Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave what he just had to know would be a much quoted comment to the Nikkei today, explicitly saying that the company had “begun seriously looking into acquisitions again.”

Music to the beleaguered mergers and acquisitions market, to be sure, especially after a recent uptick from other big companies pulling out their wallets again as the impact of the econalypse subsides.

According to sources, Google is working on at least a half-dozen acquisition deals, most of which are small start-ups in the online advertising and cloud-computing arenas.

That would be welcome news for many.

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In an unusually robust collaboration using Facebook Connect, the Huffington Post is launching a feature on Monday called “HuffPost Social News,” which lets readers create a personalized social networking-like news page on the Huffington Post itself.

While the Huffington Post had already been using Facebook Connect since January–which allows readers of the site to log in using their Facebook identity to interact, which is mostly used to leave comments–this essentially takes Facebook Connect and puts it on steroids.

While the use of “social news” will be seen by some as simply a clever PR term, it is an interesting development for both the popular online news site and for the social networking giant.

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MicroHoo. Check! FaceFeed. Check!

And Twoogle? Let’s check!

Yahoo and Microsoft have finally partnered. Microsoft is already a big investor in Facebook. And today, the huge social networking site just picked up online content-sharing site FriendFeed, which is chock-a-block full of ex-Google execs.

Now, one has to wonder if wouldn’t it be easier if Google finally ponied up and bought the most recent star of Web 2.0?

That would be, of course, Twitter.

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After Facebook announced today that it had acquired online content-sharing site FriendFeed, BoomTown had a chit-chat with Facebook’s Director of Product, Chris Cox, and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor.

Although neither budged on telling me the purchase price, which various Silicon Valley venture capitalists I spoke to estimated to be about $50 million in cash and stock, the pair came together after several months of casual conversation, probably sometime after Twitter spurned Facebook’s $500 million offer last year.

But, as in failed love affairs, moving on is the next best thing to do!

No word on who got to break the news to No. 1 FriendFeed Fanboy Robert Scoble.

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It’s certainly acquisition fever in Silicon Valley today. After it was announced that Facebook had bought FriendFeed, now comes the news that VMware has purchased SpringSource, a privately held enterprise and Web application development and management cloud computing start-up.

The price? That would be $420 million in cash and stock.

With the purchase of Spring Source, Palo Alto-based VMware–which is a top player in the virtualization space–is adding to its cloud-computing application-management strength and also its ties to the open-source community.

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Facebook said today it is acquiring FriendFeed, the online content sharing site.

It is a logical fit for the social networking site, which has lagged behind microblogging kingpin, Twitter, in the real-time search and status game of perception in Silicon Valley. FriendFeed has also trailed well behind Twitter.

Terms were not disclosed, but it is likely be well under the $500 million Facebook once offered Twitter. In fact, sources estimate to me that the price was about $50 million in cash and stock.

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Oh, Scooby-Don’t…

You could not be more wrong in your post last week–titled, “Why Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are wrong about naming Web 3.0 ‘Web 3.0′”–about Walt and I being wrong about naming Web 3.0 “Web 3.0″ in an essay we posted at the start of our D: All Things Digital conference, which took place last week.

I know writing “Kara Swisher,” “Walt Mossberg” and “Wrong” is well-nigh irresistible, but your solution of calling the digital era we are in the “2010 Web” is equally confusing and incorrect.

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Yesterday, TechCrunch’s U.K. blogger Mike Butcher spun the tale of buyer’s remorse run amok with a report that Time Warner online unit AOL was “seriously considering selling Bebo, the social network it acquired for $850 million only a year ago,” citing poor performance and a bad advertising market.

Later, AOL went on the record saying “there is no truth to this rumor,” although Butcher insisted otherwise from his sources.

Well, actually, no. While Time Warner was crazy to pay that much for Bebo, it is not quite that nuts to sell it for bupkis.

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BoomTown’s been just one week gone and yet another goofy, traffic-generating debate “erupts” in the blogosphere involving the usual suspects and the favored hyped Silicon Valley company of the moment, Twitter. The new bone being gnawed on is something I can hardly grasp the point of–some drivel argument about what constitutes the authority of a tweet. While tweet status would seem only important to, say, a Warner Bros. cartoon character like Sylvester, all I can think is: Who cares? That’s because the fact remains that Twitter is simply an unknown to most average people in a way other tech trends have not been.

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This morning, FriendFeed, which is a kind of content delivery version of Twitter, went international, launching in six new languages–German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and simplified Chinese. Now live, the move is a natural extension for the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up–founded earlier this year by a small gang of ex-Googlers, who joined together to create a service for super-aggregating updates of all kinds for social-networking and news items in an ongoing feed. Here’s a video interview I did last week with Taylor and Buchheit about a range of topics, including–my favorite–monetization, or lack thereof, of a lot of terrific services like FriendFeed and Twitter.

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Last night, BoomTown was invited to moderate a panel for MIT/Stanford Venture Lab at Stanford University’s Business School on the topic of lifecasting.

In other words, the digital version of TMI (too much information!).

Called “Lifestreaming: The Real-time Web,” it was aimed at debating the trend toward “sharing our lives with others as they happen,” with three entrepreneurs and a venture capitalist in the space.

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So I was in Washington, D.C., this past weekend for a lovely wedding, traveling back to a city where I started my career and worked for 15 years after college.
And I conducted a little experiment among the more than 100 folks gathered for the wedding, all of whom were quite intelligent, armed with all [...]

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OK, I like Twitter a lot, but what is up with all this tech news coverage of its outages?
With the Twitter service being glitchy all weekend, for example, the jump-to-the-next-big-thing champ Robert Scoble wrote another piece yesterday smacking his old amour and praising his new love: FriendFeed.
You know, the new pretty young thing in [...]

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While the tech blogosphere fiddles away on navel-gazing stories–Who are the top tech bloggers? Do they Twitter to get to the top? Or do they FriendFeed? Do they feed friends while tweeting? More importantly, will there be chicken wings?–I’d advise anyone interested in the much more serious issue of making some money from Web 2.0 [...]

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