Everyone was expecting Business 2.0, the Time Inc.-owned tech magazine where — full disclosure — I used to work, to shut down this Friday after staffers sent the September issue to the printers. But that is, as of last night, no longer the case. Time Inc. is giving the magazine an eleventh-hour reprieve, in the manner of the governor calling in a pardon just as a sentenced prisoner is being strapped into the electric chair. Top execs at the publisher are now, instead of arranging funeral plans, sorting through a flood of offers to buy the magazine. Here's what's changed — and why.

Here's a new Facebook revenue estimate to think about: $90 million a year — from sponsorships alone. Sure, I've poked fun at Facebook's fanciful figures. The social network's board members, after all, can't get their stories straight on how much the company is making — so why should we trust their wild-eyed, multibillion-dollar valuations for the company, either? But now it gets real, folks. An informant has forwarded me a Facebook rate card — a rate card the company claims doesn't exist. It's dated February, so keep that in mind. And any rate card, of course, is a salesman's fantasy numbers, not the real ones that get hammered out in a sharp-elbowed deal. But the contents of the card square with what I've heard from insiders. After the jump, what it takes to buy your way onto Facebook.

The upside of that suspect tip I got about what caused Tuesday's massive Internet outages? Tons of tipsters have written in to tell me what they saw on the scene at 365 Main, the troubled San Francisco datacenter whose generators failed during what ought to have been, for the expensively-built facility, a humdrum power outage in the city.

Everything you know about Craig Newmark is wrong. The tale that Craigslist's founder and CEO Jim Buckmaster like to tell about how eBay got a stake in their company goes like this: Newmark, the clueless business naif, issued shares to an employee, never thinking they'd be cashed in. That employee turned around and sold the shares right under Newmark's nose to rapacious auctions giant eBay back in 2004. It's a good story. But it's nothing like the truth, according to sources close to the transaction. And the truth? That Newmark and Buckmaster, who love to portray themselves as unpretentious types who care nothing for money, can be bought. For a mere $16 million.

I'm a dunce. I was wrong. There, I said it. In running a tip on Tuesday that a drunk employee brought down 365 Main, the San Francisco datacenter which hosts servers running some of the Web's most important sites, I trusted a source I shouldn't have. Here's the story behind my 365 Main post. A warning to readers of sensitive dispositions — I'm about to take you inside the sausage factory, and it's a bloody mess.

We've now learned more about the outage at 365 Main's San Francisco datacenter that knocked some of the Web's most popular sites offline. The latest theory: An employee, reportedly drunk, hit the emergency-power-off switch in 365 Main's Colo 4 room. (Update: I no longer know whether to trust the source who sent in the tip about a drunk employee.) Other sites located in other rooms were unaffected. This isn't the first time 365 Main has suffered an EPO-induced outage; a major one still remembered by customers occurred back in April 2005, and another took place last year. After the jump, a gallery of the carnage caused, and a roundup of reactions.

There's a reason most datacenters are located in distant office parks: It's harder for angry customers to line up at your door. And that's what's happening to 365 Main, the downtown-San Francisco datacenter which is suffering a major outage, caused, a tipster says, not by local power fluctuations but by a drunken employee on a bender. (Update: I no longer know whether to trust the source who sent in the tip about a drunk employee.) An eyewitness says that in addition to the customers lining up, bicycle messengers are constantly whizzing by to drop off packages — legal notices, one presumes, informing 365 Main that it has breached customers' service-level agreements. Anyone else on the scene? Drop us a line.

365 Main, a datacenter on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District, is popular with Soma startups for its proximity and its state-of-the-art facilities. Or it used to be, anyway, until a power outage took down sites including Craigslist, Six Apart's TypePad and LiveJournal blogging sites, local listings site Yelp, and blog search engine Technorati. The cause? You won't believe it.

The tip, incredible. The source, ironclad. Microsoft has apparently told executives at one of the world's largest PC makers not to expect a formal release of Windows Vista SP1 — the first major set of upgrades and bug fixes to its Vista operating system — until 2009 at the earliest. That explains why Microsoft was so desperate to correct erroneous reports, spread by a careless team of developers at Microsoft, that a beta version of SP1 would be out last week. Microsoft now says it "currently anticipates" a beta of SP1 later this year. Anticipations, of course, are not always met. Especially if you're a sluggish beast like Microsoft, with thousands of developers to keep in train on a release. And this delay would have wide aftershocks.

No sooner had we gotten a tip about the YouTube video of Jobster's brainstorming session than the video was taken down. Luckily, informants reported on the contents — and I can totally understand why Jason Goldberg, CEO of the troubled recruiting website, thought better of leaving up what he now tells Valleywag is "an early unedited version."

Months after Valleywag named Mac columnist and book author Andy Ihnatko as a possible writer of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, people have started fingering him as Fake Steve Jobs, the pretend Apple CEO, again, based on nothing more than some skimpy IP-address data. My pesky journalist instincts kicked in: Why not actually ask him? My lazy blogger instincts kicked in: Why not just do an IMterview? So I did. He warned me that he wouldn't give me any real answers about Fake Steve. And he delivered on that promise. But even so, I came away doubting that he's FSJ. A transcript of our AIM conversation follows.

Although fans of high-definition video had already been deriding the Hollywood in Hi-Def site, created by backers of the Blu-ray disc format, for days, it appears our Friday post may have helped provoke a response. The site's masthead now clearly states "Built for Blu-Ray, Powered by Blu-Ray Supporters" and the About Us page has been thoroughly revised, removing any doubt that this "forum" is actually an advertisement. Although much of the site still uses generic "hi-def" headers which could fool newcomers, we are happy to have contributed a small part to the eventual demise of this deceptive promotional campaign. The site description from the About Us page, before and after our post, following the jump:

For Earth2Tech, the new green blog from GigaOm, founder Om Malik has hired Adena DeMonte away from the Red Herring, the struggling publication we've put on a deathwatch. That's got to be the last straw for Herring editor Joel Dreyfuss (pictured, right). Rumor has it that Dreyfuss at one point told Malik to stop poaching the Herring's best writers. Malik, of course, is a former Herring writer, but the publication in its current form and under current management bears no relationship, aside from the name, to the storied tech magazine Malik worked for earlier in this decade. Why Dreyfuss feels Malik's not entitled to fish in his pond is a mystery to me — unless it's just a sign of his general frustration with trying to bail out a sinking ship.

Sony's $50-million mistake is reportedly relaunching as Crackle. Has-been video site Grouper, which Sony bought last August, launched a year before YouTube but never caught on as well; it's now one of several B-list video sites like the superior Vimeo and Blip.tv. Grouper will become Crackle, according to a tipster (who also points out that while Grouper claims over 20 million unique visitors a month, comScore counts under a million). Users can at least hope the site's new incarnation looks something like the trippy Crackle.com placeholder page. I'd ask the company for confirmation, but last time I did that, they flat-out lied.

The "Rahodeb" incident, in which Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey was caught touting his company's stock on Yahoo Finance message boards, is not the first time Mackey has shown extremely poor judgment when it comes to the Internet. Around the same time he started posting on Yahoo Finance as "Rahodeb," a handle taken from the name of his wife, Deborah Morin, he launched a dotcom called WholePeople, which turned out to be an out-and-out disaster, as I wrote back in 2000. But as I reported that story, I also heard persistent rumors that there was a lot of sleeping around going on at Whole Foods, starting at the top. Sounds like the kind of thing we approve of. In most cases. But not the way Mackey did it. Here's why:

Resistance is futile. We wish to improve nonprofits. We will add your charitable and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your website will adapt to service ours.

Red Herring, the print magazine, no longer publishes. RedHerring.com, the website, is on its last legs, running Reuters wire copy and the occasional blog post. Red Herring's conference business, too, is in disarray, with cut-rate tickets being issued for last month's Red Herring East to fill seats, and the host hotel cancelling next month's Red Herring Japan. So what does owner Alex Vieux do? Why, launch a social network, of course. (Even that idea's not original: The old Herring had ambitions, pre-bubble, for a similar site called Herringtown.) Valleywag has an exclusive screenshot of the not-ready-for-primetime site, called RH27, after the jump.

PAUL BOUTIN — Wall Street Journal uber-reviewer Walt Mossberg replied at length to Valleywag's email inquiry yesterday, in which I asked why he mentions Apple's Mac OS X so many times in his review of Microsoft Windows Vista. He obviously thinks the Mac still whups Vista, yet doesn't tell his loyal readers to consider a Mac instead of the pricey new PC most will need to buy to run Vista's best features. Are they holding a gun to his head there, or what? The Sage of Potomac replied instantly, but his email got stuck in the tubes for most of a day. Walt's full response after the jump.See also: David Pogue calls Vista "a truck"

PAUL BOUTIN — Vista or OS X? The star reviewers at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both point out Microsoft's new operating system (a) requires a new, beefed-up PC to use its best features, and (b) seems like an inferior copy of Apple's Mac OS X. David Pogue and Walt Mossberg are both known Mac fans. Each spends a good chunk of his review praising OS X over Vista. It leaves a reader wondering: Should I buy a Vista PC or get one of those Macs, and why didn't they tell me which? Are Pogue and Mossberg appeasing Mac fanboys without actually advocating Apple? Were they ordered not to blurt out VISTA SUCKS GET A MAC? After the jump, Pogue takes the bait.

So, finally, the bottom of the story of the Wall Street Journal's clash with web billionaire Marc Benioff. And it gets uglier. Pui-Wing Tam, the Journal reporter who was investigating the Salesforce.com CEO's Hawaii getaway, was indeed detained, both by Benioff's construction crew and the police. Benioff told the police that she was a stalker. The detention may have been illegal. And Journal brass in New York decided to cut mention of the incident when the article about Benioff's Hawaii complex was published.