahoo Glue. What Yahoo Glue does is piece together results from different popular sites and bring them to you on one page. For example, a search for an NFL team will bring up results from Wikipedia, Yahoo Sports (including stats, rosters, schedules, etc), YouTube, Yahoo Maps, Yelp, Flickr, Yahoo Groups, and Yahoo Answers.

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Barry Schwartz posted something of a rant at Search Engine Roundtable after an unnamed blogger attacked the site's live blogging coverage of PubCon:

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After news came that Jerry Yang would be stepping down as Yahoo!'s CEO, the immediate reaction by analysts, Wall Street, and your neighbor's cat was: MICROSOFT ACQUISITION TIME!

But Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, is saying: Not so fast.

Ballmer has said time and again that Microsoft has moved on from the possibility of returning to the good ol' days of negotiating a Yahoo! acquisition.

And while it's tempting to think that he's just waiting for that stock to drop to around $2-3 a share (hey, only $6-7 more to go!), consider this: Yahoo's VP of Search Technology, Sean Suchter is leaving the Sunnyvale search engine. And I hope he likes rain and coffee, because rumor has it that he's headed to Microsoft.

That rumor was reported by none other than Kara Swisher, who is pretty much never wrong. The only thing I'm wondering is: Where's the noncompete agreement?

Amidst the rumors and denials, one thing is for sure. No matter how much Ballmer would like the speculation to end, it won't.

Flash content has long posed a lot of problems for the search and webmaster communities.  Now Google – and more specifically, the newly introduced Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash – intends to solve at least a few of them.

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eHarmony is releasing a new same-sex matching service starting by the end of March. This service is the product of legal problems the company has been dealing with out of New Jersey and California. A gay man in Jersey sued the company for not catering to same-sex relationships as a violation of his rights in the state of New Jersey, and earlier in the year, a gay woman from San Francisco filed a suit against the company for being denied access to eHarmony's service because of her sexuality.

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