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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has formally launched a political group aimed at revamping immigration policy, boosting education and encouraging investment in scientific research.

AOL has been the sad sack of online media for so long now that it almost makes Yahoo look good. But at least the latest quarter showed the first year-over-year revenue growth in eight years–eight!–so it’s worth looking a little more closely at whether CEO Tim Armstrong has a handle on what can bring the Internet pioneer back from irrelevance.

Notorious for flubbing solid acquisitions, Yahoo has bought six small companies under Marissa Mayer in an attempt to cultivate not only innovative technologies, but the engineers who run them.

A year ago, OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter sold the games-maker to Zynga for $180 million-plus, and became the head of the company's New York outpost. Now he’s out. Porter’s departure isn’t a huge surprise, given both his timing (presumably long enough to hit certain employment and/or earn-out goals) and the fact that Zynga ended up writing off at least half of its OMGPOP deal a few months after it closed.

Facebook's stock market debut left founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a paper fortune currently valued at $13 billion -- and a 2012 tax bill of around $1.1 billion.vZuckerberg's whopping tax hit stems from his move last May to increase his stake in Facebook. On the day of Facebook's initial public offering, Zuckerberg exercised a stock option and purchased 60 million Facebook shares at a "strike price" of 6 cents each.

With the BlackBerry Z10 poised to make its U.S. debut later this week, it's comments from CEO Thorston Heins about the iPhone that have generated buzz. In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, Heins discussed the importance of staying on top of smartphone advancements, citing Apple as an example.

Google Reader is headed to the tech graveyard, with Google announcing that it will shut down the RSS service on July 1. The justification is that Google wants to continue its path to put more resources into fewer products — or, as Larry Page put it in 2011 “more wood behind fewer arrows.”

Android lead Andy Rubin will step down from his position, handing over the reins of Google’s mobile operating system to Chrome lead Sundar Pichai. Google chief executive Larry Page broke the news Wednesday in a post on the company’s official blog, saying that Rubin felt the time had come to move on — albeit within the company.

The Yahoo evolution continues - this time with a few more swings of the axe.
Friday, Yahoo announced that it would be sunsetting a handful of its products in a move consistent with CEO Marissa Mayer's plan to aggressively prune the unruly conglomerate.

Andrew Mason isn’t leaving Groupon empty handed... One thing is crystal clear already: Mason has a tidy nest egg — roughly $260 million — to spend on whatever tropical island he may hit to nurse his wounds, or to splurge on the fat camp he referenced in a letter to employees.