Valleywag
Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo — as well as a host of freelance moneybags — continue to press their offers to shower Facebook, the hot social network, with dollars and ads. And last Wednesday at San Francisco's Web 2.0 Summit, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company was close to clinching a deal. When Friday came and went without a deal, though, conference attendees where whispering about what might have gone wrong. The latest rumor, though, is that Facebook will have an announcement to make on Tuesday. How do we know that? The company has scheduled an all-hands meeting for that day.
Word of the meeting first spread among attendees of Facebook Developer Garage Vancouver. The event, for Facebook-application developers, had a Facebook employee scheduled to give a keynote on Tuesday. But according to a message sent by organizer Greg Bauer to attendees today, the Facebooker cancelled his speech because of a just-arranged all-hands meeting. Bauer's message:
I've got the unfortunate news yesterday from Facebook that our confirmed keynote speaker has to cancel because the Facebook team has an important internal meeting for all on Tuesday (getting bought by Google? launching a music store? moving the platform to new heights with a new markup language? who knows).Update: Valleywag now hears that Facebook has a sales conference set for Tuesday, and, possibly, a tech-department all-hands, but a companywide all-hands is unconfirmed. I'll update the post when we know more. One possibility: Could the keynote speaker have just been making a dog-ate-my-homework excuse to get out of the trip up to Vancouver?
Comments
I posed the first question of the Web 2 Summit\ to Mark Zuckerberg (video). "How's the funding going," I asked him. "We're nearly done," he replied. Owen has a scoop: An all hands has reportedly been called for Tuesday for all Facebook employees.
hmm, maybe they're going to launch friends lists
[www.treyp.com]
Oh oh oh! I bet it's a new iPhone! Oh wait... nevermind.
@trey: Ridiculous. Why would they call an all-hands for the rollout of an already-announced feature? Try again.
Weren't they talking about an inline instant messenger a la OkCupid?
That'd be my guess. If Zuckerberg was legitimately close on a deal and it fell through, I doubt any amount of red-eyed wheelin' and dealin' is going to get us a financing agreement over the weekend.
How did "all hands" come to mean so many different subsets of people at a company? Did someone update the definition of "all" and not tell me?
It's those newfangled privacy settings on Facebook. They've gotten so complex that Zuckerberg couldn't send out an all-hands meeting invite even if he wanted to.
I'm just using it as a souvenir scrapbook for my Second Life activities.
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