Here are two quotes that got me thinking about what would happen if Facebook–whose user base is inexorably marching toward 400 million–ever got serious about the news aggregation business.

While it is not doing that now in any organized fashion, it will be increasingly obvious that consumers are inevitably moving away from the only-search paradigm to that of discovery through social and other jacked-up affiliation networks.

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Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates–who has been devoting most of this time to philanthropic work via the Gates Foundation–has just launched an ambitious blog and information site.

He is calling it “The Gates Notes: An Inside Look at Global Matters,” but BoomTown has officially nicknamed the site–which you can see on a screen grab after the jump–All Things B(ill) or perhaps All Things G(ates) today.

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There are lots of possible reasons Google finally went on the offensive against China yesterday.

While much of the speculation so far has been about Google’s motives, real or imagined, it seems to me that the focus should sit squarely on how appalling the Chinese government behaves regarding the Web.

And more to the point, how it tries to pass off egregious censorship, vicious retribution of its critics using digital skullduggery and persistent violations of basic freedoms as justified by government policy and laws.

That canard is accepted by no one with any kind of conscience and falls flat in today’s increasingly transparent digital-centric world.

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Last night, Trulia sent me a small pile of information about the fast-growth year the real estate search and information site had in 2009, despite the near-complete collapse of the U.S. housing market.

You can read all the stats below in Trulia’s press release after the jump–62.3 million unique monthly visitors, visits up 45 percent, page views up 105 percent and one million inquiries sent by home buyers to real estate agents via the San Francisco start-up, which was founded in 2005 by CEO Pete Flint and COO Sami Inkinen.

BoomTown also had a short chit-chat with Flint about where Trulia is headed.

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While Quattro Wireless was not saying anything about price in its blog post this morning confirming our scoop–like the image?–last night that it had been acquired by Apple, sources reconfirmed the $275 million figure Boomtown reported.

“It was a great company and a good price and a good time to sell, given all the change going on,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “It is a game of size now.”

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One good thing about taking a break between Christmas and New Year’s is getting to miss all the 2010 prediction stories out there about the tech world.

Oh, BoomTown will admit that I used to do them years ago.

But they were mostly off-base in some significant way or, if by some chance I got one right, it was definitely a very lucky guess.

So, last year, I made a resolution I am keeping this year: No predictions.

That doesn’t mean I will not make some promises.

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Full disclosure: BoomTown is several hours into the spiked eggnog here at All Things Digital Worldwide HQ, so our headlines are 100 percent spikier!

All joking aside and without much blabbery from me, Twitter just acquired Mixer Labs, makers of GeoAPI, which helps developers build location-based services.

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Microsoft’s feisty little search service, Bing, has finally made an iPhone app, which is now up at the Apple iTunes app store.

It’s a sweet little irony, since Microsoft and Apple have been frenemies over the years.

But bowing to the power of the iPhone as the premier smartphone out there, Bing has to be on its platform if it wants to compete with Google and others in the mobile arena.

Click in for more screenshots.

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Leave it to Google to compare its most aggressive new product to date with one that often includes meat by-products, bone meal, brewer’s rice, corn syrup and–yum!–“dried animal digest.”

But that’s exactly how the company chose to describe its new Nexus One smartphone in a blog post Saturday, noting that its employees would be “dogfooding” it.

As in eat their own product! Get it?

But will big wireless carriers and consumers like what Google plans to serve up?

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A few weeks ago, several sources at Yahoo began telling BoomTown about a mysterious “Project Rushmore,” which was described as a massive integration of major social networking sites across the giant Internet portal.

Now, the first unveiling of Project Rushmore comes with this morning’s announcement that Yahoo will be integrating Facebook Connect with its many properties, from its powerful media sites to its Flickr photo service to its email.

One delicious irony here: Yahoo almost bought Facebook several years ago.

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David Ko, head of Yahoo’s mobile division, has added the Internet giant’s vast media properties in the U.S. to his portfolio, according to several sources.

With purview over programming and more for the main Yahoo media properties, such as News and Finance, he will now control a vast swath of its consumer-facing products.

But, in a related move, product development for mobile has moved from under Ko to CTO and EVP of Products Ari Balogh.

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It’s well known that Google doesn’t do much in the way of marketing around its search service.

So, then, what is one to make of a half-dozen videos–called “Search Stories,” which look suspiciously like commercials, starring the company’s many products–that Google introduced late last week on its blog and posted on a new channel on YouTube?

Could it be that the $100 million marketing campaign that Microsoft launched for its Bing search service, which seems to be slowly gaining share, is starting to get on the nerves of those Spocks in Silicon Valley?

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BoomTown was intrigued when Mind-Your-Own Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, penned a blog post yesterday about the microblogging service changing its prompting question.

Now, above the little Twitter box, it reads, “What’s Happening?” and not the original tweet query, “What are you doing?”

While the blogosphere covered this as if it were a moment of monumental meaning, most were ignorant that the true beacon of innovative What’s-Happeningness does not reside in Silicon Valley.

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Tony Conrad, CEO and co-founder of Sphere–the contextually relevant content engine AOL bought in the spring of 2008 for upward of $25 million–left the Time Warner online unit last month, several sources have told BoomTown in recent weeks.

But, in an effort by AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong to hold onto entrepreneurial talent, Conrad has agreed to become “Special Advisor” to its AOL Ventures Unit.

Apparently, he is also mulling a new start-up and remains a VC too.

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While Nicki Dugan (pictured here) was not one of the top execs at Yahoo, she certainly is typical of many at the company who stuck with it through many ups and downs.

No longer, according to a memo BoomTown obtained, since the longtime PR staffer–who has been at Yahoo for almost a decade and who was previously with an outside public relations firm that worked for Yahoo–will leave the company Monday.

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