We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s Part 6 of 6 of our discussion with Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer, who were interviewed together by Walt Mossberg and me on the conference’s opening night.

In this video, Gates and Ballmer answer questions from the audience about the Yahoo deal, widgets, Facebook and healthcare.

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Today, Mike Homer, as well as many others suffering from incurable degenerative brain disease and dementias, will get a new video-sharing channel on YouTube, along with a Web site and an interactive widget.

Unfortunately, Homer continues to suffer from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), for which he is under treatment at the University of California at San Francisco.

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Here is the single favorite quote I read from EconAds in New York yesterday, from NeoAtOgilvy COO Greg Smith.

“No one wants a relationship with their mustard.”

Well, exactly. (Unless, it is Col. Mustard, of course, who is endlessly fascinating!)

This odd but spot-on observation was about why big packaged goods advertisers–who are the really big spenders of the ad business–might be less than interested leveraging social media advertising and its promise of deep engagement with consumer.

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In its ongoing bid to prove there is a robust and sustainable ad business in the social networking space, widgetmaker Slide opened a New York office and hired a big deal online ad exec.

Of course, because it has to be hip, the office is in the always trendy West Village, instead of uptown on Madison Avenue.

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Last year, BoomTown caused a tempest-in-a-Web-teapot by asserting that Facebook apps were, for the most part, inane.

And, while many said the market would develop from the frivolous to more useful–making Facebook a true “utility,” as promised by Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg–that day is not today for the social networking site or its third-part widget makers.

Instead, it’s still Pinocchio at Funland (and we know how that turned out!).

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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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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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According to several sources close to Yahoo, the company will outline in much more detail its open-platform strategy next week, in its efforts to keep its cred as a big supporter of openness and also show it has a clear path to reinvigorate itself despite current turmoil.

Yahoo has been accelerating its open activities of late, mostly related to its search and ad infrastructure.

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On its blog aimed at Facebook developers, the social-networking site said it would push back its massive Profile page redesign, which was supposed to roll out in early April.
It is now set for late spring, although the post specified no specific date.

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RockYou, widget maker, is the latest example of a sane valuation heartbreaker, as it is undertaking efforts to secure an investment from mainstream financing firms that would value the company at between $300 million and $400 million.

First reported by Valleywag last night, the start-up, said one source, “is being squired around Wall Street” by investment behemoth Morgan Stanley, in search of the same kind of deal its rival Slide got in January.

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While a lot of focus yesterday has been on the gobs of cash that Time Warner shareholders now have to fork over to social networking site Bebo, which was bought by its AOL division for $850 million in spite of low revenues, sources close to the company tell me another big deal is in the hopper and at another lofty price.

Sources say that AOL has been seriously mulling the acquisition of KickApps, which makes white-label social widgets, apps and communities for various companies and helps monetize them, for a reported price of $90 milion.

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Last week I paid a visit to the Palo Alto, Calif., HQ of SocialMedia and also had a chat with its Co-Founder and CEO Seth Goldstein.
As the start-up describes itself, SocialMedia “is the leading provider of social-platform services. It fuses together three core features–management, marketing and monetization–into a comprehensive package that advertisers and developers can [...]

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Last night, BoomTown checked out the new space MySpace is renovating for its soon-to-open San Francisco office. The occasion was a party the social-networking site held for developers as part of its recent platform launch.
In other words, the night MySpace started kissing up to the widget makers with tasty burgers and big techie hugs.
And [...]

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Last night, MySpace threw a party for third-party developers at their soon-to-be-opened office in San Francisco’s trendy SoMa neighborhood.
BoomTown went and did a video of the event here, where the trendy, Beverly Hills-based social-networking site made nice with the geeky widget makers of Silicon Valley.
And we also talked to MySpace Co-Founder and CEO Chris [...]

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With all the noise about Microsoft’s $41 billion offer to buy Yahoo, I dropped the ball on posting about a chat I had about a week ago with Slide’s Max Levchin about the recent $50 million investment that valued the widget maker at an astonishing $500 million.

To say I was dumbstruck by the market value, given that the profitless start-up has only about $10 million to $12 million in annual revenue and a still unproven business plan, would be wrong.

Incredulous, yes. Gobsmacked, indeed. Feeling like I was back in 1999, most definitely. But not dumbstruck!

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