Everyone, it seemed, was friending everyone; Glenn Beck was even snapping fan pics of Michelle Obama and chatting up liberal internet publisher Arianna Huffington (see selected Time 100 tweets below).

Some on stage, where the founders of Twitter were honored, limited their remarks to 140 characters.

And, like the hot microblogging startup, the event was one of the few remaining bubbles where the world's economic problems could be forgotten: The champagne and food reportedly flowed freely.

Not that everyone appreciated the insulation. Page Six's Paula Froelich was as disgruntled at having to attend the event as she was thrilled getting out of last night's Met Costume Ball. Ann Coulter had trouble finding a safe table, according to some whispers overheard by Glynnis MacNicol. And Time's James Poniewozik, stuck in the cheap seats at his own event, brought word that host Jimmy Fallon was scared by visions of a drunken full complement of View ladies.

(UPDATE: Froelich emails to set the record straight, "LOVED the Time 100 — was a heck of a lot of fun - was just annoyed about having to deal with subway in black tie and changing shoes/putting on makeup on the D train due to security for M.O. (I'm not dumb - i remember the inauguration fracas, you couldnt take a cab within 50 blocks of the Pbamas!).")

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Some Twitter selections:

Pictures were taken, on and off the red carpet:

Michelle Obama was, naturally, sleeveless, and Stella McCartney requested she stay that way, forever, for the good of fashion. (Getty Images)

M.I.A. was sporting purple lipstick and a denim-y jacket. Glynnis MacNicol caught a shot of the singer mingling.

Liv Tyler, Stella McCartney and Kate Hudson were mingling, A-list style. (Getty)

Oprah always mingles A-list-style, by definition. (MacNicol)

A.R. Rahman and Falu perform. (Celebrity photographer (in a way) Evan Williams)

MacNicol becomes meta-paparazzo.

UPDATE: Keith Kelly from the New York Post put together a cool chart of who sat where at host Time Inc's tables. Highlights:

Power table: Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Time Inc. bigshots John Huey and Richard Stengel (Time editor).

Cool kids' table: Biz Stone of Twitter, hottie Obama speechwriter Jon Favreai, Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels and model/designer Lauren Bush.

Geek table: Conservative pundit Ann Coulter, stats whiz Nate Silver, Ford CEO Alan Mullally and Time assistant managing editor Michael Duffy.

April Fool's is always a big event for Silicon Valley companies. The annual festival of pranks is a defining event for geek culture. When he worked at Sun Microsystems, colleagues of Eric Schmidt, now Google's CEO, disassembled a Volkswagen Beetle and reassembled it inside his office. Google's pranks over the years have ranged from Google Romance to a toilet-based Internet service provider.

Since he joined, a Google tipster tells us, Krantz has been the wordsmith behind Google's tomfoolery — "Google uses the same weird writer genius every year." He promises the prank will be "very good and totally insane." But isn't the ultimate April Fool's joke here that Google, which worships at the altar of the algorithm, actually employs a veteran of the world's most prestigious magazine?

(Photo by Ted Thai/Life)

Time political correspondent Karen Tumulty shared some Capitol trivia.

New York Times TV blogger Brian Stelter experienced a Christian Bale problem.

Federated Media online-ad huckster John Battelle had time to Twitter, but not to think. See how that works?

Wired.com editor Dylan Tweney went hungry after a colleague ate his lunch.

Could the sushi thief have been Wired writer Steven Levy, who confessed to feeling hungry? Nah — Levy was at TED and you weren't.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

In Time's latest cover story — which you can read without charge on the World Wide Web — Isaacson writes that publications cannot rely on advertising revenues alone, and should get their readers to pay per article instead:

A person who wants one day's edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment.

We ought to cheer the notion that publications will try to start charging for content online. Writers at ad-supported publications will pay the fees and deliver crisp summaries and analysis for free. Outlets which charge will end up reduced to the business of trade publications, which only manage to extract money from people who need the information for their job.

That's pretty much what Time did in its early years, when it was a fancy printed blog. Editors there subscribed to the New York Times and other papers, and wrote up a weekly digest, which Time's founder, Henry Luce, then sold for rather less money than one would pay at the newsstand for all their sources.

But we have to wonder where Isaacson got this idea? Here's a hint: In 1995, Josh Quittner, whom Isaacson had hired the year before, wrote an essay about "Way New Journalism" for the online arm of Wired. Quittner wrote:

Nearly two-thirds of the cost of putting out a newspaper or magazine is the cost of printing it (paper, ink, printing presses) and distributing it (trucks, delivery folks, mail). Uncouple the content from the production and distribution costs, and you see the kind of cash we're dealing with here. Introduce the possibility that by the end of the decade, 100 million people will be on the Net. Now, give those people the technical ability to pay 3 cents for each and every story they read. If only 1 million people read, say, one Time story on O.J. Simpson, that's US$30,000. Pretty soon, you're talking about real money.

When Quittner noted that the technical infrastructure for such micropayments was missing in 1995, it was true. When Wired repeated the claim a year later, it was still true. But when Isaacson mouths the verity in 2009, he makes a fool of himself. He writes that PayPal does not accept micropayments; in fact, it does. Amazon.com lets anyone build their own micropayments service using its billing engine. The existence of 99-cent iTunes songs and 10-cent text messages show that consumers are willing to pay small amounts for digital content.

The problem with micropayments is not technology. It's that consumers are fundamentally uninterested in paying per article. Isaacson dismisses the problem of "mental transaction costs," but it's quite real. It's almost impossible to determine the value of an article before you read it. And the amounts we're talking about — 3 cents? 5 cents? 10 cents? — aren't worth the time it takes to decide how much one is willing to pay.

The advocates of micropayments also forget the basic law of supply and demand. Editors today increasingly talk about "commodity news" — the numbingly same mass of articles written about the same news event, adding nothing to the reader's knowledge. Why would anyone pay for those? The snobs of print media also forget that they have long competed with free radio and television news broadcasts. The news will come out, one way or another. It's the classic vanity of writers to think that they have created the one perfect story that exceeds all others. The clear-minded statistics of Web usage quickly reveal this as a delusion.

Quittner (who, full disclosure, was my boss for six years at Time and Business 2.0 and talked about micopayments incessantly) was right to note the liberating effect of getting rid of the costs of print media. But he was wrong about how we'd pay for it.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom may be known nationally as the patron saint of gay marriage, but back home, Newsom has built his career on things like buying fleets of hybrid vehicles and installing windmills near the Golden Gate Bridge.

Small problem — as Curbed SF points out, Newsom has never built a windmill or anything else energy-related anywhere near the Golden Gate Bridge. Not that such considerations would quell admiration from right-coast hacks looking to promote handsome, young politicians for the benefit of the party machine.

If you live in New York, you might think San Francisco's Gavin "Gavvy-gav" Newsom is some sort of John Lindsay-handsome but Michael Bloomberg-effective miraculous wonder. He married the gays! And instituted universal healthcare! And tans his hot bod with solar panels! It's okay, we understand — you guys have never had as firm a grasp on left-coast reality as you thought you did. In truth, Newsom's administration has failed on such basic points as violent crime, public transportation, and affordable housing.

While local New Yorker correspondent Tad Friend chewed on Newsom's presentation hook, line and sinker, even he can't be entirely blamed. The regional press corps has been filled with unapologetic boosters since the gold rush days. With Nancy Pelosi, our local political machine's grand inquisitor, running the House of Representatives, it's only natural that we press a lanky golden-boy type upon you poor suckers statewide. For my sake and yours, however, don't believe the hype.

Gavvy-gav was, and is, a ditzy jock who just happened to be related to somone endeared to the Getty oil fortune. As a perennial ringer for upwardly mobile softball teams otherwise stacked with the obliged noblesse, he rose quickly from above the muddied ranks of local activists and condo association street fighters. Picking topics which cost him little political capital locally while presenting them as daring moves nationally, Newsom has cemented the perception of his position firmly between the socially center-left and economically center-right.

Which, honestly, is about the perfect balance for the pot-smoking, free-market and gay-loving populace which forms his constituency. Still, it's no frame to hang an Obama-level cult of personality on. Newsom's feather-light shoulders and uncannily cheery countenance really can't take the weight of serious responsibility. Take pity, east coasters, and please don't bother to burden him with it.

(Photo by Franco Folini)

• Weebly: It has a head start, so let's see if we can push them back down!
  
• ING Direct: A boring bank, but its fees are low, so vote it up.
  
• StumbleUpon: Take pity on the StumbleUpon guys: They just got bought by eBay, so they could use some cheering up.
  
• Bix: How meta — voting for Yahoo's online version of the American Idol vote-a-thon. We're betting this one doesn't come back next week.