Mark Zuckerberg needs no introduction these days, what with all the magazine covers and morning news shows. My mother knows who he is now, and my mother can hardly turn on a computer.

Dr. Louis Bush Swisher died from the complications of a brain aneurysm that burst without warning one sunny Sunday morning less than 40 years ago.

For the record, my mother is an astonishing and loving grandmother.

Having a baby had always seemed the easiest and most natural thing to do, and I had never felt - even in my most furtive days of coming out - that being gay would mean I could not become a mother.

As anyone who has covered the company for any length of time knows, Yahoo's record on major decision-making has been akin to a hippie commune - a lot of wrangling internally in a culture where everyone seems to have a voice and a reticence to push the button to launch.

Now I am not against widgets, those small third-party applications that people can put on their Web pages on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, in general.