The honeymoon's over... and just in time for the divorce. Three months ago, Lithium Technologies, a privately held provider of social networking and online community-building software, agreed to buy brand-tracking startup Scout Labs for a reported $20 million. Minor Ventures, which helped give birth to Scout Labs, reportedly made out well. Now, however, in a lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court, Minor Ventures is accusing Lithium of intentional misrepresentation, fraud and fraudulent concealment, TechCrunch reports. "The entire amount at stake is around $5.5 million (half of the promised $11 million or so in stock received)," according to TechCrunch. …

Until further notice, don't expect to find Yelp in the "reviews" section of Google Places. Citing a company spokesperson, TechCrunch reports: "Google has changed the classification of Yelp's reviews." As the blog reminds us, "Yelp has been frustrated by Google's recent decision to pump up its Places service with Yelp's content -- without Yelp's consent." As a Google spokesperson tells TechCrunch: "Regarding the presentation of Yelp review snippets, neither of us was happy with the data as it appeared, so we reclassified results from Yelp while we reviewed our options. This means that, for the time being, Yelp pages …

What's wrong with Google's social media strategy? GigaOm's Adam Rifkin has tons to say on the matter. For, by going after social game makers, the search giant "is gearing up to fight a Facebook that doesn't even exist anymore: Interactive brand conversations are the future, not games!" For the benefit of Google and any upstart eyeing the social space, Rifkin breaks down the field into four basic truths: Real social engagement comes from photo-sharing and chat ("Real social engagement comes from photo-sharing and chat"); What worked two years ago does not work now; Engaging applications spam their users ("Google …

Hold onto your hat, Groupon! Yelp just announced that its first local "deal" is live. Yup, as the local review site quietly acknowledged last month, it's moving into the white-hot local deals space -- or what everyone, including Business Insider, still refers to as Groupon territory. Still, "Yelp is a natural fit to become a big player in daily deals, given its reach, its position as an authority on restaurants, and its existing sales force with local merchants," notes BI. Daily deals will be rolling out in San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere "soon," but doesn't get more specific …

And for Google's next trick... CNet is reporting that the search giant could soon turn Gmail into a formidable communications hub by adding the ability to make phone calls from its Google Chat interface. "Google is testing a Web-based service within Gmail that will allow users to place phone calls from their in-boxes," CNet reports. "It's launched from the Google Chat window on the lower left-hand side of a Gmail page and allows users to place and receive calls from within their contacts through a user interface that strongly resembles the one used in Google Voice."

It's hard to imagine anything spoiling teens' rapacious appetite for Facebook... until you hear about a story like this: "Three teens who were on a 69-name hit list posted on Facebook have been killed in the past 10 days in a southwestern Colombian town," officials tell CNN. "Police say they do not know who posted the list or why the names are on it." The hit list on Facebook, which was posted August 17, gave the people named three days to leave the town of Puerto Asis or be executed, Volmar Perez Ortiz, a federal official whose title is …

San Francisco-based social media marketing startup Flowtown just closed $750,000 in seed funding from a long list of angels, including Dave McClure of 500 Startups and Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures. GigaOm calls Flowtown "yet another social media marketing company, but ... not just another tool for monitoring customer feedback through their tweets." On the contrary, Flowtown takes a list of your existing customers' email addresses and delivers profiles of their social network participation, influence and demographics, and helps you communicate with them. To date, 15,000 businesses -- including many small e-commerce shops -- are using Flowtown at a …

Gaming apps are big business, today, but they really grab the industry's attention when their creators start talking in terms of Hollywood franchises. That's the case with Finnish app maker Rovio, which is telling Variety about plans to turn its "Angry Birds" gaming brand into everything from TV shows and movies to toys and comicbooks. "The company's founders have been making the rounds of the studios and tenpercenteries [sic!] over the last several weeks weighing which ancillary offers to move forward with first," Variety reports. "Any such move would be an unusual one for a mobile gamemaker, considering most …

Kindle sales are booming, but all is not well for Amazon and its ambitious e-book business. Indeed, "A month after jolting the book industry with a deal to give Amazon exclusive digital access to some of the country's best-known literary works, literary agent Andrew Wylie is largely abandoning the agreement," reports The Wall Street Journal. The Amazon deal was reportedly reached after Wylie failed to agree to terms with publishers for electronic rights to his authors' existing titles. According to The Journal, it represented a major deal in the war between Amazon and its two biggest rivals in the …

With an eye on Netflix and Hulu, Apple is in advanced talks with News Corp. to let iTunes users rent TV shows for 99 cents, sources tell Bloomberg. Per the deal, "Viewers would be able to rent programs from News Corp.'s Fox for 48 hours," three separate sources tell Bloomberg. Meanwhile, CBS, NBC Universal and Walt Disney also are reportedly in talks about joining the effort. "The content deals would give Apple users access to some of the most-watched shows on TV and increase the appeal of its devices, including the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch," Bloomberg reasons "Adding …