The stories of Terry Childs and Roger Duronio — resentful IT workers who wreaked vengeance on their employers — make nontechnical managers wonder what they might do differently than the City of San Francisco's Department of Technology. What does it take to keep your IT resources happy?The core issue isn't compensation, it's trust. This article at Infoworld explains the shift in perception many IT employees experience: As they become more senior, they become a threat rather than an asset. Something to be protected against, rather than being the protector. Moreover, IT people often feel they're not being told the truth about the organization they serve. Are stock options about to tank? Is the scandal denied in the press actually true? Will the techies be blamed for project failures to save face? Is the CEO who demands weekend work busy packing his golden parachute? It's a cliche, but it's true: IT people live in a logic-driven world. Privileged, encrypted, confidential information and access-restriction procedures are fine with them. Lies aren't. Computers don't do lies. Yet the same human boss who tells an admin how valuable he is to the company is often planning to cut him loose. Terry Childs went berzerk because he knew the cost-cutting managers piling more and more work on him were also looking for a way to chop his $126,000 salary from the payroll. The solution isn't perks, it's candor. If management is playing a game of Advanced Strategery against the IT department, a foosball table, free lunches and drycleaning will only add to their sense of indignity. Yeah, they're kind of ungrateful that way. But if your admins feel pressured to continually re-justify their existence to managers they believe are brazen liars, why is it such a surprise that one of them will look for a way to turn the tables?

When users revolted against a Facebook redesign in 2006, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post in response titled "Calm down. Breathe. We hear you." In it, Zuck came off defensive and condescending. "We're not oblivious of the Facebook groups popping up about this (by the way, Ruchi is not the devil)," he wrote. Now, Zuckerberg's written another post defending the site's latest redesign, which more users — though a far smaller percentage of them — also don't like. It's titled "Thoughts on the Evolution of Facebook." It reads like the inoffensive pablum you'd read on, say, the Official Google Blog. Why is that?No surprise there: Besides top flack Elliot Schrage, Facebook has hired at least three PR people from Google in recent months — Debbie Frost, Barry Schnitt, and Larry Yu. Zuckerberg's preprocessed blog post predictably mentions "Facebook's mission," which Zuck tells us "is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." That sounds exactly like the talking points Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — also an ex-Googler, trained in the delivery of political messages from her time in the Clinton White House. For his investors, an uncontroversial Zuckerberg is a profitable Zuckerberg. If he's to stay CEO through an IPO and beyond, he'll have to practice putting shareholders and analysts to sleep with similar language. We sure will miss the clumsy honesty of Zuck's original post, though. Compare the old versus the new, below. Mark Zuckerberg before the Googlers came — defensive, condescending and honest:

In the next year, Facebook plans to visit 20 universities and 5 business schools as it looks to staff up its already swelling operations. Students graduating from these institutions need to be prepared. In a post to announce the tour, Facebook recruiter Marcia Velencia writes that the company is "looking for people that are passionate," who, like Facebook, "value working hard, smart, and fast, and following that up with some good fun." Velencia and Facebook will almost certainly find these types of candidates and successfully lure them into the company. They will do so by allowing the candidates to believe — not explicitly promising them — that working at Facebook will make them rich, allow them to change the world, and put them on a fast track toward an exciting career in tech. Here's what graduating students entertaining a career at Facebook should actually expect.Facebook will not make you rich. On a job board for University candidates, Facebook says its hiring engineers, product managers and customer service reps. That means unless you're an engineer or you've started your own business during school, Facebook probably plans to hire you into customer service. Its where the company needs bodies as it staffs its ad sales operations and grows its user base. It's also the area Facebook COO and former Googler Sheryl Sandberg knows best. Working Facebook customer service will not make you rich. The job only pays $18.75 per hour. You are not going to change the world. At some point during the interview process, Velencia and Facebook HR will expect you to say that one reason you want to work for the company is that like Mark Zuckerberg, you want to change the world by connecting people. It's fine to say this in order to get the job. Just don't believe it. If you want to change the world go work for Teach for America. You will not be technically challenged. Code will not iterate quickly. I interviewed then Facebook CTO Adam D'Angelo in 2006 and I asked him what he liked most about working there. He said he loved how fast the company moved, pushing new code and making changes to the site. D'Angelo is gone from Facebook now and soon, so will that ethos. The site redesign that's users are just now moving to in September? It was supposed to launch in April. Minion work at Facebook will be like minion work at Google — awful. Though it could turn you into a champion political in-fighter, which is a crucial talent for a career in tech. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg built Google's customer service operation. She will try to replicate it Facebook. Here is how one Google employee described her division:

Yahoo's new marketing push tells us to "Start Wearing Purple." A website created for the campaign features a video of various grungy-looking people, including Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, wearing purple and hollering. We'd show you the video, but it's not very different from a clip a tipster found of Yahoo cofounder David Filo and top exec Ash Patel dancing awkwardly to a Kelly Clarkson cover. The pair flail around like they're in some kind of bizarro-world Apple iPod commercial. That's the problem with Yahoo: It thinks it's an iPod — universally loved and carried around. But it's really a Mac — a fine product nevertheless rejected by many.Click to view Yahoo, triumphant over a host of other wannabe Web portals in the '90s, resurgent in the early part of this decade, has never really gotten used to not being No. 1. Apple, for all its arrogance, recognizes that the Mac is not the best-selling PC brand. Yahoo's marketing department should spend all its time explaining to Internet users why they should use Yahoo instead of its competitors. That's what Apple does with its "Mac vs. PC" ads. Each commercial humorously sticks to its talking points comparing the advantages of Macs over PCs. Apple does this because it remains far behind in the PC market and needs to convince customers to switch from more popular products. That's what Yahoo needs to do in search. But instead of saying why users should, it markets itself the way Apple markets the iPod — as a ubiquitous aspect of a certain way of life. Apple can do this because it already dominates a market full of similar digital music players. A better product helped sell the iPod to the masses. But an advertising campaign which keeps people associating themselves with the brand reinforces Apple's dominance. Yahoo doesn't have that luxury. It still dominates, but in tiny niches. It needs to say why Yahoo News is better than Google News and the New York Times. It needs to say why Yahoo Fantasy Sports games are the most popular on the Web. It needs to say why anyone who owns a digital camera should upload their pictures to Flickr, not Facebook. But instead, Yahoo spends all it's time trying too hard to convince users how wonderfully wacky it is. What's tragic about that is that the brand Yahoo is trying to create isn't particularly attractive. Look, it screams, we're so desperate to be seen as kooky kids, we're willing to hit our top executives in the face with rubber balls! Perhaps the real target of the campaign is Yahoo's own employees. Morale is in the dumpster at its Sunnyvale headquarters. "Bleeding purple," Yahoo's longtime catchphrase for displaying loyalty to the company, has come to refer to the endless exodus of employees. Wearing purple may boost the mood of longtime Yahoos. But it will hurt recruiting for those outside the cult. What adult wants to work at the company which still hasn't figured out what it wants to be when it grows up?

Revolution Health, the brainchild of AOL founder Steve Case, is still in talks to sell its health portal to a rival, Everyday Health. The combination would have bested WebMD, the No. 1 health-site operator — until WebMD bought QualityHealth.com today. The Revolution-Everyday deal, meanwhile, could happen within a week — but is currently stuck on financing. Arranging the money to consummate the sale is proving difficult, with Wall Street more concerned with its own survival than the health of Case's startup venture. One way or another, it seems all but certain that Case's Revolution Healthwill end up sold, without much transformation to show for his troubles.Case's quest to transform the healthcare industry has tragically earnest roots; he started the effort after his brother, Dan, died of brain cancer. Hospital bureaucracy always frustrates the patient's kin — but suffering does not always lead to wisdom. Dan, a tech investment banker, might have cautioned Case against this plan. Revolution Health has ended up as a mere information middleman, buying ads on Google and then selling the users who click on them to other advertisers. That's why it inevitably needs to sell; online advertising is a game of volume. With Google eager to bulk up its own health efforts, it's not clear how much longer there will be room for third parties to play. And arbitrage is hardly a revolutionary exercise. Someone needs to fix the healthcare system. Case's story is suitably tragic; his motivation, noble. But he's not the man for the job.

Wall Street is melting down. But from sampling the thoughts of tech bloggers on Techmeme, an automated news aggregator, you'd think that the biggest story today was a redesign of WSJ.com. One couldn't ask for a clearer sign of the Valley's superficial obsession with user interfaces and online advertising. With Lehman Brothers going bankrupt, Bank of America negotiating to buy Merrill, and AIG desperately selling off assets, who, exactly, will be having their employer pay so they can read the headlines on WSJ.com, let alone advertising there? Yet the problem goes far deeper than one website's newly glossy surface.The disconnect has been long in the making. The economy is a constant topic of discussion in the Valley — but the question is always, "Why aren't we feeling it yet?" That's because the bicoastal economy has split apart. After the '90s bubble burst, investment banks slashed their presence here, and have not returned in force. With no IPOs and few large acquisitions, Wall Street's investment banks have realized that the geeks are not going to make them rich. And the geeks have realized Wall Street will not make them rich, either. Small boutiques like GCA Savvian and Frank Quattrone's Qatalyst are taking whatever midmarket M&A action there is; Wall Street's local bankers have been reduced to shopping around private investment rounds in companies like AdBrite and Glam Media. There's even talk of creating new markets for tech-startup securities which bypass the public ones. Sarbanes-Oxley regulations have made going public an even more tiresomely bureaucratic affair; meanwhile, employees at fast-growing companies like LinkedIn and Facebook are itching to realize some of their paper wealth. The only potential buyers of those shares are "accredited investors," which the SEC defines as individuals with net worth of more than $1 million or steady income of more than $200,000. Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen recently spoke of the unintended consequences of post-Enron regulations; instead of protecting the public investor, they have resulted in cutting him off from opportunity. The rich will get richer, while the average Joe will never get a chance to invest in the next Google. (Or, one should note, the next Pets.com.) The Valley's entrepreneurs love to disparage Wall Street. Google's cofounders famously tweaked the bankers' noses by insisting on an egalitarian auction format for the company's IPO. Yet no one has invented a perfect algorithm for distributing the fruits of the Valley's innovation to the investing public. Wall Street's thundering herds of braying brokers, for all their flaws, managed to spread the wealth. The notion of the insular Valley doling out its profits to a crowd of privileged insiders surely appeals to those already inside the circle. But it should alarm everyone else.

The boom in online ad networks, those automated brokers of discount banners patronized by websites desperate for quick cash, is at long last turning to bust. And the shakeout couldn't have started with a more deserving company. Amid lawsuits and layoffs, Heavy.com has seen two-thirds of its once-15-strong salesforce leave, a source familiar with the company tells us. Meanwhile, the company is trying to sell its Heavy.com, a video destination targeted at young men, so far without success. The plan is to focus on its porn-friendly Husky ad network. Who's to blame? Recently hired "grownups," says our source.Heavy has never been a particularly reputable company. It used to inflate its traffic with popup ads. Yet it still managed to raise $20 million in venture capital in January 2007. By last fall, investors began to clamor for more revenue. The startup's management then brought in what our source calls "C-level grownups." The hires included CMO Eric Hadley from Microsoft; CTO Scott Penberthy from Photobucket; CFO Todd Sloan from Nielsen; and VP Richard Rocca, who spent a few months at shady ad network Glam Media after leaving the equally unsavory ad startup Gorilla Nation. That crew now runs the company, "but the problem is there's not going to be anybody to run it with them," says our source, who calls the new leaders "ineffective."

The latest statistics are alarming: Google, far from peaking, seems to be increasing the rate at which its market share grows. In a year, Google has gone from 64 percent of U.S. search queries to more than 71 percent, Hitwise reports. At that pace, there will hardly be any search business left for anyone else by 2012. From sports to finance to social networks, Google directs an increasing portion of the traffic websites receive Jossip makes light of Google's plan to archive 244 years of newspaper articles, suggesting it will lead to even more snafus like Monday's Google-spawned rumor of a United Airlines bankruptcy. But really, isn't Google's move to archive centuries of newspapers a bit like the architects of a genocide dedicating a museum to the holocaust they committed?

Ad networks are to Web 2.0 business strategy what the portal was to the dot-bomb — a desperate attempt to turn the eyeballs that were used to calculate valuations for venture capital and acquisition purposes into actual revenue by aggregating advertising inventory. And they work about as well as you'd expect, which is not very. So I was more than a little bemused to see real estate listing Web site Zillow touting a new ad network along with a consortium of struggling newspaper publishers. Because from what I've heard about the startup, it hasn't been able to make revenue numbers promised to investors by founder and CEO Rich Barton, while it burns through cash on — wait for it — real estate.Barton, who famously founded travel Web site Expedia as a Microsoft property before it split off and sold to IAC, has apparently been telling investors that the company will make $40 million in revenue by the end of the year — even though the best estimates within the company peg the amount at more like $8 million, according to a source. Meanwhile, the company maintains a lavishly appointed office on the 46th floor of the Wells Fargo Center in Seattle's central business district, and has raised a total of around $87 million in three rounds of venture capital funding.

Austin-based interactive ad agency Tocquigny embarrassed itself with a video meant to show prospective interns how fun it is to work at the company over the summer. Instead of showing how quirky and Internet-savvy Tocquigny was, it proved to be a turnoff — and a ripoff. Besides not copying someone else's work, what could Tocquigny have done differently? Using five examples the agency should have followed, we'll explain how to do a self-promotional corporate video right:Rule No. 1: Convince the video's participants that the end product will be less embarrassing if they don't worry about being embarrassed while they make it. Get your people to either commit themselves fully to the project, or stay out of the way. Vimeo's companywide lip synch of Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" wouldn't work nearly so well if the girl listening to her iPod at the beginning didn't keep such a straight face. Know what else doesn't hurt? Actually memorizing the lyrics.

Nobody reads terms of service agreements, those legal documents new users have to click a box to say they've read. And the truth is, they hardly matter to anybody but the cyber-rights-now crowd who get worked up by articles on Boing Boing, and the paranoid lawyers at large Web companies who want to avoid money-fishing lawsuits. But sometimes they go far beyond protecting corporate interests into la-la land. Did you know that when you download Google's new Chrome browser, you agree that any "content" you "submit, post or display" using the service — whether you own its copyright or not — gives Google a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute" it? Google's ambitions for Chrome are even larger than we thought; by the letter of this license, Google will own all information that flows through its browser. But Chrome's terms of service are just the latest in a long line of ludicrous legalese.

Blogger Jason Kottke has been asking for a Google browser for seven years. So, too, have Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In 2001, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told them the company wasn't ready to take on Microsoft in a full-fledged browser war, Steven Levy reported in his Wired feature on Google's new browser, "Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web." But I don't think Google's project is really about taking on Microsoft. It's about Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, in a feud that stretches back almost two years.John Lilly, the CEO of Mozilla, has said he's "not worried" about Google Chrome. That's classic PR-speak. Mozilla and Google are financially intertwined; Firefox makes money for Mozilla by referring users to Google's search engine; that traffic, in turn, generates advertising revenues for Google. But Mozilla has shown some signs of independence, signing a deal with Yahoo for search in some parts of Asia. And the larger Firefox gets — its browser-usage share has reached 20 percent, according to some estimates — the more leverage it has over Google. Sure, in theory, Microsoft can tie its Internet Explorer browser to its Web search and mapping services, generating traffic. But that's been the theory for years. Can we say it? Microsoft's online services just aren't very good, which is why users avoid them and they're losing money hand over fist. A new browser won't change that. So Firefox, not Internet Explorer 8, is the real strategic problem for Google. Of course, it's impolite to say so. Firefox, as an open-source project, is beloved by geeks, even though its executives are well paid and the project is gushing cash. (Mozilla Corp., a for-profit corporation, is owned by the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit; the company's profits can thereby flow up to the foundation without violating its tax-exempt status. Neat how that works, eh?) Google would also face an all-out rebellion in the ranks if it came out and said it's taking on Firefox. But there's reason for the Googlers behind Chrome to start a grudge match. Several key engineers — Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher among them — devoted considerable volunteer time to Firefox before joining Google's browser project. An article posted on the Truth about Mozilla blog in February says Mozilla's CTO, Brendan Eich — a veteran of Netscape — removed Goodger as a Firefox "module owner" in September 2006. Being the "owner" of a module, while a volunteer position, carries considerable cachet. Goodger subsequently removed himself from the Firefox project, as did colleagues like Fisher and Pam Greene. Wired now reveals the motivation behind Eich's move: By June 2006, Goodger and others had created a prototype of Chrome. If Lilly wasn't worried about Google's browser, why would Eich take Goodger off Firefox? In any event, removing Goodger played into Google's hands, making him all the more willing to take on Mozilla. The infighting between the browser maker and the search engine shows the limits of open source's "sharing is caring" ideology. Open-source projects can be just as political as proprietary code — and as vulnerable to twisting for corporate priorities. The bottom line of Google Chrome's creation? The bottom line. Google was worried that Firefox was making too much money, and Mozilla was getting too independent. Mozilla had to be stopped — and the true Firefox believers at Google had to be cajoled into doing Larry and Sergey's dirty work. (Illustration of Ben Goodger by Scott McCloud)

Even Scoble couldn't save Seagate. Almost a year after the hard-drive maker renewed a sponsorship deal with the prolific blogger, its stock is down 35 percent. Archrival Western Digital, meanwhile, is up 40 percent. So much for the profession of "influencer marketing," a field which has exploded since the 2000 publication of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and the subsequent work The Influentials. These books, translated into action by marketers, have prompted companies from AT&T to Yahoo to hire executives expressly to suck up to bloggers. Seagate's Scoble sponsorship is the purest expression of this trend. And the best illustration of why it doesn't work.The theory it's based on is nonsense. It is true that ideas spread virally through the population. But it turns out that there's not a single set of influencers who are reliable Typhoid Marys. Duncan Watts, a former Columbia University researcher who now works for Yahoo, found in a study that the emergence of contagious ideas is random. Repeated experiments found that anyone can start a trend, and it's impossible to predict who those people will be. Watts's research is not 100 percent conclusive; his models might not translate perfectly to the real world. So let's go there! In April, a study by Canadian research firm Pollara found that word of mouth works — nearly 80 percent said they'd buy products recommended by a friend or family member. But word of mouse? Only 23 percent said they'd buy something touted by a blogger. "This shows that popularity doesn't always equate to credibility," Pollara executive Robert Hutton told MediaPost. "Marketers might have to reconsider who the real influencers are out there." In backing Scoble, Seagate hoped to buy cheap buzz. It's a convenient fantasy for marketers: Find the one magic guy to woo, then watch him chat up your company to Wall Street traders! Seagate would have been better off sending big hard drives to a dozen bloggers. Or a hundred. Or, for that matter, a random assortment of people, whether or not they have a habit of typing out the contents of their brain every 3 seconds. Anyone — literally — would have been a better choice than Scoble.

Here's our theory: Daily deadlines did in the newspaper industry. The pressure of getting to press, the long-practiced art of doom-and-gloom headline writing, the flinchiness of easily spooked editors all made it impossible for ink-stained wretches to look farther into the future than the next edition. Speaking of doom and gloom: Online ad revenues at several major newspaper chains actually dropped last quarter. The surprise there is that they ever managed to rise. The newspaper industry has a devastating history of letting the future of media slip from its grasp. Where to start? Perhaps 1995, when several newspaper chains put $9 million into a consortium called New Century Network. "The granddaddy of fuckups," as one suitably crotchety industry veteran tells us, folded in 1998. Or you can go further back, to '80s adventures in videotext. But each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

The Valley's latest extreme sport is feigning nonchalance about the economy. Living in an earthquake zone requires developing a habit of stoic flinchiness. The economy's seismic shifts are slower, but just as unpredictable; all one can do it shrug one's shoulders, stock the emergency kit, and keep on living. "We're watching the economy crater all around us, but ... well, we're not really seeing any direct impact," writes Tech Ticker anchor Sarah Lacy. "Making things more uneasy for those here in 2000: We didn't cause this one." Lacy's right to reach back in history for examples, but her timing is off. This is 1998 all over again.The Asian financial crisis had roiled markets for a year, much as the credit crunch has done. Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund, required an elaborate Wall Street rescue, backed by the Federal Reserve, foreshadowing Bear Stearns. All this happened, mind you, while Mark Zuckerberg was still in junior high. In the Valley, meanwhile, the first Internet boom was just starting to unfold. Towards the end of the year, Henry Blodget, then a Wall Street stock analyst, set a $400 target for Amazon.com shares. The talk of market-watchers was how the technology-heavy Nasdaq index had uncoupled itself from the gyrations of the Dow. But surely it would come to an end, right? Then as now, that was the question on everyone's mind. It did end, but not in 1998, and not in 1999. The Valley's Teflon economy just raised expectations further, contributing to the wildness of the boom and the harshness of the bust, which unfolded in wearying slow motion from the Nasdaq peak in March 2000. The buoyancy of technology in the '90s only served to sink us, come the new millennium. That's where I think we are: Not 2000, but 1998. In the lull before the storm, the wild upward ride before the crash. A tech recession now might actually be healthy, since so many are braced for it. Strategy Analytics reports that the second quarter was the slowest rate of growth for digital media in two years, since the research firm started tracking its index of online-advertising and e-commerce revenues. Ad-dependent companies are preparing themselves accordingly. Marc Andreessen talked about an economic "nuclear winter" before his social-network startup, Ning, raised $60 million; similar fears, if less bluntly voiced, drove Slide CEO Max Levchin to add $50 million to his startup's stash earlier this year. The risk of all these companies adding to their stock of dry powder is that, in the absence of a deep downturn, the Valley's leaders will be tempted to light it up. The lack of big exits is driving venture capitalists crazy; they want to hand their charges off to greater fools, so they can get back to hunting for the next plausibly big thing. Companies spending for spending's sake, to form the appearance of turbocharged growth and make companies look like IPO material, could return us to the bad old days of 2000. That, I think, is why so many here are secretly rooting for a downturn. They want to get it over with, before things get really wild. "The Great Web Wipeout," a work of speculative satire published by Wired in 1996, makes for instructive readings. The names will mean nothing to today's readers. But substitute "Twitter" for "Starwave," update Stewart Alsop's title from "computer columnist" to "venture capitalist," and you've more or less got a contemporary piece. Underlying the Valley's blue-skies optimism: The fear that the heavens are soon to open up with rain.

"Dating isn't dead, it's just changed names!" So the newspapers reassure us. Don't blame today's "hookup culture" on Web-driven moral decay or the rapid-thumbed narcissism of the Youngs. The Internet has actually saved romance. "They may not call it 'dating,' but they still 'go out,'" a Contra Costa Times reporter explains. "And when it gets serious enough, they announce it online and become 'Facebook official.'" Facebook has saved dating? Fine, one fewer thing to blame Sheryl Sandberg for. But it's still not true.Facebook's most hardcore users — young men pretending not to be looking for sex — can now mark their latest target as theirs in public. But this is no great victory, for women or for dating. Or, for that matter, for them. For one, it kills their prospects of picking up someone new as a stopgap before their current relationship fails. Unless they can somehow convince their current partner that really, talking about one's relationship in public is only for cads and showoffs, and she's gullible enough to agree. Even if they do "cancel" their relationship — to use Facebook's lingo — between tagged photos and archived News Feed items, users can no longer count on the one thing that fuels serial monogamy — consensual amnesia. What we can credit Facebook for, maybe, isn't saving romance. But it is saving a little bit of our honesty.

When former Varian engineer Wayne Cox reached out his driver-side window to push the dying Oralia Puga Ramirez, 75, and Enedina Oliva, 70 off the hood of his car, a 1994 Infiniti, did he have to roll down his window first or was it already open? I wonder, because that's a detail that matters — a detail that delineates between confused and calculated cruelty. You're driving along, you hit someone by accident, your window's already open, you reach out to see if the person is OK, they aren't, so you freak out and drive away — that's callous and wrong, but not calculated. Hit someone you didn't see, see they're dying, press the button to send your power window down, wait the three or four seconds for the window to sink all the way, then reach out and push two dying people from the car's hood? That's callous, wrong and calculated — criminal in a way you'd only expect from an engineer. Or least from an engineer like the nine bad guys we list below:

A year and some after the Facebook platform's launch, few of its widgetmakers have made any real money — unless you count the venture capital they've raised. Just a month after the iPhone 3G launch, Apple CEO Steve Jobs says that $30 million has already changed hands through the iTunes App Store. Even the guy behind the do-nothing "I Am Rich" application made a few thousand bucks. So you, wantrepreneur Web developer, you're thinking: Gee, I made, like, four-and-a-half Facebook Zombie widgets this past year. Maybe I should cook myself up an iPhone app. But hold on there, Steve Jobs Jr. Do you really know what you're getting yourself into?According to Iminlikewithyou's Charles Forman, who's working on porting his startup's copycat games to the iPhone, there's not much in common between the platforms besides the word "app."

"We think it's a good thing that users can lie," said Tom Coates, of Fire Eagle, the location-tagging app Yahoo just opened up to all comers-and-goers. It's a topical spin on a problem as old as Dodgeball, the first widely adopted friend-finding cell-phone app. Dodgeball and its kin are ostensibly used for telling your friends where you are. But really? They're even better for avoiding people. Using a "mobile phone to play hide-and-seek is a welcome development for social-mapping services," claims Newsweek.com, based on a few users' own predictably poor personal habits of relying on technology to do their dirty work for them."What's appealing to some may feel a little creepy to others," Newsweek continues. The same goes for the users when signing up for these location-based apps in the first place. What are you asking a friend, exactly, when inviting them to view your movements around a city? It really means you want to see where they are, and who else they may be with. You're not going for friendship so much as mutually assured surveillance. That users are lying may be painful to friendships, but it's all that's holding the social fabric of these apps together. At Brightkite, glossing over the truth is even built in as a feature: Instead of your precise address being sent as an update, you can opt to have only your city transmitted. Of course, some of your "friends" will figure out immediately that you don't trust them with your whereabouts. All the more reason not to lean on the "social Web" to manage relationships. The very people most inclined to make use of these apps are the ones who could never pull off fibs with any delicacy in person. Ideally, new services would take people out of the equation even more, and let computers have a go at these problems from start to finish. When I ask my phone where the nearest cafe is, why can't it just know that I mean "the one where my ex isn't currently on a date with someone else, ignoring her and refreshing Twitter"?

It seemed like such a simple proposition. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wanted Ben Ling to lie for her, and get rich doing it. Ling is — was — the director of Facebook's applications platform, which had garnered the social network much of its buzz over the past year. But he'd been supplanted by Elliot Schrage, Sandberg's PR guy, as head of the platform, and had gotten a job offer to return to Google. For the search engine, Ling's return was an invaluable PR victory, after a string of defections — including Sandberg herself. It was likewise a blow to Facebook's image; the company has lost a string of technical leaders since Sandberg started her reign of terror.So Sandberg asked Ling to lie. The fib she demanded: That he was taking a two-month vacation, not returning to Google. In exchange, she'd let him vest his shares in Facebook — a small fortune for less than a year's work. Ling, it seems, declined. His integrity was worth more than whatever Sandberg had to offer. Technically, Facebook doesn't owe Ling anything. His shares wouldn't vest until he reached his one-year anniversary. But the reality is that Sandberg, by promoting Schrage above Ling, effectively squeezed him out. And Silicon Valley companies often let departing employees keep some of their shares, even if they've been at a company under one year, to keep good relations (and sometimes, buy silence). Facebook has routinely accelerated departing executives' vesting, a maneuver which lets them keep more shares than the calendar would say they've earned. Sandberg's high-pressure tactic was a foolish overreach. She was trying to manage perceptions, and combat the idea that her version of Facebook is an inhospitable place for brilliant technical talent like Ling. Instead, she's created an even worse perception — no, rather, a reality. Joining Facebook, always a chancy venture, is more dangerous than ever. Those who take a job there now bear the risk that the manipulations of a power-grasping executive will make all their work worthless. (Poor Mike Schroepfer, who just joined the company as VP of engineering; did he have any idea what he was getting himself into?) There's another perception that now exists, as a result of Sandberg's actions: That the COO herself is a glib liar, who expects those around her to glibly lie, too. Less than a month on the job, she had underlings fibbing to Fortune for a puff-piece profile. It seems obvious in retrospect that the paeans that executives like Matt Cohler and Adam D'Angelo offered on the way out must have been fictional, too, bought by Sandberg with Facebook shares. Sandberg's explanation, tossed off with Clintonian brio: "There is no specific underlying story behind the few execs leaving our company." The key word in that sentence is "underlying," minus the "under." Silicon Valley's corps of engineers have little tolerance for dishonesty. The implicit bargain they strike with the MBAs who turn their work into money: Keep the lies over on your side. Lie to investors, partners, reporters; just don't lie to us. There's no room for lies in the world of code; software works, or it doesn't. That may be a Pollyannaish belief, but it's a common one in the idealism-choked cubicle farms which sprawl along 101. Sandberg, with her clumsy cajoling, has broken the pact. She tried to turn one of the geeks into a smiling fake, just like her. He didn't bite. One would think that with Sandberg's political training, she'd at least bring the talents of a skilled prevaricator to the Valley. Instead, the Ling affair has revealed her as the worst of both worlds: a clumsy liar.