Back in the conference room, the morning meeting winds down, and attention drifts to the window of an adjoining office. On the other side, another Flickr employee smiles politely through the glass. Then he turns his back to us and lowers his pants to his ankles. It's a full and excellent moon, and our room delivers a restrained golf clap.

Had that happened in Yahoo's more restrained Sunnyvale headquarters, I'd bet a pink slip would have been delivered instead. Colin doesn't tell readers who it was, leaving us to guess. Review Flickr's staff list, and place your bets in the comments.

More spy photos? Send them in.

We can't stop — and that's okay, Thompson writes:

Ahan knows that she cannot simply walk away from her online life, because the people she knows online won’t stop talking about her, or posting unflattering photos. She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what’s being said about her. This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are.

This is the geek utopia of socialization, Thompson explains: Every time you Twitter a complaint about your head cold, upload a photo of yourself making a squishface, or comment on a story you read, you draw your new social circle in closer.

But to what end? While we make pals, others are making money. Thompson argues that Facebook's News Feed, introduced in 2006, revolutionized friendship. Perhaps. But a year later, Zuckerberg spoke before a Madison Avenue crowd and made clear that what he really wanted to do was revolutionize advertising.

With Zuckerberg's visionary skills, perhaps he can do both. Ideally, he'd just collapse commerce and conviviality into a single phenomenon. If you can't stop gossiping about yourself, why not at least profit from it? Twitter and Facebook could drop the question "What are you doing?" in favor of "What are you selling?" That seems clearer.

(Photo by Dominic Campbell)

(Photos by Stewart Butterfield, maguisso, doctorow, oreilly, dsifry, heather)

A lot of people buy photos from Flickr users. But people have to know the person, and send them a Flickr mail and they have to negotiate a price. It's a very high-friction process. Taking the friction out of that would be one of things Flickr could do to monetize.

Two years later, the tinnovative Butterfield and his cofounder and wife, Caterina Fake, are out of the company. Maybe now Butterfield's bizarre resignation letter makes more sense? (Photo by ericskiff)

She was recently spotted in New York's startup-laden Flatiron and Chelsea neighborhoods, making the rounds. New York VC Fred Wilsion is an unabashed fan, and the two have already invested alongside his Union Square Ventures in Etsy. Might the pair break hearts in both San Francisco and Vancouver by moving to Manhattan instead? As for New York, all I can say is been there, done that. Head back to Canada for Sonnet's sake, guys. American citizenship ain't what it used to be.

(Photo of Butterfield by heather)

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
• 
  
• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
• 
  

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)

My own loyal Tumblr followers — well, 2 out of 45 — say the unnamed price is right. Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson agrees, with a caveat. "It makes a ton of sense," he told me. "They are still in the 'make the service great phase' though."

We agree. For all its impressive growth (9,394.1 percent, year over year), Tumblr can still only claim 510,000 visitors according to Compete.com. Flickr has 24.2 million.

Karp tells us he realizes free feature growth can't stop if he wants Tumblr's userbase to continuing growing so fast. Freeloading users will continue to get new features, too, he said. But they're going to be features that in turn help make Tumblr an ad-supported destination for the wider Web. We're guessing more pages like Tumblr's dashboard-like front page, except broken out into specific subject areas like "autos" and "women" so that ads can be more lucratively targeted.

New features that disproportionately raise Tumblr's hosting costs or require support, however, won't come for hipsters who don't give Karp their parents' credit-card number.

I'm pretty sure, however, that's there's one way to get out of paying fees for Karp's new features. Just a guess: Drive enough traffic to the site and Karp will be happy to comp your subscription and maybe more. Julia Allison new Web content company, for example, will be based on the Tumblr platform. And I bet she won't be paying.

Why? Paid subscriptions could probably pay Karp's bills. Fark.com founder Drew Curtis says TotalFark subscriptions bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for his zany headlines site. But Karp's investors, including Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, will pressure him to find a much larger revenue stream — something that gets its hands on all the money large advertisers aren't spending on the Web. Proctor & Gamble's annual advertising budget, at $1 billion, can buy a lot of airtime, but it can't get trust-funders who only watch The Office when it's embedded on the Web to change their detergent-purchasing habits.

We hear the difference between the two sites is that Yahoo Video will host longer, "professional" videos; Flickr will house shorter clips, three minutes or less — and at least at first, only from those who already have Pro accounts. The skilled visual artists who pay to use Flickr should take this as an affront. When it comes to still images, they're good enough to pay to be deemed pros. When they record moving images, they suddenly become amateurs in Yahoo's eyes. Flickr user riot: film at 11.

One could blame this plan on absentee management. After his paternity leave, Butterfield is not returning to a management role at Flickr. His wife and cofounder, Caterina Fake, didn't even attend the Flickr party. Flickr's de facto commander, Kakul Srivastava, came to Flickr from Yahoo after the acquisition. She previously worked on Yahoo's video products. That Flickr took nearly three years after she joined to roll out video doesn't speak well for her stewardship, either.

(Photo by Dan Farber/News.com)

Strikeout! Mullenweg showed up at the last minute. One wonders: Was the recently minted millionaire dealing with fallout from his nasty Twitter fight with Six Apart's Anil Dash? Or was he just calling his broker? (Mullenweg later told me he just went to the wrong green room.)

Flickr's Cal Henderson says "fuck" a lot, which would seem to come with his job. "I'm Cal Henderson from Flickr, the kitten-sharing website" is how he introduces himself. He admits that one Flickr breakdown came about when he failed to use a basic Linux utility, df, to measure if he had enough storage available — a problem when you serve terabytes of photos. Still, it's a good problem to have. "A lot of people can ignore scale forever," he notes — because they never get enough users to bring their site down. "We serve 32,000 photos a second," says Henderson.

"One of the things I don't like about Web 2.0 is you as users want your data to be available, to stay up forever," says Digg architect Joe Stump. "As an engineer, I hate that."

Most of the panelists favor open-source software and cheap hardware. "Buying enterprise means they don't put their prices on the Web," says Mullenweg, the creator of blogging software WordPress. "It means you have to talk to someone with slick-backed hair for 30 minutes. It's uncomfortable."

If you can get over that, says Henderson, "the easiest way to solve scaling problems is to throw money at it. When you're a startup and you don't pay your engineers, then engineering is cheap and hardware is expensive. If you're paying for engineering time, that's expensive."

Stump takes a question from Pownce creator Leah Culver: "Where do you find your bottlenecks?" Stump's answer: "Bottlenecks never have to do with your [programming] language." Henderson instantly retorts: "Unless you're using Ruby." (Ruby is the language used by Twitter, among others, and some blame it for Twitter's outages.) Stump's comeback: "It's always your database or your file system."

StumbleUpon's Garrett Camp suggests testing new features on a small set of your audience, rather than everyone at once, so you test under real conditions but don't afflict buggy code on all of your users at once.

"When we look at the site, we ask, 'What don't we have to do right now?'" says Digg's Stump. Avoiding real-time updates helps avoid bottlenecks. Henderson says Flickr sometimes shows photo pages that are a minute old — again, to minimize load on the site.

That's a rare moment of agreement between Henderson and Stump. The two are back to sparring in minutes. Henderson's comeback to an obscure point Stump makes: "I don't want to work at Digg." Stump then ribs him: "So, Cal, you're moving over to Microsoft technology soon, right?" "Yes, we're moving over to .NET and SQL Server," is Henderson's deadpan response. That's the last zinger before the show wraps up.

At the bottom of the Yahoo Video page, there's a section titled "More With Video." Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield promised Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site, would add video "soon" last summer. But his promise was empty: No engineering work had started at the time, and Butterfield himself would soon leave Flickr to go on paternity leave. (We hear he's coming back to Yahoo in another role, but not returning to Flickr.)

Still, video's long been seen as a natural extension for Flickr. The same digital cameras which take still photos almost all now capture video too, as do cameraphones. Why force users to go to two websites for the output of one device?

Which raises the question: Why did Yahoo Video relaunch with user-generated content? The rumor I'd heard was that Yahoo Video would become a showcase, much like NBC and News Corp.'s Hulu.com, for professional content, while the amateur stuff moved to Flickr. The obvious conclusion: Flickr's video features aren't finished, while Yahoo Video's were ready to go.

One would think proper leadership would have sorted this out. But of the managers in Yahoo's advanced-development division, one, Bradley Horowitz, just left for Google; another, Salim Ismail, was thankfully laid off; and the last, Chad Dickerson, had just been installed in his job before he got handed the management of what's left. It's no wonder that even when Yahoo manages to launch a promising new site, mismanagement haunts it.

Wish Bear / Chris Saad: Formed the DataPortability Working Group in the hopes that his wish — that all websites would share their data — comes true for everyone. Although Saad is not a major player at a big Internet company, pretending to make wishes come true is still a lot of fun.

Tenderheart Bear / Brad Fitzpatrick: Helps everyone show and express their feelings. He helps his fellow Share Bears be as caring as they can be, as the most prominent developer to join the Share Bears. The Share Bears don't have a leader, but as the lead developer of OpenID and other open-source tools at blogging company Six Apart, now the poster boy for Google's OpenSocial platform, Brad Fitzpatrick comes closest to it.

Friend Bear / Dave Recordon: As a close friend of Tenderheart Bear and his replacement as spokesman for open technologies at Six Apart, is a kind and friendly bear. Sometimes he disagrees with his buddy over Google's definition of friendly. Thinks "the social graph" is the meaning of being a good friend.

Love-A-Lot Bear / Ben "Bling" Ling: is a pretty and perky bear who helps spread love and help it along wherever he goes, be it Google or Facebook where he recently defected to to lead its platform program.

Birthday Bear / Joseph Smarr: Plaxo's chief architect hates it when people forget birthdays. That's why he wants you to sync up all of your online identities, so no one misses out on your happy day.

Cheer Bear / Matthew Rothenberg: As the representative for well-liked and fairly open social photo site Flickr, is a very happy and perky bear, who helps everyone be their happiest and cheer up those who are unhappy, like those who work for Google or Facebook.

Grumpy Bear / Marc Canter: Teaches us all that it's okay to be grumpy and vocal about open standards sometimes, but it's also silly to let grumpiness go too far when your own philosophy rarely results in business success. Canter's PeopleAggregator is an example of both supporting open technologies and its irrelevance, the silver lining and the rain cloud.

Bedtime Bear / Marc Canter: So special that he captures the personality of two Share Bears, Canter is a very sleepy bear. He helps everyone get a good night's sleep and have sweet dreams of portable data.

Good Luck Bear / Robert Scoble: Isn't a developer and doesn't work for a major Internet player, but sheer luck has made Scoble an intriguing bit player in the data-portability movement.

Editor's note: This is Tim Faulkner's last piece for Valleywag. Faulkner has been a contributor to the site since May 2007.

The most notable feature of Apple TV is HD movie downloads. Movie rentals are already available on your computer through iTunes, but the high-definition versions are reserved for Apple TV set-top downloads only. Apple could be having trouble getting all the HD movies encoded and set up properly for digital distribution. Either way, delays in shipping products is never a good sign — especially when you are trying to reassure your investors that everything is fine.

Oh, did we mention that Yahoo Research Berkeley is one of the locations rumored to be on the chopping block?

Johnstone, who fancies himself quite the lensman, has somehow become Yahoo's house photographer. He's been posting his corporate work, without authorization, to his personal Flickr stream.

In his self-appointed role, Johnstone, unbelievably, managed to take a publicity shot of Yahoo TechTicker star Sarah Lacy that made the photogenic valley fox look bad. The online-video show's producer, who never wanted to go with Johnstone in the first place, had the photos reshot — and was furious to hear that Johnstone had published the unapproved photos on Flickr. Johnstone took them down after a late-night call Friday — which was the first he heard, we understand, that his original photos hadn't made the cut. He's being replaced by a real photographer. If only more of the amateurs at Yahoos were meeting his fate.

(Photo by jeremyjohnstone)

Yahoo has Flickr's servers on 24-hour watch," says a source familiar with the site's operations. In other words, something going wrong is practically the default state for Flickr, which has grown beyond its technical capabilities. Flickr was down for four hours over the weekend. With founder Stewart Butterfield on paternity leave, and not expected to return to Flickr when his leave ends — word is he might seek another role within Yahoo instead — Flickr's staff strikes some as dispirited. And other Yahoo employees would rather gripe about Flickr than fix its code.

(Screenshot posted, and then retracted, by jeremyjohnstone)

• The Web's top 10 top 10 lists
• 10. Wired's "The 10 Best Gadget Ads of 2007" makes our list because it points out why everyone wants an iPhone. Apple's genius ads.
  
  
• 9.The New York Times' "Buzzwords 2007" can has number 9.
  
• 8. eMarketer's Predictions for 2008 makes our list because we're so handy with their charts.
  
• 
  
• 7. Tumblr founder David Karp's 2008 Tech Predictions.

  Google will launch the Web Service competitors GStorage, GCompute, and GAmazonFlexiblePaymentService.

  
  
• 6.Your Best Shot 2007 Samplr, collected by Flickr, features the most interestingness of any list in our top ten.
  
• 5.Silicon Alley VC blogger Fred Wilson sure can pick 'em. No, not startups. Rock bands. Like the ones in his Top Ten Records 2007.
  
  
• 4.The second Wired entry — out of nearly a dozen folks, so there's real competition here! — to make our list has to be The Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 because it reviews how we did playing God last year.

  Cancer-fighting Clostridium bacteria Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment mean that a cancer diagnosis is no longer always a death sentence. But certain oxygen-starved parts of tumors are still difficult to reach with the old methods. Enter the Clostridium family of bacteria. Injected into the body, they grow and multiply only in the oxygen-poor parts of cancer tumors. In September, scientists in the Netherlands showed they could arm Clostridium bacteria with therapeutic protein genes, essentially creating search-and-destroy tumor missiles.

  
  
• 3.We're not going to pretend we understand the Large Hadron Collider, which comes online in 2008, according to Ars Technica'spredictions for 2008. "The Higgs boson, supersymmetric particles, and dark matter candidates all beckon," Chris Lee writes. We'll just show you this neat video.

  
  

• 
  
• 2.Tech CEOs say the darndest things, don't they? Like remember when Zuck said media changes every 100 years? Wired's editors do, and they bring it all back in their 2007 Foot-in-Mouth Awards.

  There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get. — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the iPhone, which is outselling all Windows Mobile phones combined.

  
  
  
• 
  
• 1. How's this for meta? We're going to declare Valleywag's own "The Web's top 10 top 10 lists" the winner. Meta FTW!

(Photo by andrer69)

Google's hardly the first to get caught in this contextual snafu. Ask Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield about the time an animal rights activist uploaded photos depicting the cruelity of seal clubbing. Not a good place for fur-coat ads, it turns out.