Facebook evangelist Dave Morin touts the ability to take one's real identity from Facebook to other websites. And indeed, that's one reason why I mocked MySpace's move; its users' pseudonymous logins have no particular value as sources of identity.

But do I really want to interconnect all my online identities? That's the premise of the "data portability" movement — that we really want nothing more than to take our friends with us from one website to another. And yet I'm content to segregate, say, the work acquaintances I have on LinkedIn from the more personal relationships I track on Facebook. Would Valleywag's commenters want to have their real names attached to their accounts? Some are happy to, while for others, that's a deal-breaker — and the site would be the lesser if it lost them.

Mark Zuckerberg's original, brilliant insight — to connect Facebook's identities to real names, schools, and workplaces — is its advantage over rival social networks like Bebo and MySpace. But I'm not sure I want a Web with non anonymity. Morin and others will hasten to note Facebook's privacy options — but surely they realize that when others give up their anonymity, there will be peer pressure for most to do so.

Real identity has value, say, when conducting commerce, which is why it's laughable that eBay partnered with MySpace and not Facebook — just another sign of that company's clueless technological leadership. But anonymity has its benefits. Facebook Connect threatens the anonymous Web. For that reason, I can't wish Facebook Connect anything more than partial success.

But Google only wants to give Yahoo so many options as long as there's even a remote possibility Microsoft will try to acquire the company. As soon as that threat's gone, expect word of "divided" Google executives worried about antitrust regulations to return — leaving Yahoo shareholders without a Google deal or a Microsoft deal. Just Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's infinite wisdom.

Not if Facebook and MySpace hope to tap the kind of budgets large advertisers have ready. Procter & Gamble spends $300 million in a month. Big buyers like that are used to TV, where "you can get a million dollars worth of advertising in one phone call," Cisco's Web marketing director Michele Gibson recently told us. Dropping coin like that, these buyers want publishers — not a publisher's website — to explain exactly who will see their ads and how. At Ad:tech in San Francisco last month, ad buyers practically screamed for social networks to "educate" them on how they can spend more money to reach an audience obviously moving online. That means more steak dinners — and for Facebookers in particular, it means sending out fewer impersonal customer-service emails and picking up the phone instead.

AdWeek's Brian Morrissey explains with an analogy:

The ad world will end up looking a lot like financial services where lots of investors trade on their own, but big institutional investors go through Goldman.

Yahoo
Think anybody's ever kicked the plastic white picket fence in Yahoo's New York office? How about one of the lounging employees? (Photos by skreuzer)

Mozilla
Most people who work on Mozilla's products don't get paid. Actual employees in Mozilla's Toronto office have it much worse. (Photos by menros)

Mahalo
Mahalo founder and CEO Jason Calacanis not only pays his "guides" between $30,000 and $35,000 a year, he also houses them in what appears to be a poorly lit, post-apocalyptic strip mall. (Photos by Conrad)

Google
We listed the Googleplex as on of the top 10 workspaces in tech because of its amenities. But with its kindergarten campus color scheme, lava lamps, scooters, and ball pool, Google's headquarters often seem designed to to hide its most prevalent feature: gray cubicles. Anything to keep the drones from remembering that they're just one out of the corporation's 16,800 employees, we suppose. (Photos by titaniumdreads, emerce, tantek, revdancatt and yoz)

Microsoft
Microsoft's world headquarters in Redmond, Washington go the other way. Welcome to the Borg cube. No talking. (Photos by taguri and ilikeyesterday)

LinkedIn
LinkedIn's offices are just like LinkedIn.com: utilitarian and utterly boring. (Photos by LinkedIn Blog)

Jajah
The poor souls at Internet phone company, Jajah. No one should have to suffer through so much purple outside of Sunnyvale. Also, when does corporate graffiti get added to ThingsWhitePeopleLIke.com? (Photos by Jajah)

Facebook
Food wrappers everywhere and a little smelly — Facebook's offices remind me of my sophomore hall. Except instead of drunks vandalizing the place, Zuckerberg paid a kid to go at the walls with a spraycan. This was done to reinforce Facebook's vibrant, youthful culture by ensuring any visiting adults would rather gouge their eyeballs out before ever returning. (Photos by Outer Edge Studio, fcb, eston and cavemonkey50)

DoubleClick
Here is DoubleClick's office in Colorado. I've never been there, but I know for a fact there are more Cathy cartoons pinned against gray cubicle felt in this office than any other in tech. (Photos by Ben Saitz)

Adobe
Adobe's headquarters are as warm and human as Photoshop's user interface. (Photos by Tom Ferris/Security-Protocols, nikonfans and glub)

Google does everything it can to coddle its engineers, both financially and physically. By shifting from stock options to restricted shares, it has made their compensation less dependent on the swings of the market, and thus discouraged departures that might otherwise take place.

The management pool at Google is deep indeed, and some find themselves drowning in it. Making a splash is harder and harder, as the company reins in its chaos; to those fighting to get unloved projects launched, a clique close to Larry and Sergey seem to be the only ones at the company who matter.

Human-resources departments pride themselves on minimizing turnover. But Google's "people officers" might want to rethink their approach. A bit of churn could do the company good — from the top of the company on down.

So concerned that he monitors articles on child sexuality on Wikipedia personally. So concerned that he has started Wikiyouth, an organization unaffiliated with Wikipedia which attempts to "protect" children from "fearful adults." So concerned that he has, in the past, posted naked pictures of children in sexual poses to his website, The Humanist.

Before becoming the Wikimedia Foundation's deputy director, Möller was elected to the nonprofit's board of directors by Wikipedia's users. What this points to: The problem goes much deeper than Möller. Wikipedia's inner circles have been taken over by an extreme cadre of advocates of "free culture" whose beliefs boil down to not having a problem with children seeing porn.

They're entitled to their point of view, of course. But they can hardly pretend that, compared to mainstream thought on the subject that it is, in Wikipedia parlance, a "neutral" one. And Wikimedia Foundation can hardly expect to continue raising millions of dollars from mainstream organizations like the Sloan Foundation if it tolerates the likes of Möller in its top ranks.

In every jest, there's a grain of truth. Later in the movie, Filo appears in a disorganized office, while Ash Patel, the executive ostensibly in charge of Yahoo's platforms and infrastructure, cleans up around him. Not a bad metaphor, except that insiders say they're surprised if Patel even does the clean-up work.

While Google's engineers are awash in a sea of computing power, and are challenged to come up with ideas to use it all, Yahoo's developers cope with an IT infrastructure that is at once too centralized and too disorganized. New CTO Ari Balogh has talked about fixing Yahoo's spaghetti code with new layers of APIs, or ways for independent developers to access Yahoo's websites and data. But making Yahoo more open to outside programmers won't fix the underlying problems with the company's code and infrastructure. Former Yahoo engineers talk about servers that its datacenter operators are afraid to unplug, because no one knows what they do.

It's no wonder, really, that Microsoft executives had talked about discarding Yahoo's technology and introducing their own if they bought the company. Microsoft may be no great shakes when it comes to Web technology, but having started later, there's less accumulated cruft to scrape off. Until Filo is pried away from his iron grip on Yahoo's servers, and do-nothing layabouts like Patel are fired, it's hard to imagine things improving at Yahoo.

Jackson told the AP he plans to introduce an alternative slate of directors and turn the July 3 meeting "into 'Independence Day' for Yahoo's shareholders."

It's hard to believe the board could let this happen. I think they completely misconstrued the situation and thought, 'Microsoft is rich, so let's soak them.' They were bluffing all the way and got caught.

Microsoft remains obsessed with Google's dominance in search. Its brightest minds are confounded by its inability to catch up; they saw acquiring Yahoo as a way to instantly bulk up, and apply their algorithms to a larger database of searches.

But that presumes that all we do, all day long, is search the Web. The truth is search is just one of many online activities. When Google got to it, early pioneers like Yahoo had neglected it, leaving much room to exploit and improve Web search.

Yahoo and Microsoft both might do well to take as a given that Google will dominate search for the foreseeable future. Consumer inertia will dictate that, if nothing else; trying to make search ever fancier is a sure way to keep Google as the search engine of choice. Feature-obsessed Microsoft engineers will likely lard up Windows Live Search with more virtual gewgaws; Yahoo would do well to simply ape Google's simplicity.

The mooted plan to have Google serve some of the ads on Yahoo's search results, but only if they make more money for Yahoo is wise, and not just because it may pass antitrust scrutiny. Yahoo should not abandon the business of contextual advertising, as the art of matching ads to search keywords is known.

Yahoo, in theory, should know more about its users than Google; if it is ever able to apply that data to advertisements, it may well be able to make some searches more profitable than Google can. And Google, with its larger corpus of search queries, may squeeze more dollars out of some searches than Yahoo ever can. Cooperating cleverly doesn't mean giving in; it means maximizing one's profits. Suggestions that Yahoo fire the 2,000 or so employees of its search marketing business and throw all of its text-advertising sales to Google seem to go too far; but perhaps Yahoo should abandon all its algorithmic research and concentrate instead on analyzing its users' online behavior.

Downplaying search, too, seems wise. Jerry Yang says he wants to make Yahoo a set of "starting points" for Web users; but of all the possible ones, an empty search box seems like the least interesting place to start. What can Yahoo add to that blank space? Since Yang and Filo first started picking websites for Yahoo's online directory 15 years ago, they've created experiences for users — "programmed" in the media sense, not the software sense. Even user-generated sites like Flickr have relied on community managers to set the tone and show users what's possible. That has always struck me as Yahoo's strength, and they should build on it.

The biggest criticism of Yang is that he hasn't seemed to found Yahoo's purpose on the Web today. If he just stops searching, perhaps he'll find it.

To us, the details seem obvious. New Macs always have better speakers and better cameras, don't they? But perhaps the rumor's very obviousness lends it more credibility. You have exactly 37 days to discuss, oooh and ahhh about it. (Photo by Andrew*)

After winning kudos from the site that chronicles startups in 2005, Michael Arrington invested in the company. Cubrilovic even contributed to the site and crashed at Michael Arrington's place for a time. What followed were many laudatory posts which, though the relationship was disclosed, didn't state the obvious — that by mid-2007 the company owed customers, investors and employees money.

The only mention that the site, and the company, was facing problems came in an addendum to a post about Joyent. Arrington had stopped writing about the company as investor, but continued to write other companies he'd funded which weren't tanking. Duncan Riley finally pointed out last January that "there are big questions about [Omnidrive's] long term viability." Riley proceeded to defend Cubrilovic on a podcast run by the entrepreneur, before one of the hosts described spending an evening at Arrington's house in January of 2007 "doing shots all night with [Cubrilovic]."

The details that I've heard are that a competitor, possibly Box.net, tried to make a deal that could have at least allowed the company to close the book on some debts; but that because of the company's structure, Cubrilovic had to sign off on the deal, yet was unreachable. Observers say that the CEO's erratic behavior showed a pattern perhaps indicative, in their opinion, of substance abuse. Former CTO Phil Morle's contention that payments went directly to an account held by Cubrilovic sounds like a recipe for a binge-spending disaster.

In an update to his original post that Cook published yesterday, the investor seemed to dance around the issue of alcoholism:

Too many parties, too many conferences, too much working between 1-4am, not enough working normal business hours, too much socializing, not enough focus, no business development, and not enough follow up and delivery.

No such virtuous circle exists in television. As a substitute for clicks, Google has proposed tracking when TV viewers change channels during ads. But as the above example provided by Google suggests, no matter what the ad is or when it airs, 96 to 97 percent of the audience stays tuned in. It's not clear if those numbers are made up, but actual numbers may not prove that different. Studies from TiVo, supposedly the bane of all TV advertising, showed 40 percent of users don't bother to fast-forward through the ads. Outside of efficiency-obsessed Silicon Valley, commercial breaks just aren't that horrifying a notion.

Google's hoping to extract information from its television data, deriving some insights from channel-switching habits. But the information — do viewers care about the ads or not? — likely isn't there. Absent that, Google's systems have no way to refine themselves over time. All Google can promise, then, are cheaper rates for undesirable time slots — or, possibly, implementing technology that forces viewers to watch ads. No wonder TV executives are turning up their noses. Like the typical engineer, Google thinks it can do their job for them.

It's not the fact that the married Schmidt sleeps around that bothers Schrage (and most of his underlings in Google PR); it's how Schmidt mixes business and pleasure. His recent mistress, Marcy Simon, was temporarily installed in Google's New York office to head up PR for Google's still-nonexistent Googlephone. Simon's replacement, TV journalist Kate Bohner, has squired Schmidt, very publicly, to at least one political debate cosponsored by Google's YouTube and CNN. If Schrage wanted to deal with bimbo eruptions, he could have stayed in politics.

It's not clear Schrage is the best choice for the Facebook job, objectively speaking. One person who's worked with him says he's a disaster as a manager, and not particularly strong in the PR part of his duties, preferring the more high-falutin' policy work.

But that could make him the perfect yes-man to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans for world amelioration. At the South by Southwest conference, Zuckerberg talked, tongue not at all in cheek, about how Facebook could bring peace to the Middle East by preventing Arab teenages from turning into terrorists. He seems to believe sincerely in this stuff. And if it gets him a job at Facebook, Schrage is just slick enough to put on the illustion that he does, too.

Brooks is employed by Seesmic, a videomail startup, so some of the "two dozen videos" she made could arguably be seen as all in a day's work. But the rest? The mainstream readers of the Times must wonder what people like Brooks do all day. One supposes they could sign up on FriendFeed to find out, but they, unlike the people of the Valley, have real jobs. Brooks, for her part, makes no apologies for her online chattiness: Her website sums up her career from a first-grade report card: "Cathy likes to participate in any project, so long as she gets to talk." In that, she has found a community of like minds.

"The question from our standpoint is, how you find signal in the noise?" asks Peter Fenton, a VC backer of FriendFeed at Benchmark Capital. That assumes that there is any signal. Such is the complaint of Michael Arrington, who bemoans his 954 unread Facebook messages, and demands that Facebook make changes to accommodate him. Has it ever occurred to Arrington that he is, in the argot of product managers, an "edge case"? Entrepreneurs desperate for coverage, and aware that he never reads email, are trying a new way to reach him — and Arrington, in his compulsive neophilia, actually tries out the new medium, for a while. He then quickly tires of it, and throws a tantrum. Catering to such a person's whims is no way to run a company.

Is information overload really anything more than a self-inflicted disease of the Valley? I doubt it. But to the extent it is, Facebook is far better poised to solve the problem than a startup like FriendFeed. The Times mistakenly reports that Facebook is playing catch-up in gathering up its users' online activities from across the Web. Balderdash. It's just done a lousy job of marketing its ability to do so.

The technology behind Beacon — the Facebook feature which ruined Christmas for some Facebook users, by revealing their online purchases, and has gotten Facebook sued for allegedly violating a Blockbuster video-renter's privacy — is now being used to report posts to Twitter, Digg, Yelp, and Flickr. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg botched Beacon by presenting it as an advertising technology last fall. His recent spin that it was a technology meant for programmers, not Madison Avenue types, hasn't taken hold. It's likely Facebook will have to drop the Beacon name altogether before it successfully revives the technology.

But Facebook's News Feed is the most logical place to gather together the sum of its users' online activity. The users, after all, are already there. FriendFeed might make a logical acquisition for the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo, or most likely of all, Google (its founders are all ex-Googlers). But a radical paradigm for the future of communication? Sorry, Zuckerberg got there first.

(Photo by Brian Solis)

May 3, 2008

Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!'s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week's conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.
We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a "hostile" bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

•
First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!'s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

•
Given this, it would impair Yahoo's ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.

•
In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.

•
This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.

•
It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google's search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft's proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft, last year, declared that it was embracing "radical transparency," a tactic of divulging every detail of its every move to gain wide support. Yahoo has more recently pursued a strategy of "openness." But at this key moment, which will surely shape both companies' fates for years, neither company is practicing what it preaches.

Buckmaster may win points in the court of public opinion. Ordinary Craigslist users may well believe his spin, that eBay is the bad guy in this fight for seeking to protect its rights to a stake in the company it bought fair and square (and at a substantial profit to Buckmaster and Newmark).

But the complaint eBay filed makes clear what happened. Newmark and Buckmaster, upset that eBay had launched a competitive classifieds site, Kijiji, invoked a provision that cancelled a right of first refusal they held over eBay's shares — a right that forced eBay to offer its shares first to Craigslist, should it wish to sell. They landed in trouble with eBay by trying to force it to sign a new right-of-first-refusal agreement.

Newmark and Buckmaster, in short, are idiots. In a snit over Kijiji, they cancelled a valuable power they held over eBay. They are now engaging in what appear to be dirty boardroom tricks to reinstate that power, using means eBay finds questionable. It is understandable that they dislike eBay's competition. But had they just kept quiet about it, Newmark and Buckmaster could have kept eBay at bay indefinitely, and kept raking in the lion's share of Craigslist's profits. The trouble they are in now is entirely of their own making.

(Ilustration by Ismael Rodan/WSJ via Craigslist)

As it stands, a producer can contract with a liquor distributor to produce a commercial at a profit, and then distribute the commercial on YouTube without paying a dime — even reaching underage audiences. Or he can get paid to place brands in the hands of sketch-comedy players. Again, he makes the money, not YouTube. I'm not sure that "innovation" is required so much as doing what television has been doing for generations, which is charging advertisers to distribute their commercial content.

YouTube's incredible rate of user adoption and massive market share has been largely due to the fact that it's reached a critical mass of content, which is better than any advertising the site could have bought. There is no video search anymore, really, just YouTube. What the company needs to do now isn't brainstorm new and interesting ways to sell ads against free content, but leverage what other distribution platforms are already doing — including Google search.

Because even if the site doesn't want to charge Smirnoff to distribute the company's commercials, YouTube could at least charge to have Smirnoff ads appear on searches for specific keywords. And if the online video site policed for copyrighted material, not only would it help make nice with content providers, it would also mean YouTube could then charge them for the distribution of show clips as well — which, ultimately, serve as advertisements for the shows, both on television and online.

As NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes pointed out, "It's all smoke and mirrors until the products launch." I have a bad feeling that YouTube is thinking that "plinking" — embedding product links within videos — and other failed interactive ad schemes of the past will save them. If Google simply put the screws to the people who can pay to play their content, in the time-honored tradition of entertainment distribution racketeers throughout history, the site would have been profitable a long time ago.

I'd long thought that Battelle's flip-the-bird photo, used here, was a reflection of his charmingly combative personality. As a founding editor of Wired, which set the tech world on fire in the '90s and helped inflate the bubble, Battelle failed to stack up the tall dollars. He founded The Industry Standard, which sold more pages of advertising than any other magazine in American in 2000 and then went bankrupt in 2001. Battelle, in short, has been adept at chronicling booms, but not profiting from them. Until now.

Battelle is just the latest entrepreneur to cash out before his company goes public, a practice once frowned upon in Silicon Valley. But Federated Media turned profitable last fall, we're told. Being cash-flow positive means never having to say you're sorry. And it also gives entrepreneurs leverage with investors that they never had in the '90s, when building Web companies was much more expensive.

So at last he's earned what they call in the Valley "fuck-you money" — enough money to simply walk away, should a job turn unpleasant. In fact, we hear that's what Battelle is planning to do, albeit temporarily. He's told investors in Federated that he plans to take a leave from the business to work on his next book, The Conversation.

Where Battelle's profane wealth may get him in trouble is with the bloggers he represents. Unlike him, most of them have yet to cash out, or even turn a profit. Federated Media's take of their advertising — typically 40 percent — strikes many as too high, though most have yet to try their hands at hiring and managing their own salespeople.

But they shouldn't worry. Having enriched himself, Battelle is now thinking of them. After hearing rumors that one of Federated's blogs was in merger talks, he approached the blogger and encouraged him to come talk to Federated first before taking an offer.

In other words, Battelle is now contemplating a blog rollup. Rather than see his customers picked off one by one, with their ad inventory walking out the door, Battelle may use some of the money he's raised to buy blogs himself. It only makes sense. He knows his customers' businesses well, since he organizes conferences, orchestrates redesigns, and performs other services besides for them, in addition to the mundanities of selling advertising.

Battelle likes to think of himself as more than just a business partner to his bloggers. He's their buddy. He's their pal! This bubble has everyone frothy, and the valuations may be making some of the bloggers under his care unduly giddy. While Battelle may enjoy a tipple now and then, friends don't let friends sell drunk.

I mean, c'mon, Anne Geddes, the woman who made a name for herself by Photoshopping babies into floral patterns? I'm just surprised there's no work by Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light. It also made me pause to wonder about Marissa Mayer's self-interest. For instance, glass-blower Dale Chihuly makes an appearance, and Mayer just happens to own work by him. Seems like a great way to improve the value of her own collection by helping to popularize the artist and his work.

Not that Wikia is likely to get much more of Wales's time. He told the company's board that he would spend 10 percent of his time on Wikipedia, and 90 percent on Wikia, a promise he swiftly broke. There's no reason to expect that a change in scenery would change Wales's ways.

His domestic life is in no better a state. His wife, Christine, whom he is divorcing, has banned him from staying at their St. Petersburg, Fla. house on his infrequent visits to see his young daughter, we hear. A wise move on her part, since Wales conducted some of his obscene sex chats with Marsden from the guest bedroom.

"Everything with Jimbo is the creating of an illusion," says a source who knows Wales. "The illusion of being a good husband, the illusion of working everyday, the illusion of having ideas."

Which makes New York the perfect venue for Wales. From the theatricality of Broadway to the fanciful financial vehicles of Wall Street, New York is a manufactory of make-believe. The island of Manhattan increasingly resembles one large stage set — an artifice of a city. This is a man who's made his career on pretense, on cajoling others to labor for him. Jimmy Wales has come home. San Francisco will not miss him.

(Photo by Mary S. Butler, on a previous Wales visit to New York)

The incident largely ocurred within the confines of a forum specifically set up by Uloop to enable employees scattered across American college campuses to communicate with other. When on payday a number of employees found their checks were short, a thread was started to discuss the matter with each other — since management hadn't formally or informally alerted anyone to the pay cut, according to Garrido and Doolittle.

Garrido says management fired the pair within twenty minutes after bringing up the prospect of unionizing. He also reported that management began to call every employee who had left a message in the thread — shortly before deleting it entirely. Which sounds a lot like typical offline actions long deemed illegal by the NLRB: Intimidating employees in order to deter them from organizing, and removing employee-posted, pro-union materials from designated areas of the workplace.

When I asked Garrido and Doolittle if they had contacted, or been contacted by, any existing unions or support, they pointed out that they no longer had access to fellow Uloop employees, having been fired and banned from the message board. And while an ad-hoc group could possibly be assembled on Facebook, it offers no safe-harbor — management can moderate "networks," including deleting messages, and can monitor employee-created groups simply by joining.

In other words, until the NLRB has ruled one way or the other, if you're going to try to organize employees online, which in the case of Uloop's disparate workforce is really the only way, it's best to copy what contact information you can from employee directories and set up as secret and private a system as you can manage on your own. As poet and activist Audre Lord once pointed out, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

Update: Julia Allison has posted another photo of herself with Zuckerberg. Has no one ever told her that only the bride wears white?

A previous return vehicle, Bond Art + Science, promised to be exactly that. But artsy, high-end Web design, while profitable enough as a career, will never scorch the heavens.

So Dachis persuaded Austin Ventures to hitch itself to his star, which is unusual. (If convenient for Dachis personally; he has a child who lives in Texas, and he has been commuting there to visit for some time.) Venture capitalists rarely write a blank check to make things convenient for their entreprenurs. Dachis's company, as yet unformed, promises to be "an industry leading strategic consulting practice and an enterprise class Social Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite." Stripped of the jargon, that means Dachis plans to charge companies for advice and rent software to them over the Web. Specifically, "social software"; the most reasonable guess for that is something like Marc Andreessen's Ning, a service which allows users to create their own miniature social networks.

The Facebookification of business may be an inevitable and proftiable trend. Yet it is dangerous for Dachis to launch this so amorphously. He may never live down the time, almost a decade ago, when, faced with a CBS News cameraman, he fumbled at explaining to 60 Minutes II what, precisely, Razorfish did. "We've asked our clients to recontextualize their business," he said. "We've recontextualized what it is to be a services business. We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them." He could say the same thing for his career.

The announcement:

Austin Ventures Announces Partnership with Jeffrey Dachis to Create Social Enterprise Software and Services Company
Digital Services Pioneer Secures $50 Million Commitment
AUSTIN, Texas - April 28, 2008 - Austin Ventures, ("AV"), one of the nation's largest venture capital firms, announced today that it has entered into a partnership with Jeffrey Dachis to form a new company which will focus on creating an industry leading strategic consulting practice and an enterprise class Social Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite. AV has committed up to $50 Million in capital to support management's strategy to build and grow organically and through acquisition. Mr. Dachis will serve as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for the new firm.

Prior to establishing the new firm, Dachis' leadership and vision helped establish the digital services industry when, as co-founder, CEO, President and Chairman of Razorfish, Dachis profitably grew the company revenues to over $250 Million, expanded its talent base from 2 to 2,200 employees with offices in nine countries, completed over 25 M&A transactions, lead its IPO which raised $55 Million, and catapulted Razorfish's public valuation to over $5 Billion. Over the last decade, as the recognized leader in the digital services industry, Razorfish has won numerous performance, design, and professional service awards. Continuing its growth, although Dachis left the company in 2001, Avenue A | Razorfish now part of aQuantive, was recently sold to Microsoft for $6 Billion in May 2007.

Dachis is also a Senior Partner at Manhattan based Bond Art + Science, an Experience Architecture firm specializing in information architecture and user experience design for digital media and information services. He serves as an advisor to companies including: Bazaarvoice, Waterfall Mobile and Swapagift.com. Dachis also serves as the Co-Chairman and national board delegate of the Producer's Guild of America New Media Council East, and is on the Board of Directors of Austin's ArtHouse.

Recognized as a leading expert in digital technology, media, and business, Dachis was awarded Ernst and Young's Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2000, and has frequently appeared as a speaker at industry conferences, and in publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Wired Magazine, and on television shows such as CNBC, CNN, CNNFN, MSNBC, 20/20, and CBS 60 Minutes.

"I believe there is enormous opportunity in helping companies devise and implement a strategy to engage their constituents in a meaningful dialog throughout the enterprise. As companies begin to see the benefits of utilizing "social" technology to engage their customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and communities in an active and transparent dialog, they will need a trusted partner to help them navigate the opportunities, and an integrated set of scalable, robust, and secure enterprise class tools to implement them. We are here to provide both expertise and implementation," said Jeffrey Dachis.

Dachis added "Austin Ventures' considerable resources, experience, commitment, as well as their quality relationships with entrepreneurs, in addition to an unparalleled track record, gave me a high degree of confidence that this was the firm to work with."

"Through his leadership at Razorfish, Mr. Dachis was instrumental in helping enterprises leverage the web during the early phase of the Internet. The proliferation of social networks has created another paradigm shift wherein enterprises need to drive commercial benefit from the evolving social fabric of the Internet. We believe Mr. Dachis' experience and vision are ideal to take advantage of this most recent shift. The relationship with Mr. Dachis is part of AV's ongoing strategy of partnering with talented, proven executives to pursue investment opportunities. We continue to build relationships with executives who share our passion for growth businesses and are energized by the partnership we build with them," said Chris Pacitti, General Partner, Austin Ventures.

The new company will be headquartered in Austin, Texas.

The company is entering "its annual budgeting season" and division toppers covetous of cash aren't eager to see it diverted toward roping in a reluctant Yahoo. But that reluctance at Yahoo might be relegated to the topmost ranks only. Yahoo VPs — perhaps sick of infighting and overseeing underfunded projects — are ready and willing to embrace their Microsoft overlords. Besides, "people familiar with the matter" tell the WSJ that as much as he might like to, Ballmer can't back out of buying Yahoo now. Doing so would damage his credibility as a serious and credible chief executive. Expect Microsoft to propose a new board by July 13 — the latest date Yahoo can legally hold its annual shareholder meeting.

It didn't use to matter who specifically was responsible for delivering. Now everyone's grabbing on to things that are significant to say why they're there. Rehashing job descriptions. There's lots of internal jockeying and posturing. No one wants to be the person without a seat when the music ends.

Right now, the people who are in the most senior positions are the most nervous because of what happened to Karin Timpone. Generally acknowledged as strong asset, she went into too much strategy and didn't have a definite role. So when it came time to define things, she got let go. The perception was that she was redundant.

Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. And let's be simple and bluntly honest about it, left or right, conservative or liberal, broadcast politics are dumb, dumb, dumb.

Barack Obama and other candidates have demonstrated that the Internet is useful enough for raising money and, more importantly according to bloggers, impressing bloggers. Campaigns Wikia has done neither. After an initial spate of press, the site now goes entirely unremarked in a heated political season. Why? For a simple reason. There is actually no shortage of information about politics, much of it delivered by seasoned professionals. It may not be perfect, but it does not leave a void that needs filling by an empty-headed Internet philosopher. Politics may require transformation, and Anderson may be right that it's not happening. But to think that a Web page anyone can edit, but no one cares about, will change this state of affairs? Dumb, dumb, dumb.

(Photoillustration by CEOsmack)

A recent Fast Company article on Andreessen's current venture, Ning, went no better. You can practically hear the writer propping his eyelids open as Andreessen goes on, and on, and on, about "viral expansion loops."

What happened to the Andreessen who once ridiculed Windows as "a set of poorly debugged device drivers"? Why, he's gone online. Andreessen's blog is relentlessly entertaining. His verbal fisticuffs with the New York Times are must-reads; the vitriol oozes out of every line. And he posts just infrequently enough to keep us hanging on every word.

The only surprise, really, is that Andreessen took so long to start blogging. This world was not made for him. In the Web, he created one to suit.

(Photo by mathoov)

The strongest argument I've heard as to why we should increase our bid — that we can afford to — is not one I favor.

I don't buy the theory promulgated by self-interested rivals that blogs are nibbling away at CNET; it has always had rivals, and its sites' traffic has continued to grow as the general interest in gadgetry rises.

But if you look at CNET's income statement, the story is simple: revenues are nearly flat, while costs have soared. For that, the most likely culprit is CNET's diversion into content areas like food and babies, in which it has no expertise and its advertisers have no interest. Trying to expand horizontally has been a fruitless distraction. Rolling up smaller blogs to expand the inventory its salespeople can sell — that would actually make sense. CNET's deal with Yahoo to license its tech content and cooperate on ad sales is a positive sign of management focus, but it smacks of being too little, too late. Selling everything outside CNET's core expertise and spending the proceeds on a rollup strategy would be the right move, but I'm not sure CNET CEO Neil Ashe is brash enough to do that.

They'd read a lot of research around how to form the best companies and a lot of studies show that if you fall below 20 percent of the workforce being women, things become really imbalanced and unhealthy inside the corporate culture.

At the very least, it's no longer a Mark Zuckerberg production. The widgetmakers have taken it over. Large Facebook-application developers — VC darlings like Slide, RockYou and Zynga which have thrived on Facebook's platform since it launched last May — panicked when they saw Zuckerberg's plans. And, perhaps because Google's rival app platform, OpenSocial, gave them leverage, the widgetmakers' collective kiboshed Zuckerberg's plan to launch the redesigned profiles in April. They wanted to see changes first. And now, we hear, they got them. Zuckerberg and his team are already "improving the design to have less radical implications for developers," one tells us.

Back when the Facebook platform launched, reporters compared Zuckerberg to Bill Gates. Gates ruled programmers who wrote applications for his Windows platform with such an iron fist that Europe's courts still aren't over it. But how often did third-party software makers push Gates into making Windows the way they wanted it? By contrast, Zuckerberg is hardly putting the "eek" in his ecosystem.

Scott, Scott, Scott: Negroponte has never been in the business of doing anything. His core competency is talking. The sooner you learn this, the happier you'll be at One Laptop Per Child. Negroponte's goals with One Laptop Per Child are admirable and visionary. As with many visionaries, his contact with reality is infrequent and tenuous. The best way to get OLPC's hardware and software built: Send Negroponte on another worldwide goodwill tour, keeping him as far from the labs as possible.

Zuckerberg and Moskovitz are both known to be stubborn and to argue vociferiously for their ideas. It's hard to imagine a disagreement that would cause a permanent rift.

This split appears to have something to do with the pair's Harvard history. A clue lies in a 2005 Denver University newspaper article about Facebook. In it, Moskovitz's title is given as "No Longer Expendable Programmer." Clearly an inside joke, but where did it come from? We hear that Zuckerberg referred to Moskovitz as "expendable" and "a soldier" in IM conversations turned up during Facebook's long-running lawsuit with the founders of rival social network ConnectU.

That lawsuit was reportedly settled earlier this month. Moskovitz was clearly familiar with the "expendable" remark. The feud is, insiders tell me, only goes back a month. How to explain these facts? Here's a theory: Back in 2005, Zuckerberg must have convinced Moskovitz to laugh off the slight. Could the final stages of the legal process turned up evidence that persuaded Moskovitz Zuckerberg wasn't joking?

If so, Zuckerberg may face a lonely future. Chris Hughes, the only other person Zuckerberg acknowledges as a cofounder, left Facebook to work on Barack Obama's campaign. Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin, two Harvard classmates sometimes identified as cofounders, have long been out of hte picture. Moskovitz is the only person who has been with Zuckerberg since the beginning, the only comrade who remembers Facebook's long march out of collegiate obscurity.

Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a pact to work with each other for 20 years. In two decades, who will Zuckerberg have in his trusted inner circle? Or does he view everyone around him, as he once labeled Moskovitz, as "expendable"?