TechCrunch on Tuesday published a lengthy article about AOL's acquisition of Bebo, and how the Time Warner unit vastly overpaid for the social network and is now considering selling it. Bebo representatives tell VentureBeat the report is "absolutely ridiculous" because Bebo is a key part of AOL's expansion strategy. Even though AOL definitely overpaid for Bebo (the social net cost $850 million), it would be odd for the Web giant to jump ship now, especially when Bebo just launched a new user interface last month. The new "Social Inbox," which lets users read multiple email accounts and social …

Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. division that houses MySpace, is laying off 5% of its workforce, or about 100 people, The Wall Street Journal reports. According to an unnamed source, the layoffs include all FIM units. The cuts began last month. "I can confirm that several of the groups within FIM are eliminating some jobs and repurposing others," a FIM spokesman said in a statement. "This is part of a larger effort we're making to put FIM in the best possible position to succeed now and, more importantly, to emerge even stronger once the markets recover. It's important to …

According to various reports, Twitter, which has been featured prominently in the news for breaking stories like the plane crash in Manhattan's Hudson River, is raising another $20 million in a round of funding valuing the company at $250 million. Kara Swisher worries that the Web 2.0 startup, which has no revenue source, is getting a little cocky: "Twitter folks are always going on about how they don't need money since the burn rate is so low and because they could turn on the revenue spigot any old time they want to," she says. "Well, Twitter might want to ask …

Julia Angwin, editor of The Wall Street Journal's technology section "Digits" has authored a "tell-all" book about News Corp. company MySpace. The book isn't set for publication until March 17, but TechCrunch has a copy of a draft. MySpace is quick to point out that it had no involvement in the book whatsoever. Michael Arrington adds that, "It's clear from the tone of the book that Angwin's sources are primarily or solely people who've left the company, many of whom have a bone to pick with MySpace or parent company News Corp." In any event, the book's big revelation is …

Microsoft has unveiled Internet Explorer 8, which it says is faster, easier to use and more secure than Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome. IE 8 offers performance upgrades to speed up page loading, new navigation features and tab isolation so that if you hit a bad site, only that tab closes and not the whole browser. A feature called WebSlices updates users about particular items on another page like stock prices, the weather or an eBay auction. So-called accelerators allow users to access services like maps or language translations in a small window without leaving the page you're …

Online video ads come in different shapes, sizes and formats; some can even be skipped. As BusinessWeek reports, the lack of uniformity is confusing enough for Web users, but it poses even bigger problems for advertisers, who need to worry about tailoring their ads to different standards as well as coming up with a way to measure effectiveness using a wide range of approaches. "With so many different formats for video online, we incur incremental production costs every time we enter a new format," notes Nancy Ryan, media director for insurance company Allstate. As the report points out, these difficulties …