The deal and its terms were never announced and Apple has not confirmed it. But Computerworld notes a summer tweet from a Placebase customer claiming the acquisition had been made in “hush-hush” fashion. The tweet also notes that Placebase founder and CEO Jaron Waldman’s LinkedIn profile now shows him as part of the “Geo Team” at Apple. And Placebase.com, which once touted the company’s Pushpin mapping platform has been taken offline.

Reached for comment, Apple (AAPL) declined to offer one–or to confirm that the acquisition has even taken place. But assuming there has been an acquisition–I know the evidence we’re dealing with here is circumstantial at best–this might explain the increasingly strained relationship between Apple and Google (GOOG), the Apple board’s Schmidt-ectomy and the Google Voice for iPhone debacle in which the companies offered two very different stories to explain the application’s rejection/delay from the App Store. If Apple has acquired Placebase, it could certainly use that company’s technology to replace Google Maps with an in-house mapping solution.

Of course, Apple might have something else in mind entirely–adding a new layer of customization to its current map offering, perhaps. After all, that was Placebase’s forte–enhancing maps with private and public data sets (demographics, crime data, etc.). In any event, we’ll never know unless Apple tells us, and right now, the company clearly has no intention of doing so.

Among the enhancements to Yahoo’s search page design–the features that, in the company’s words, “exemplify how Yahoo! is continuing to innovate in search technology and the user experience”–are the following:

• a unified, Bing-like design
• an enhanced search assistant
• the ability to play video within search results
• a set of filters that allow users to refine their searches based on prior queries or follow-on searches of other sites like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (click on image below to enlarge).

“The Web is huge, billions of pages, millions and millions of sites and domains,” explained Larry Cornett, Yahoo’s VP of search products and design. “You do not care about all of it. We are bringing front and center the features that are going to make it easier and safer to search.”

Which is all well and good. But isn’t that exactly what Google and Microsoft claim to be doing as well? Doesn’t everyone have a search assistant these days? Doesn’t Microsoft’s Bing already offer in-line video viewing in its search results? (Google once did as well, but disabled the feature over performance issues.) And aren’t Yahoo’s filters basically another version of Google’s “Show More Results” feature? They certainly appear to be.

So these things aren’t true innovations; rather, they’re innovations of the new-to-Yahoo sort. They’re table stakes at a search game that Yahoo has already lost. So “bringing front and center the features that are going to make it easier and safer to search” doesn’t really mean much when they’re already front and center in market-leading offerings, as Danny Sullivan notes over at Search Engine Land.

“There are certainly some aspects that are becoming commoditized in the foundation in search,” Cornett said. “You can either overwhelm people and give them millions and millions of results or show them what they care about the most. That is exactly where we’re going to continue, building a search experience that understands what they’re looking for.”

That sounds great–except it’s not anything different from what Microsoft says. And if Google doesn’t say it, that’s because searchers are voting with their actual search activity that Google’s already doing it. In addition, while Cornett suggested that Yahoo is somehow spending huge amounts of time and money coming up with a better personalized experience over competitors, the fact remains that Google has long offered personalized results that outdistance Yahoo.

“We’re very excited to have Dayne Sampson join the team, reporting to Debra Chrapaty, corporate vice president, Global Foundation Services,” a Microsoft spokesperson commented about the hire. “Operations and foundation services are key to delivering the Microsoft Software plus Services vision, and Dayne’s extensive operations and industry experience will be a strong asset for GFS and the company.”

Sampson’s departure follows similar migrations by Sean Suchter, Yahoo’s VP of search technology; Qi Lu, one of its top search scientists; Larry Heck, former VP of search & advertising sciences at Yahoo Labs; and Jan Pedersen, who was once chief scientist and VP of Yahoo’s (YHOO) Search and Advertising Technology Group. As I said last week, If Yahoo employee defections to Microsoft continue apace, there may come a day when Redmond will no longer need to buy the struggling company’s search business. It will already have acquired it.

Oh, one last thing: time to update that LinkedIn profile, Dayne…

In order to build the necessary respect and win the mindshare of the Internet community, I recommend a recipe not unlike the one we’ve used with our TCP/IP efforts: embrace, extend, then innovate. Phase 1 (Embrace): All participants need to establish a solid understanding of the infostructure and the community–determine the needs and the trends of the user base. Only then can we effectively enable Microsoft system products to be great Internet systems. Phase 2 (Extend): Establish relationships with the appropriate organizations and corporations with goals similar to ours. Offer well-integrated tools and services compatible with established and popular standards that have been developed in the Internet community.”

–J Allard, corporate vice president of design and development for the Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division, “Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet,” 1994

In February, Microsoft (MSFT) surprised industry watchers and embraced the idea of data portability, throwing its support behind OpenID, a decentralized digital-identity protocol.

This morning came the inevitable extension of that idea, the announcement of a partnership with five social networks on a new data-portability strategy. LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo (TWX) and Facebook have all agreed to use Mirosoft’s Windows Live Contacts API to, in the words of John Richards, director of Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform, “create a safe, secure two-way street for users to move their relationships between our respective services.“

In other words “Windows Live Messenger.” Certainly, it’s hard not to look at Microsoft’s announcement that way, given the simultaneous debut of invite2messenger.net, a new Microsoft Web site through which people can invite friends from participating social networks to join their Windows Live Messenger contact list.

“In completing this two-way street, both Windows Live and our partners have paid special attention to relationship context and privacy management in order to create the best possible user experience,” explains Richards. “We understand that just because people have a friend relationship with a contact on one social network, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want that same relationship on another network. To preserve the context of the relationship, we are requiring that relationships be re-established in each experience with permission from the friend or contact, rather than automatically storing the data. We encourage you to visit www.invite2messenger.net to see these ideas in action, and to invite your Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn and Tagged friends to join you on the world’s largest instant messaging network, Windows Live Messenger.”

Quite a coup for Facebook. As Google’s vice president of global online sales and operations, Sandberg managed the division that handles sales for about 99% of the company’s advertisers. Her absence at Google (GOOG) will almost certainly be felt as deeply as her presence at Facebook, which stands to benefit a great deal from her experience building Google’s online sales and operations organization. Said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “She has just about the most relevant industry experience for Facebook, especially since we need to scale our operations and scale them globally.”

Interesting to see a Google veteran like Sandberg jump ship for Facebook. Especially after the departures of
Gideon Yu, now Facebook’s CFO, and Benjamin Ling, who heads up Facebook’s developer platform. Perhaps the search giant is beginning to suffer from the same sort of brain drain it brought to bear on the industry a few years back. Recall this 2005 quote from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman?

Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did. It’s largely that they’re hiring up so many talented people, and the fact they’re working on so many different things. It’s harder for start-ups to do interesting stuff right now.”

Like the Facebook Platform, “InApps” allows developers to create productivity applications for LinkedIn or to port some of the site’s features to outside Web sites. But unlike Facebook, these widgets must be approved by LinkedIn before they’re deployed.

Clearly, the company has no intention of offering users the chance to send electronic hamburgers to each other, or pop their zits. “What we are trying to do is make professionals more productive by making them able to find one another, learn more about each other and communicate efficiently with each other,” LinkedIn Chief Executive Dan Nye told Reuters. “It’s not a place where you waste two hours of your time trying to find a date.”

Launching in concert with InApps are a new look and a number of new features designed to make the site more interactive. Among them: a news feed customized by the company and the industry in which a user works and an interesting BusinessWeek application that lets you see how you’re connected through LinkedIn to people and companies mentioned in its articles. With such upgrades, LinkedIn–which claims 17 million registered users globally and about 5 million unique per month–hopes to dominate the business of business networking. Personal networking and self-expression, it seems to be saying, are best left to others.

But is it reasonable to think that people will continue to maintain two social-networking profiles–one for their personal life and another for their professional life? LinkedIn CEO Nye says it is, especially given the value proposition LinkedIn offers its users. “…People have profiles on both services,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But on LinkedIn, you’re not going to get poked, there’s no zombies and you’re not going to share your music list. … Now when someone says, ‘Hey, let’s go down and meet at Starbucks,’ you don’t have to ask five people if they’re Tom.”

To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories. Our Tech 10 appears below.

1. Bienvenue, iPhone: France Telecom has begun selling Apple’s cellphone at selected Orange stores in Paris and other cities. The device itself will cost about $1,106 with no plan attached, or 399 euros (about $590) with one of four “Orange for iPhone” plans, Computerworld notes, adding it will cost 100 euros ($148) to unlock the handset.
2. FCC Says ‘Uncle’: A proposal by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to tightly regulate the cable TV industry has been “drastically” trimmed, reports the New York Times, which noted that Martin had sought more diverse programming and reduced cable costs.
3. Amazon: 1; Feds: 0. The federal government has lost its bid to compel Amazon to release details about the book-buying habits of thousands of its customers, according to Declan McCullogh on his blog, The Iconoclast. The Justice Department sought the information to prove its case against a former Madison, Wisc., city official accused of evading taxes in selling used books online.
4. Google, Online Snitch? The search colossus has voluntarily given the IP address of an Israeli blogger who used “Google Blogger” to allegedly slander municipal council members running for reelection, the Israeli Web site Globes Online reports, calling the move “unprecedented.”
5. YouTube, Censor? The popular video-sharing site has suspended the account of a well-known Egyptian anti-torture activist who posted videos of alleged brutality by a number of Egyptian policemen, Wael Abbas told Reuters, claiming that about 100 images he had sent were no longer available on YouTube.
6. But It Doesn’t Mind those CondéNet Vids: CondéNet is announcing today that it will distribute videos from its various consumer-interest Web sites via YouTube, The Wall Street Journal reports, adding that the deal is the latest in a series for Condé Nast Publications’ digital division.
7. LinkedIn Link to News Corp.? A “well-placed source” has told VentureBeat that News Corp. (owner of this site) is in talks to buy business-networking site LinkedIn. But LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye told Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky that “It would take a helluva lot” to get him to sell.
8. The Earth, Updated: Google Maps is updating its features, prompting Duncan Riley at TechCrunch to wonder if the new features won’t ultimately send Google Earth down the path of the dodo.
9. Feeling Insecure: Web applications and holes in Windows Office are the top concerns of Internet users, according to the annual security report by SANS, a computer training and security organization, in its Top 20 risk assessment for 2007.
10. How Green Is My Gaming? Greenpeace has released a report slamming Nintendo and Microsoft for making their video-game consoles with toxic chemicals, reports BusinessWeek, noting that the enviro group’s latest ranking of electronics firms this week also highlights questions over the environmental impact of the products and how much consumers care about them.

–posted by Associate Editor John Sullivan

OpenSocial, as Google has named it, is a set of common APIs (application programming interfaces) that will enable developers to write applications for a broad range of Web sites and services without any individual customization. Think of it as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “social graph” but writ large.

And while some might smirk at OpenSocial’s initial roster of participants–LinkedIn, hi5, Ning, Friendster, Plaxo and Google’s own “big in Brazil” social network Orkut–it does include a few big names: business software makers Salesforce.com and Oracle. Oh, and Google. Which, as TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld points out, already has much of the critical mass it needs to push this effort forward: “Google already has so much data on you, depending on how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything together. … Over time, Google will connect all of these together in different ways, along with data about you from other social services across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying all of these apps together underneath. The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network.”

Comments like Moskovitz’s are a far cry from the accusations of talent-hoarding leveled at Google just a few years back. “Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did,” LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman told the New York Times in 2005. “It’s largely that they’re hiring up so many talented people, and the fact they’re working on so many different things. It’s harder for start-ups to do interesting stuff right now.”

Quite a contrast in perceptions, yeah? Funny, how quickly the hottest-of-hot Valley companies can begin to lose currency in tech’s talent pool. Not that we haven’t seen this sort of thing before. “Twenty years from now, Google … will essentially become the Microsoft of today,” said management consultant David Goodenough. “This is the norm.”