Sam Lessin, in public, is a privacy freak; privacy is the sales pitch for his staggeringly unpopular blogging and file-sharing startup, Drop.io. But he invited a bunch of known oversharers — Facebookers Dave Morin and Meagan Marks, Google Maps marketer Brittany Bohnet, and the like — to his dad's vacation home, permitted the filming of the video, and starred in it himself. I doubt he cared very much that it became an Internet sensation.

No, I suspect that this takedown had little to do with Web 2.0, and everything to do with Wall Street. Even before the mortgage bubble popped, launching the credit crisis, being showy with wealth just wasn't done in the circles Bob Lessin circulates in. Showing off your dad's sweet pad only seems like a good idea if you're a Harvard legacy in your early 20s.

So is this the end of Web 2.0? Depends on what you mean by "Web 2.0." No one can quite agree. User-generated content? It's cheaper than the professionally generated kind; in recessionary times, it seems like it's here to stay. Likewise the fad for creating programmable interfaces for websites; getting coders to volunteer their time to make your product better sure sounds better than hiring them.

No, the real test is whether this millennial generation will continue posting videos when they don't have splashy trips to celebrate. Will they continue updating friends with every change in their status, when the news isn't that they've gotten hired, launched a company, bought something expensive?

When their buddies can't find work, when their startups run out of money, when they start leaving town en masse, what will they do? Promise to stay Facebook friends?

Ullyot was a "member of the class of 1989," a Harvard employee told me, but he did not get his degree until 1990. He graduated magna cum laude, but the delay seems curious. Especially since Ullyot's dad, James Ullyot, is a prominent Harvard graduate himself, and is now president of the Harvard Alumni Association. Harvard, like all Ivy League colleges, strives to make room for influential graduates' children.

Even more curious: Ullyot was two classes behind Sandberg, who graduated — on time, as best we can tell — in 1991. But Sandberg's husband, former Yahoo executive Dave Goldberg, was in the class of '89 with Ullyot. Could that be the connection that landed him the job? If so, just more proof that Harvard connections pay off.

And now I know why I got an out-of-office message from her when I complained about her nicking not one but two of my recent stories on Facebook for a Journal article! But I would have been more impressed with Vascellaro's honesty if she had said that she was going to Cyprus with "sources" rather than, as she Twittered, "buddies."

Catch Vascellaro's cameo in Bohnet's latest video:

Cyprus Lip Dub - Don't Stop Believing from Brittany Bohnet on Vimeo.

(Photo by Sam Lessin)

FAZ: Can you please describe your cooperation with Sheryl Sandberg?
Mark Zuckerberg: She is an excellent manager. She is very good in building our international organization. I'm focused on the direction of the company, especially of the product development, and the overall strategy. I spend a lot of time working with engineers and product developers. We work together hand in hand.

FAZ: Who is the boss?
Mark Zuckerberg: Me!

That should make things clear — to Sandberg, most of all. Charitably, Silicon Alley Insider wonders if something was lost in translation. Nah. Zuckerberg is this blunt and awkward in English, too.

(Photo by Christian Thiel/FAZ)

I really don't think that the flaws in management you see are the fault of Zuck's youth; the flaws you see are the result of his character. The reason you don't see these flaws in equally-prominent fortysomething executives is that all the ones who have characters like that have failed so badly for so long they're off the radar.

That's why, for days before it was announced, top executives at Facebook desperately hid technical lead Dustin Moskovitz's plans to leave. They dithered as Mark Zuckerberg tried to persuade his cofounder and college roommate to stay, and others, led by COO Sheryl Sandberg, concocted a plan to spin his departure. That spin has now been dutifully printed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal: Facebook's changes are the "type of evolution you see among young growing companies and specifically young growing companies in Silicon Valley," company flack Larry Yu told the paper.

Sandberg, who closely directs the company's PR, would have us think that the uproar that has taken place at the social network since her arrival is a healthy evolution. It is not. The internal politicking she has introduced to the company is destructive, and has sent many of the company's best and brightest fleeing. The list of the departed includes data guru Jeff Hammerbacher, product VP Matt Cohler, platform director Ben Ling, and most recently, Justin Rosenstein, a top engineer who's leaving with Moskovitz. Operations VP Jonathan Heiliger may be next. The defections all hurt. But most of the blame lies with Zuckerberg himself.

Zuckerberg has always styled himself as the company's "founder," relegating the likes of Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, now Barack Obama's Web campaign director, to "cofounder" status. Never mind that this distinction doesn't exist in English; those who start a company are all equally founders.

Zuckerberg clearly considers himself first among equals; he once referred to Moskovitz as "disposable" and a "soldier." The former Harvard roommates patched over those insults, and Zuckerberg said he will rely on Moskovitz's counsel even after his departure.

If Moskovitz really thought he could guide Facebook's evolution, he would have stayed at the company, right? Zuckerberg has a history of churning through confidants. Napster cofounder Sean Parker helped establish Facebook in Silicon Valley as its president, only to be disappeared from the company. Former COO Owen Van Natta was in favor, then out. Sandberg had his ear for a while, but may be losing it. Lately, I hear he favors Christopher Cox, the twentysomething recent Stanford grad he recently tapped as the company's director of product. We'll see how long he stays by Zuckerberg's side.

This fickleness may be predictable from a 24-year-old. But it's fundamentally bad for the company. Yahoo thrived, in its early days, on the partnership between CEO Tim Koogle and founders Jerry Yang and Dave Filo. Google's triumvirate of its cofounders and CEO Eric Schmidt improved on that management form; the troika lends the company some stability by making sure decisions at the top are never unilateral.

Zuckerberg's insistence on the "founder" title suggests that he always planned to rule the company alone. It's a bad plan. His instincts on what kind of website will attract a 100 million users have been spot-on. But he has no business sense. At one point during the Facebook redesign process, he suggested getting rid of advertising altogether, having grown disillusioned with both old-style banner ads and the company's experiments with targeting ads to users' behavior.

Will Zuck ever find an equal partner, a sounding board who can help him turn Facebook into the large, ongoing concern he envisions? Dustin Moskovitz may not have been the right person. Nor, it seems, is Sheryl Sandberg.

Yet to staunch the bleeding of Facebook's technical talent, Zuckerberg will have to find someone to ground him — someone for whom he has enduring respect, who can moderate his worst impulses. Without it, there will be one word describing what's going to happen to Facebook: "founder."

Every time Zuckerberg skips town, bad things happen at Facebook. Is it because he doesn't want to be seen as the bad guy as his former comrades in arms leave the company? We're not saying Facebook employees should worry every time they see the boss surfing Expedia. But we are wondering if this isn't a trend.

Tip to the Z-Man: don't go overboard at Oktoberfest.

(Photo by cpthook)

Heiliger previously worked for Andreessen at Opsware. One would think the chrome-domed entrepreneur, now chairman of Ning, would prove a powerful ally in the fierce political battles that have roiled Facebook since the appointment of Sheryl Sandberg, a Beltway insider turned Internet executive, as COO. Nothing's certain, and Heiliger may well stay. But for him to be so unhappy as to openly entertain job offers? The social network's executive suite seems to be coming unplugged.

At various times in our progress, people have come up to me to deliver a now familiar question: "did you ever imagine Facebook would be this big?" And I give a familiar answer: "well... yea, actually". Frankly, Mark and I knew even at the beginning this was something the world needed. We went into the college market as a stepping stone - identifying dense nests in the graph that would lead us to the rest of the world. We could see far enough in the future to know there would be an impact, we just didn't know exactly what it would be. Now I can look back on our progress and see the ways the world has changed, the ways we have changed it. We've altered the future in a score of ways, from making it easier to look up phone numbers and email addresses to making it more difficult for terrorists to isolate impressionistic youth in the middle east. At the same time we've built a competent and vibrant organization, driven by a passion to push the world more open.

In the process of helping to build a company, I found I had another passion: making companies themselves run better. It's easy to confuse this with a desire to manage, but even when I tried to do that I found myself drawn back to code for the solutions to my problems; I didn't want to construct efficiencies, I wanted to engineer them. Communication is the key to scale in any size organization and technology is the key to communication. I've seen us unblock ourselves time and again with new tools to increase transparency and passive information flow and many times it was the fruit of my own labors. While working on improving Facebook's tools, however, I came to a very difficult conclusion: doing this for all the companies of the world was not the same project as doing it for one of them. This idea is one that needs an organization that was built to do it, with every fiber of its DNA engineered in a way that producing an extensible enterprise platform becomes little more than the logical consequence of an organism executing its own nature. Further, the things we've scoped for Facebook's product team to do are the right things to be doing and I wouldn't have agreed with asking the company to divert significant resources to approach a project so different and so boundless in scope. Every time we introduce something new, we do it at an opportunity cost and this is too large a detour to take when we are already moving swiftly in the right direction.

And Facebook is moving in the right direction. When Facebook has a billion members (and 800 employees? maybe 900?) and someone leans over to ask me if I ever imagined it would get that big, my answer is going to be "you're damn right I did. how come it only has 20% of the market?". To know that this is Facebook's future and decide not be a part of it is the hardest thing I've ever had to do, but it's allowed me to have a broader perspective for the future. Like you, I've worried about the people leaving the company but it took becoming one of them to understand that this is just another part of the ecosystem (you should just take my word for it though). I'm not leaving the movement - I'm becoming a new part of it. The inevitable flux of the men and women behind these organizations is what moves the industry forward in the same direction in a way that cross-company collaboration alone never will. As the world moves to modular stacks and applications built up from a smorgasbord of platforms instead of single toolkits, then the companies that build the parts will need to act more and more like cooperative teams in a single larger organization. As Justin would undoubtedly say, I am simply viewing the industry from a different level of abstraction. These changes are difficult and sad, and that's certainly an understatement for me... but change brings new things and this particular change will bring a new ally to our mission - I think we can all be pretty pumped about that.

Whether I work here or not, I'll forever bleed Facebook blue. Facebook has been my passion and my purpose for the past 5 years. Our new project is not a replacement for what we build here, but instead both a complement and a compliment, and we have every intention of making it feel like a natural extension of Facebook's product and purpose. Similarly, my timing in leaving is not an indication that I have lost faith in our ability to succeed, but an affirmation in my confidence in the company's enduring success irrespective of changing faces.

Justin and I going to be around for at least another month and I am really looking forward to going deeper on this idea with everyone and how we can continue to work closely with Facebook. I'll always be really proud of the work we've done and grateful for the opportunity to work with such a uniquely remarkable team. We'll also be at the Q&A later to help continue the conversation right away.

Dustin

A couple of months ago, after three years as a Google product manager, I decided to leave for Facebook. I am writing this note to spread Good News to all the friends I haven't already overwhelmed with my enthusiasm: Facebook really is That company.
Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while — the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other's genius. That company that's doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can't pull off. That company that's on the cusp of Changing The World, that's still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you'll kick yourself in three years if you don't jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life.

I'm serious. I have drunk from the kool-aid, and it is delicious. Facebook is hiring ambitiously across the organization. If you're an engineer, UI designer, product manager, statistician, bizdev god, general entrepreneurial badass, whatever, and you would even consider considering Facebook as your new place for hat-hanging, please send me a Facebook message. We can have lunch, or I can give you a tour, or we can go kick it with Mark Zuckerberg — whatever it takes.

Build, or perhaps buy. In July, RockYou acquired Speed Racing, one of the top games on Facebook. But RockYou, in diverting its attention from its rivalry with Slide, will face well-funded competitors in startups Zynga and SGN. By the time all this becomes a serious business, isn't it just as likely Electronic Arts will be the Electronic Arts of social games?

No, Facebook finally found the way monetize. The new revenue will be derived from mining Irish leperchauns for gold.

Facebook's corporate charter has a relatively unusual provision for employee stock sales. The company has a right of first refusal over employees' shares, meaning that it has the right to match any price offered by a buyer; most companies have tighter restrictions.

Employees have been told that sales outside the program will have "career-limiting effects"; promotions, raises, and new stock-option grants may be taken away from those who sell anyway. But Facebook has no such hold on ex-employees.

And the offers in the market are tempting. Facebook's program will let shareholders sell at $8.90 a share, which represents a company valuation of $4 billion; some buyers are offering $11 a share. If too many transactions go through at the higher price, Facebook may have to revalue its shares, which will have untoward tax implications for the company and other employees.

It's not clear what Facebook can do, short of rewriting its corporate bylaws. But the company program does have one thing going for it: It will be formal, organized, and predictable. For geeks who'd rather optimize code than their own financial returns, letting their managers handle their money may seem easier.

The problem is that Mark [Zuckerberg, Facebook founder,] hired Sheryl Sandberg. She has political aspirations as does the head of PR she hired, Elliot Schrage. It's pitiful really: I'm shocked. It used to be full of young, idealistic cool people.

What's so shocking? Given Sandberg's penchant for sharp-elbows politics, honed in the Clinton White House, hiring a conservative lawyer with a close ties to the outgoing Republican administration constitutes a wise ideological hedge, lest Facebook be perceived as too Democratic-leaning. We think our tipster's friend nailed it: It's pitiful that he's shocked.

After a challenge to a similar state law in Utah last week, a federal judge restored a sex offender's right to anonymous speech online. Though the judge stated that this decision should not apply unilaterally to all registered sex offenders, her ruling is the first to question the conventional wisdom: that curbing online speech can curb sex crimes.

Free speech advocates and social network analysts have long been claiming that this approach won't work. First, there's the problem of the expansive definition of "sex crime" — from violent assault to public nudity. On that basis, Flickr has at least one employee who, after bending over bare-assed for his colleagues, could be banned from the Internet. Add to that that state and Federal lawmakers still can't seem to grasp the qualitative difference between a sixteen year old flashing her boycrush and a fifty year old posing as the same sixteen year old. Toss with a little bit of election-year mania about being tough on crime, and you get a botched bill that may only drive sex offenders further from the public eye — the opposite of the safer, happier Internet McCain hoped to create.

(Photo by soggydan)

• Served as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
• Worked as the top lawyer for AOL Time Warner in Europe.
• Joined Gonzales at the Department of Justice White House as a deputy assistant and deputy staff secretary in 2003, earning a promotion to chief of staff that stuck when he and Gonzales moved to the Department of Justice in 2005. "[Gonzales's] leadership style is to listen and engage," Ullyot told the Washington Post of Gonzales. "Our job on the staff is to make sure that he's hearing from all the people that he needs to be hearing from."
• Along with Raul Yanes, coordinated the White House's response to the investigation into the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. The case ended with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief-of-staff Scotter Libby's conviction.
• As assistant to Gonzales when he was the White House counsel, helped defend — or at least did not object to — policies established by the infamous "torture memo," which argued for ways the Bush administration could forgo the Geneva Conventions in order to prosecute the War on Terror. "The tragedy of the torture memo is that it didn't get caught at a much lower level much more quickly," one former Justice Department official under President Bill Clinton told Law.com. "Had that memo received a broader look, there is no question that people would have said this is just wrong, as the administration later admitted it was."
• Earned Alberto Gonzales's unwavering praise: “I appreciate the steady leadership, counsel, integrity, and tireless commitment that Ted brought to this job and the cause of justice. I thank Ted for his great service to the President and the Nation in these challenging times. I wish him all the best as he moves on to this next phase of his career, and I look forward to our continued friendship."

Correction: Part of this post originally suggested Ullyot began working at the DoJ in 2003. He began working with Gonzales at the White House and they both moved to the DoJ in 2005.

We millennials know there are two things we can do about weighty problems like the Sudan, Iraq and HIV/AIDS: Start a Facebook group, or mock those who do. I'm not about to start a Facebook group. Forthwith, a list of Facebook groups that never achieved their creator's ambitions to become "one million strong" — though I'm sure coach will give them a plastic trophy at the end of the season anyway.

Other names who have previously faced the wrath of Facebook's name police include US political blogger Jon Swift, Japanese author Hiroko Yoda, British member of Parliament Steve Webb, Australian graphic designer Beta Yee, New Zealander Rowena Gay and countless others with names including "podcast", "beaver", "jelly", "beer" and "duck."

Judging by Sandberg's panel appearence Monday, Facebook particularly wants to push its new Engagement Ads — the ones which allow users to comment on advertiser's banners. Yesterday, I sat down with a top executive from one of the major interactive agencies and asked him what he made of Facebook's showy efforts. Engagement Ads? "Eh, those aren't what I want," he said. Then he suggested three things Facebook needs to do right now to win Madison Avenue's money faster than a week's worth of sessions, panels and Ziggy Marley parties ever could.

Build a toll booth.
Everyone knows banner ads don't do it for big-budget advertisers anymore— not even ones that allow users to comment on them and share with their friends, like Facebook's new ads. Instead of creating gimmicky features that users don't want, Facebook needs to come up with ways for advertisers to be seen as providing new functionality on Facebook itself. By way of analogy, my source told me to imagine American Express sponsoring a normally congested toll road for a day. Drivers approaching the toll booths would see them empty and maybe billboard that read: "No toll today. Drive on through and see what it's like to be an American Express cardholder." That's the kind of branded experiences Facebook needs to create for users and advertisers, my source told me. Not gimmicky ones like asking users to design Mazda's new cars or come up with new Ben and Jerry's flavors. Facebook should encourage users to feel like a site improvement was brought to them by a brand. Maybe Facebook's Video application should have been sponsored by Sony's CyberShot line, for example. The challenge: Facebook's site developers work separately from the group which comes up with ad products, a divide Facebook needs to erase.

Facebook needs to stop imagining it will ever reach Google's size.
One reason Facebook hasn't come up with these kinds of advertising arrangements already is that they require lots of creativity, planning and customization. They're one-offs, and Mark Zuckerberg can't simply program a computer to sell them over and over. It's a terrifying reality for Facebook because its investors put money into it expecting it would become the next Google, which is an automated moneymaking machine. (Only 3,000 out of its 18,000 employees are required to run its advertising operations.) The sooner Facebook management and its investors realize that the company will not be the next Google — which, let's face it, lucked into a ridiculously simple way of making money — the sooner it can take advantage of its massive, desirable user base.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg need to hire Madison Avenue insiders.
My source says Madison Avenue avoids spending money on MySpace because no one in New York knows its ad salespeople. Facebook needs to put Madison Avenue insiders in positions where they have Mark Zuckerberg's ear. For example: Zuckerberg could have used someone with advertising experience to challenge him with the baby-name test before the company went forward with its Beacon ads. The baby-name test? "You know," he said, "The one where you take the name and think of all the terrible things it rhymes with and then decide if you still like it."

Not everyone who uses Facebook is a narcissist. "We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others," said Buffardi. They gave personality questionnaires to nearly 130 Facebook users, analyzed the content of the pages and had untrained strangers view the pages and rate their impression of the owner's narcissism.

Frankly, whatever content analysis tool they used could be quite valuable in finding "influencers" to connect with your brand. They're naturally productive and efficient online promotion engines, they're young and they come cheap. Start working on your pitch, kids!

Got a little joke for you...

What did one seagull say to the other seagull?

This landfill stinks. Let's fly over to that other landfill.

It's getting to the point where SNS's are trying to out fill each other with... filler. That's all this is.