They say you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep. Joel Jewitt is inclined to agree.

Upon reviewing your social networking friend list, Jewitt and his colleagues at the San Francisco-based data-mining firm Rapleaf say they can help predict which ads you’ll pay attention to and whether or not you’re a worthwhile risk for a credit card or a loan–all without hacking into any accounts or breaking any laws.

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Yet another News Corporation (NWS) executive is talking about Google (GOOG), and yet again, I feel like they have no concept about how Google interacts with their web pages. Which is frightening, since they’re being very vocal about how they’re supposedly wronged by Google. Please, someone, give them a search marketing 101 course.

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In case you missed it, Google (GOOG) acquired mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million in stock.

There’s a lot of speculation on why, but the obvious reason is that Google wants more direct access to what they are betting heavily on–that mobile is the next great advertising medium. It’s made a huge bet on mobile with Android, which is an obvious move to own the mobile search ad market, but now it’s got its hooks into the mobile display ad market as well.

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Google (GOOG) plans to buy back $750 million of its common stock to offset dilution from shares to be issued in the pending all-stock acquisition of AdMob, CEO Eric Schmidt told Bloomberg yesterday.

In a research note, Broadpoint.Amtech analyst Benjamin Schachter notes that this will be the first time Google has ever repurchased any of its own shares, despite its $22 billion cash position.

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Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) are all offering some form of courtesy Wi-Fi through the holiday season, at venues such as airports, hotels and Times Square.

Each has a relatively new service it’s hoping to attract consumers to, whether it’s Google’s Chrome browser, Microsoft’s Bing search engine or Yahoo’s revamped home page and customization features.

Google is working with Wi-Fi providers Boingo Wireless and Advanced Wireless Group to provide connectivity at 47 airports, including Boston, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami and Seattle from today until Jan. 15 (sorry New Yorkers, JFK, LGA and EWR are not on the list).

“We know that this is a very hectic travel season for people, and we hope that free Wi-Fi will make both traveling and connecting with friends and family a little bit easier,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search, said in a statement.

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Eric Schmidt is brimming with Bay Area pride.

In the 33 years that the Google (GOOG) CEO has lived in the Bay Area, Schmidt says he has watched a long list of regions try–and fail–to create technology capitals of Silicon Valley’s scale.

“You can tell them by doing a query on Google like Silicon X, or something like that,” he said in an interview last month. “The Silicon Glen, that was Scotland. Silicon Alley, that is New York. Just do the search. They are all there.” He continued, “They have had some success but they aren’t the scale of Silicon Valley yet anyway.”

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Google Wave, the Internet giant’s new online collaboration tool, has generated much buzz among developers, and now it has a large geeky fan following doing strange and relatively useless things. You can check out some of the silliness at the Google Wave Extensions List.

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I like to think of myself as an aficionado of business disruption. After all, as a venture capitalist it is imperative to understand ways in which a smaller private company can gain the upper hand on a large incumbent. One of the most successful ways to do this is to change the rules of the game in such a way that the incumbent would need to abandon or destroy its core business in order to lay chase to your strategy.

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One of the frequently heard complaints about iPhone applications is that with more than 85,000 options, finding good ones can be tricky and time-consuming. Could the answer be yet another app?

Envio Networks on Tuesday is launching Chorus, a free app that shows users the ones their friends are trying out and suggests ones that might interest them. The Andover, Mass.-based company, which has received funding from Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners, specializes in social-networking technology and saw the Apple (AAPL) device as a good showcase for what it can do.

“We think that shared discovery is a very powerful concept,” said Manish Jha, Envio’s chief executive, who ran ESPN’s mobile unit previously.

To use Chorus, you register and add some friends, which you can do by inviting phone contacts, Facebook friends or even contacts in your immediate vicinity, who must also be Chorus users. You can then see apps they’ve added in an “activity feed,” which looks and behaves similarly to Facebook’s news feed.

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has mounted a recent push to turn network neutrality “principles” into official regulations–and in doing so has stirred up the net neutrality hornet’s nest once again. The issues involved are thorny when you wade deep into the weeds, but consumer-level support for network neutrality seems largely driven by simple principle: AT&T (ATT) should not be “speeding up” websites with deep pockets, leaving everyone else to languish in the slow lane.

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Facebook Wednesday threw its software developers a bone, releasing a “roadmap” of forthcoming features to help them plan their products. They include new ways for software applications, like games, to messages Facebook users when their friends want to play Scrabble, for instance.

The company also said it will be releasing a new navigation menu to allow users to gain quicker access to hundreds of thousands of applications from the left-hand side of their screens.

At the event at its Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters, the company also snuck in some news of a slightly different flavor. The social networking site said that it plans next year to release a tool that will allow any Web page to show up in Facebook search results.

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It’s long been hard for health-care consumers to learn how much doctor visits or hospital stays will cost them. That’s now beginning to change, as a growing array of Web sites try to lift the veil on pricing.

The online resources come from insurers, government agencies, Internet companies and medical-care providers. The sites aren’t perfect: Unlike online retailers that sell products such as televisions, the health sites can’t typically give exact prices for medical procedures and services. Still, consumers can get a rough idea of typical costs in their area, and that can help them choose doctors and hospitals, budget for medical costs and sort out disputed bills.

John Rogers, a funeral-home owner in Frankfort, Ky., says he checked pricing on HealthcareBlueBook.com in June after a hospital told him it would charge a facility fee of about $4,200 for his wife’s outpatient gastrointestinal surgery. The Web site suggested that a reasonable price would be closer to $1,300, based on what insurers paid facilities for such procedures in his region.

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Google (GOOG) has seen its fair share of troubles in China, from having its flagship search engine blocked to being scolded for peddling pornography. Last week, the Chinese Written Works Copyright Society accused the company of infringing the rights of Chinese authors through its Google Books project.

And the drama continues. Now, the Web site of the People’s Daily is accusing Google of “malicious revenge” after Google searches for the People’s Daily Online’s books section turned up warnings that read: “This site may contain malicious software that could harm your computer.”

An article posted on the People’s Daily books page, from the Beijing Times (in Chinese), quoted an official with the People’s Daily site as saying he had received numerous calls from readers who said they were unable to access the site through Google. The unnamed official said there was no harmful software on the site, and that he believed the block was due to the site’s reporting of the Google Books story. The site began featuring stories on the rights-infringement issue on Oct. 21, and even created a special page on the subject. “Starting on the 21st [we] were maliciously blocked,” the official said, according to the report.

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Geeks and ghouls rejoice: the Internet has come up with a way to boost your Halloween haul.

The folks at Zillow.com have created their first Trick or Treat Housing Index, which draws on the site’s real estate data to determine the top-five neighborhoods in Seattle and Los Angeles to maximize candy intake this Saturday.

How’d they do that? “There is a common belief that wealthy neighborhoods are the Holy Grail for harvesting the most Halloween candy,” blogs Zillow’s Whitney Tyner. But to provide what it calls a more holistic approach, Zillow factored in home values alongside additional data on population density, neighborhood walkability, and local crime. “Based on those variables, this Index represents neighborhoods that will provide the most candy, with the least walking, and minimum safety risks,” she wrote.

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Google Inc. (GOOG) said it will limit the number of phone numbers its Internet phone service blocks, in a partial bow to federal regulators’ concerns that it was skirting rules designed to ensure that consumers phone calls are connected seamlessly.

A Federal Communications Commission spokesman said the agency was reviewing the letter but had no comment. It’s not clear if Google’s actions will settle the FCC’s inquiry, since the agency has historically taken the position that phone companies can’t block calls or stop consumers from calling whomever they want.

In its letter to the FCC, the search giant said its Google Voice call management service will only block a limited number of phone numbers instead of all calls to some rural areas where it costs more to connect calls.

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