The Facebook Prom was prophetic, signaling farewells, graduation, and the ending of teenage ties. As his colleagues were preparing to dance the night away at the Metreon, CTO Adam D'Angelo, a high school buddy of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, was saying his farewells. BoomTown reports that D'Angelo, 23, is leaving the company because "his responsibilities no longer fit well with his skills and interests." Even as the company tries to recreate a high-school environment to keep its employees tightly knit, Zuckerberg's own social network is fraying.

Jayshree Ullal, a 14-year veteran of the networking giant, is leaving the company, we hear. "Going-away party today at 3:30, Cisco Campus, Building 3," our tipster tells us. Ullal, one of a few female top executives at the company, ran the company's $10 billion datacenter, switching, and security group. Unlike most Cisco executives, she seems to have a sense of humor. Her recent keynote at the Interop conference was plagued by audio problems. "Is it my hair?" she joked at the time. Anyone know where she's headed next? Let us know.

We hear that Rachel Whetstone, Google's European communications director, will replace Elliot Schrage as the company's top flack after Schrage left for Facebook. Her background may make her a perfect fit, in more ways than Google would like you to know. Unlike Schrage, Whetstone has some experience with rough-and-tumble politics, having served as chief of staff to British Conservative party leader Michael Howard. She also may be better suited to dealing with CEO Eric Schmidt's periodic outings with mistresses: She herself had an affair with Viscount Astor, a top Tory official, which scuppered her political career and led to her joining Google.

Long before he and Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake spawned daughter Sonnet, Stewart Butterfield had a manly thatch of russet facial hair that screamed "Daddy." He's thus the natural winner of Fortune's first beard-off; other contenders like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Yelp's Russel Simmons might as well not have bothered. There's one curiosity about his win, though: Why would a judge praise Butterfield's beard for being "trimmed nicely, edgy, yet mature, so he doesn't look 18 sitting in front of investors"? We don't think judge John Allan, the owner of a chain of grooming clubs, has any special insight into Butterfield's career plans. But he's nonetheless on target: We've heard Butterfield, who sold Flickr to Yahoo more than three years ago, has left Flickr general manager Kakul Srivastava — his "hero" — in charge of his startup baby, so he can tend to his real one, and is ready to bolt from Yahoo.

Commenter Facebookcanhavehim shares this thought on Google überflack Elliot Schrage's prospective departure for Facebook:

Are Elliot Schrage and Sheryl Sandberg about to stage a policy-wonk reunion in Palo Alto? When she worked at Google, Sandberg, now Facebook's COO, helped recruit Schrage from the Council on Foreign Relations. Having taken charge of Facebook PR, Sandberg is looking to hire a VP of communications with experience in public policy. Since most Valley flacks are weak in knowing the ways of D.C., that job description is tailor-made for Schrage. Sources tell us he has already interviewed at Facebook. And we hear he's more than ready to leave Google, chiefly because of its philanderrific CEO, Eric Schmidt.

Ionut Alex Chitu compiled a selection of farewell notes from departed Googlers. Nostalgic and longwinded, they're full of remembrances of free food and something called respect for engineers. Here's the good stuff — Googlers on why Googlers go. Four-word version: To be in charge.

Emails are flying out of Redmond with this speculation: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's botched $50 billion bid for Yahoo could mean the end of his career. While Microsoft's board reportedly gave the CEO considerable leeway in handling the deal, his dithering approach and his failure to sell the deal both to Yahoo's board and Microsoft's own executives don't reflect well on the sweaty screamer. The only problem: Microsoft has no obvious successor for Ballmer.

In the newsrooms of Silicon Valley, they call it "going native." In New York, media is a semirespectable profession, and the skyscraper snobs of the world's leading infotainment conglomerates assume that those who drop out for lesser arts like PR just couldn't cut it. Not so here. Erika Brown, who covered venture capital for Forbes, is leaving the magazine to join Matrix Partners as the VC firm's director of marketing and business development. (Biz dev? I can't picture Brown, a snappy dresser, in blue shirts and pleated khakis.) Did Brown parlay her contacts from reporting into a new job? It's hard to imagine she didn't. And one can hardly blame her. The death of magazines may or may not be imminent. But serving time in a distant bureau of a magazine which is mostly diffident about the Valley is a career killer. Brown's note to friends:

The recruiters at Binc interviewed current and former Googlers to compile a list of five reason to stay at the company and five reasons to go. At 1,054 words, a Googler would use up all of his 20 percent time reading it. Here's the 100-word version.

Engineer Mark Hamburg has left Adobe for Microsoft. Known as the "architect" of Adobe, Hamburg is credited by the Photoshop Hall of Fame with "programmer logic and the compositing models that unite Photoshop's imaging effects to specific features such as the history palette, free transform, screen caching, and shapes." Hamburg will move to Seattle and focus on "user experience." [LightroomNews]

Jumping ship from a company that had already lost the confidence of its investors, Jeff Pulver, the pioneering VOIP promoter, has left Pulvermedia, the company he founded to put on tech tradeshows like VON.

College classifieds site Uloop, the subject of a labor complaint filed by fired employees, previously had to settle a wrongful termination suit, according to a tipster. A marketer and founding member of the team was fired last fall, and filed suit arguing that it was discriminatory. Unlike the rest of the team, veterans of the dot-bomb who were churchgoing Christians, he was young and Jewish. Uloop settled the case, paying $50,000. As for any hints that company management may like unions even less than Jews, notoriously anti-union newspaper publisher Gannett made invested an undisclosed amount in December. Update: Turns out the marketer in question is "Silicon Valley Publicist" Denis Hiller, who can thank his lucky stars he won't have to spin Uloop's latest possible transgression.

Meg Whitman isn't losing any sleep over eBay's role in prepping Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui for his rampage that left 33 dead. Asked what was her worst moment at eBay, Meg confides to confides to Portfolio: "The site outage in 1999," adding that she had to sleep on a cot "for multiple nights." Whitman goes on to give eBay kudos for being "incredibly vigilant around trust and safety and keeping the .01% [of customers who aren't 'basically good'] in line," a boast made all the more ridiculous by the company's recent defense of its sale of combustion-enhancing fertilizer to troubled teen Ryan Schallenberger. (The gist of eBay's defense: Ammonium nitrate isn't just used to blow up high schools and federal buildings.) Seeking Alpha has a complete transcript of the interview, in which you'll find these nuggets Portfolio's editors skipped:

When Twitter hired Lee Mighdoll as VP of engineering and operations in January, cofounder Biz Stone called him the "perfect match" for the company. Not anymore. Mighdoll is out after just three months of the job. "The match was not perfect," Stone told SAI in an email. Mighdoll is the second engineer reported to have left Twitter in the last two days; architect Blaine Cook fled the country yesterday. Neither was able to fix Twitter's oft-reported propensity to crash. We hear the final straw to break Biz Stone's back was not the breakdown yesterday that TechCrunch described as a "privacy disaster". Makes sense, because isn't that Twitter's raison d'être?

Here's how things usually work: Have a major outage, then fire your operations guy. At Marc Andreessen's Ning, the social-network Web host best known for its porn sites, things run a bit differently. On Monday, CEO Gina Bianchini fired VP of operations Alexei Rodriguez. On Wednesday, the company saw all of Ning's networks go offline. We hear Rodriguez failed to deliver a promised upgrade to Ning's systems that would have avoided the problem; the outage was coincidental but almost inevitable, given Rodriguez's omission. The larger problem for Ning: No one seems to care that it was down. When you offer porn and still no one complains that they can't get to it, you have a problem which goes much deeper than database configurations.

Lead architect Blaine Cook helped build Twitter into the downtime-prone morass it is today. Now, as the service grows ever more popular, and ever more unreliable, he's out. In an email to Silicon Alley Insider, Cook says he left Twitter over two weeks ago and plans to move to the U.K. with his partner. "We're Canadian and her visa makes it impossible for her to work in the U.S.," Cook explains. SAI's Peter Kafka wonders if Cook actually got the boot due to Twitter's many outages. We think it's more likely that, as close to Twitter's groundswell as he is, Cook has seen what Twitter hath wrought and is wisely fleeing the country before Robert Scoble tests the limits of how many Twitters one human — or other creature — can send in a day.

CNET editor-at-large Michael Kanellos is leaving for a post at the Oakland office of Greentech Media according to a tipster. Kanellos has been with the company for 12 years, and recently added cleantech stories to his beat. While no editorial staff were handed pink slips in the last round of CNET layoffs, Kanellos may have taken a look at the green tea leaves and left before the company had the chance. As for the promise of cleantech media? We suspect he's hedging his bets. Greentech is more an analyst shop than a publisher, and enviro-mad VCs who pay for research reports are a surer source of revenue than advertisers.

It has been almost eight months since Google CFO George Reyes turned in his resignation. (Under pressure and personal disdain, we hear; his fellow executives routinely called him an "idiot" behind his back.) Since then, at least two people have been offered the job and turned it down. Even if Google were to announce a new CFO tomorrow in its earnings call, the delay will have gone past embarrassing and into mystifying. Who wouldn't want to help run the world's fastest-growing big media company, which has minted an army of billionaires? We'd heard rumors that Reyes was digging into matters that CEO Eric Schmidt didn't want him involved in. Did Google's prospective CFOs, once they started going through the books, find something frightening enough to send them fleeing from a dream job?

Josh Quittner, former editor of the defunct Business 2.0, has extricated himself from his unhappy stay at Fortune by returning to Time, where he previously worked. Tellingly, Time editor Rick Stengel refers to him as a "writer" for Fortune, though he had the ostensible title of executive editor. Stengel's memo is included below. Quittner's new gig is his old gig, covering consumer technology, which takes him back roughly 13 years in the progress of his career. Funny, because we'd heard that Quittner had held serious talks with Michael Arrington about joining TechCrunch, around the same time he wrote a laudatory column about the tech blogger. All that puffery, and no job in exchange? A shame.