Quoted: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dropped the ax today, and it landed on Kevin Johnson's neck. Johnson, Microsoft's soon-to-be ex-President of Platforms & Services, has been with Microsoft since 1992. He was in the unfortunate position of leading the recent Vista effort through its very troubled launch, and running Microsoft's online efforts while watching

Quoted: Getting average know-nothings to create content for your site is easy enough and well understood by now. But how do you get experts to create in-depth topic pages about the hot-button issues of the day, complete with videos, links, and healthy commenting? Russell Fine is trying to do that with Opposing Views, a site that launched a few hours ago.

Quoted: If you glance at the top lineup of gaming applications on the Facebook or MySpace platform, you'll notice an interesting fact. Not one is the product of a major gaming publisher. Instead a group of independent gaming startups have been the leaders in publishing games within social networks. Co-founders of the gaming publisher Playfish, Kristian Segerstråle

Quoted: Xobni, the Y Combinator email startup that turned down an acquisition offer from Microsoft earlier this year, has just lost its VP Engineering and first employee, Gabor Cselle. Cselle joined the company in March 2007, sporting a seemingly perfect resume that included work on the Gmail team and a Master's thesis on "Organizing Email". The departure

Quoted: When Digg's Lead Architect Joe Stump took the stage at the Facebook Developer Conference in San Francisco earlier today, something in one of his screen shots caught our attention. He was there to show how users will soon be able to log in to Digg without an account via their Facebook credentials (the new Facebook Connect product). But also included

Quoted: Microsoft has just announced a major reorganization of its Platforms & Services Division. It will now be split into two groups (Windows/Windows Live and Online Services) which will both report to Steve Ballmer. Kevin Johnson, who used to head the Platforms & Services Division, will soon be leaving the company. The full press release is below.

Quoted: Rumors have been propagating through several popular Mac blogs that Apple will be releasing a red iPhone 3G model for the holiday season. The release will be well-timed, considering the initial iPhone hype will start to slow, and people will be opening up their wallets more for the holiday season. (Photo via MacBlogz) The red iPhone will presumably

Quoted: Today at the f8 conference Benjamin Ling revealed that Facebook will be releasing a Cocoa framework for the iPhone that will allow application developers to integrate with Facebook Connect. The framework is expected to be released sometime in the fall, and will take the form of an SDK that can be used by developers of iPhone applications. Facebook Connect

Quoted: The TechCrunch team is on site at the Facebook Developer conference, and we'll be live blogging the news. Mark Zuckerberg's Keynote starts at 1:30 pm PST. Facebook's press release is here. Live Coverage In a press briefing after the keynote, Zuckerberg stated "I wish I knew" when asked when the anticipated payments system would launch. He also hinted