No. Metcalfe literally ate his words two years after his prediction. In the decade since, Internet infrastructure upgrades continue to outpace growth. So even though worldwide traffic grew by half last year, peak utilization is now less than 50 percent of available capacity. Don't believe out-of-date claims about "last mile" bottlenecks, either. Home broadband users have been built out to more traffic than they're using. Comcast's caps are about per-customer profitability, not system overload. If anything, you should feel encouraged to use the Net even more. Just make sure your ISP is willing to let you have at it. (Photo by zinkwazi)

The theory it's based on is nonsense. It is true that ideas spread virally through the population. But it turns out that there's not a single set of influencers who are reliable Typhoid Marys. Duncan Watts, a former Columbia University researcher who now works for Yahoo, found in a study that the emergence of contagious ideas is random. Repeated experiments found that anyone can start a trend, and it's impossible to predict who those people will be.

Watts's research is not 100 percent conclusive; his models might not translate perfectly to the real world. So let's go there! In April, a study by Canadian research firm Pollara found that word of mouth works — nearly 80 percent said they'd buy products recommended by a friend or family member. But word of mouse? Only 23 percent said they'd buy something touted by a blogger. "This shows that popularity doesn't always equate to credibility," Pollara executive Robert Hutton told MediaPost. "Marketers might have to reconsider who the real influencers are out there."

In backing Scoble, Seagate hoped to buy cheap buzz. It's a convenient fantasy for marketers: Find the one magic guy to woo, then watch him chat up your company to Wall Street traders! Seagate would have been better off sending big hard drives to a dozen bloggers. Or a hundred. Or, for that matter, a random assortment of people, whether or not they have a habit of typing out the contents of their brain every 3 seconds. Anyone — literally — would have been a better choice than Scoble.

• Facebook is borrowing money. Actually, no. Facebook's $100 million is a lease, not a loan. Facebook is on the hook for rent payments, and will have the option to buy the equipment at the end of the lease. But technically, it's not on the hook for the $100 million. That said, it's hard to imagine how, at the end of the lease, Facebook functions without the servers it's renting. What Facebook is doing with the lease is delaying the day it has to buy its servers outright.
• Facebook is borrowing money because it can't sell its equity. Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider put forward this theory. In moments like these, one wonders less why the former stock analyst was barred from the securities industry. A venture lease like Facebook's usually requires an "equity kicker" — warrants to purchase stock, the corporate version of the stock options employees get. In this case, Facebook negotiated a warrant-free deal, but it's given TriplePoint warrants in the past. So Facebook's lender, TriplePoint, is betting that Facebook's equity is worth something; it wouldn't have offered it leases in the past otherwise. A warrant-free deal may not be great for TriplePoint, but it's great for Facebook.
• Facebook won't know what to do with all those servers. This is the most nonsensical theory of all. Facebook isn't renting servers for the workaday business of displaying webpages and photos. While it needs some more servers to keep up with site growth, the main reason it needs so many servers, I believe, is that it's planning to use them on the massive job of analyzing data to target advertising and content to its users.
• Gideon Yu must be an idiot. We've ribbed Yu for being a bit slick. But as YouTube's CFO, Yu negotiated the company's sale to Google for $1.65 billion. Shall we not give him some small amount of credit for knowing what he's doing?

And as for that bromide about tech companies not incurring debt? In the form of leases, they do it all the time, from landlords and hardware makers. Even startups lease their offices, and IBM, HP, Dell, Sun and others have large financing arms that help put equipment in customers' hands without money upfront. Save for the size of this deal and the name of the renter, TriplePoint's lease would have been wholly unremarkable.

There is one question that remains: How TriplePoint will come up with the money. This is reportedly the largest deal the lender has ever financed. Let's take TriplePoint at its word, though. The company's website says it has says it has "the capacity to put more than $1.5 billion to work" — curiously hedged wording. Note that TriplePoint doesn't actually say it has $1.5 billion on hand to lend. But that's TriplePoint's problem, not Facebook's.

A lot like it used to — everyone's still working to pay their agent, their lawyer and their accountant. No one producing video for online distribution is even thinking about hiring a maid, gardener or driver yet — not even Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. And if you think Google AdSense will cover those costs, you'll probably end up begging for change on the boulevard of broken dreams. Or maybe the off-brand Spider-Man will have a heart attack and you can take his place amusing tourists. Licensing deals, merchandise and sponsors are still the only ticket to Tinseltown riches. And old showbiz types will milk young upstarts for every penny on that end. (Photo by Steve Zaslavsky)

Mayer's admission also destroys another myth spun by Google PR: That Susan Wojcicki deserves credit for AdSense, the current name for Google's content-matching system. In July, I exposed that as a lie by pointing out that AdSense was a product acquired by Google, not something Wojcicki came up with in a brainstorm. Google ur-spokesman David Krane, at the time, countered that by telling CNBC that Wojcicki "directed and invented" Google's in-house version of AdSense, which launched after the real AdSense but before Google acquired the company that made it.

Now we know the full truth: Paul Buchheit invented what Google now calls AdSense — not Wojcicki, and certainly not Mayer, who can only claim that she didn't try harder to stop it. Of course, it's convenient, politically, for Krane and others to credit Wojcicki. She is, after all, Google cofounder Sergey Brin's sister-in-law.

To get them out of the way, of course. Yes, yes, Adam Bosworth, the former Microsoft engineer, was a glorious hire for Google back in the day. Yes, yes, he invented XML and the Access database and so on and so forth, and he sort of invented Ajax, the set of technologies used by most modern websites (but not really). But what, exactly, has he done for us lately? Exactly. So it makes perfect sense for Google to get him out of the way by putting him on an obscure, sure-to-fail healthcare project.

It's a time-honored tradition in tech: If you have an executive you can't stand but can't get rid of, put him in charge of your "healthcare initiative." That's what Intel did to Steve McGeady, after all. When he was in charge of the chipmaker's software business, McGeady frequently sparred with Microsoft, and even testified against the software giant in the Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit. Stripped of his software job, he was put in charge of Intel's Internet Health Initiative, and quit a few years later.

As for Microsoft's Steve Shihadeh, look no further than his resume: He's a salesman, not a technologist. His goal is to sell Windows server licenses to hospitals, and if some patter about revolutionizing healthcare means he can sell more software, of course he'll add that to his spiel. Like any good salesman, he doesn't really believe it.

So keep that in mind when you read about any tech company with high-minded healthcare plans, and its "health architect" wants to schmooze you up. Either you're dealing with someone who's got something to sell — or someone who's got nothing but time on their hands. Either way, their career's not looking healthy.

Phillip Knowlton, the employee in question, is believed by friends to be a cofounder of Craigslist, although the company does not recognize that status. He had earned a 25 percent stake in the company. But he held common shares, while Newmark and Buckmaster held preferred stock. That allowed Newmark and Buckmaster to try to squeeze Knowlton out of the company by issuing new shares to dilute his ownership stake.

Desperate to protect his ownership in Craigslist, Knowlton got in touch with people at eBay, who struck a deal for their employer to acquire his stake. Publications as august as Fortune have reported this as a straightforward sale, without Craigslist's consent. Here's what Adam Lashinsky wrote in 2005:

The transaction only occurred because Newmark had given a quarter-share to an employee, Phillip Knowlton.... As for the money eBay shelled out, that went to Knowlton, not Craigslist.

So what actually happened? eBay, my sources tell me, agreed to pay an amount around $16 million to Knowlton, and an equal amount to Craigslist, bringing the total paid by eBay to more than $30 million. The company, in turn, immediately paid out that $16 million sum as a dividend to Newmark and Buckmaster, according to their stakes in the company. Buckmaster reportedly holds 40 percent, with Newmark owning the rest, which would suggest Buckmaster got about $6 million and Newmark $10 million.

And those amounts, in turn, are dwarfed, insiders believe, by the amounts Newmark and Buckmaster take out of the company in salaries and other forms of pay. With only around 20 employees and an estimated $150 million in revenues, Craigslist is widely thought to be staggeringly profitable.

Remember this whenever you see Craig Newmark pull his "I'm-just-a-customer-service-rep" act. Remember this when Buckmaster says Craigslist only cares about its customers. Because, like the rest of Silicon Valley, they're all about the money. Unlike the rest of you, they're just better at hiding it.

Most people in the know believe that Facebook's revenues, such as they are, come not from actual ad sales but from a revenue guarantee Microsoft offered in a desperate bid to win the right to sell ads on its site. If such a guarantee exists, then Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have to lift a finger: Whether or not Microsoft actually sells ads, it still owes Facebook money. A sweet deal, as long as it lasts — which is 2009. But Breyer knows that, were Facebook to go public, it would have to disclose just how much of its revenues come from Microsoft. So he's just bluffing by talking up Facebook's Microsoft-inflated numbers.

Microsoft, which is in a better position than anyone to see how poorly Facebook's ads perform, should hardly be happy about paying Blodget's bubbly price for Facebook. After all, the revenues Breyer brags about are coming out of Microsoft's own pocket. Blodget's right about one thing: If Microsoft buys Facebook, it would be out of sheer desperation, not any kind of financial logic.