Yahoo's pending plans for layoffs have curious timing. You see, a number of Yahoos were in the job market already. A fair number of them have restricted-stock grants which vest in February, removing a last reason to stay. And yet managers are encouraging employees who were ready to quit to stay on through the layoffs. Why?
Will Leitch is the editor of Deadspin, our sister sports site, and his book God Save The Fan is now available at bookstores everywhere. He makes a cameo appearance here discussing why rich techies should avoid the world of team ownership.
Recently, I traveled to Dallas to interview Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban for GQ magazine. (Stupidly, I mentioned my day job, as editor of Valleywag sister site Deadspin, at the beginning of the interview. I once posted about Cuban getting a lap dance from a friend, in what I thought was a clearly joking manner. Cuban was not amused and spent most of the interview accusing Deadspin of being the Inside Edition of sports. So that was fun.)
Why do some stories abruptly disappear from Digg? Duncan Riley of TechCrunch suspects "super users." But there's a much simpler explanation: Digg's shadowy moderators. Digg cofounder Kevin Rose has admitted that the social-news site, a supposedly democratic venue where users pick the headlines, employs moderators: "We have site moderators that ban spammers, remove illegal content, and keep an eye on things. Always have, always will." But what, exactly, does keeping an eye on things entail?
Oracle has acquired BEA for $8.5 billion. Sun has acquired MySQL for $1 billion. These events are not coincidence. Oracle, which already makes a database, wants to add BEA's software on top of that database. Sun, which makes application servers and other software which connects to databases, wants to slip MySQL in underneath that layer. It all adds up to what geeks and software salesmen call a "stack," or a complete package of interconnecting programs.
Entrepreneurs. Engineers. Bloggers. You keep asking: Why does a writer like me hate people like you? Nick Denton's new traffic-based pay scale has backfired wonderfully, giving me a few minutes to explain it.
Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's freshly reelected god-mayor, descended into the bowels of Second Life for a quaint fireside chat with Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab. What lofty matters could a city mayor and the chieftain of a seamy virtual world possibly have to discuss? Why, the parallels between the "two famously diverse and tech-savvy communities with global profiles," of course. As Newsom said during their discourse, "We're all geeks." But the comparisons don't stop there. San Francisco is exactly like Second Life.
John Lilly, the new CEO of Mozilla Corporation, doesn't want you to pay attention to his new charge. The for-profit arm of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation produces the Firefox browser and makes money largely by partnering with search engines — that's why the Firefox browser comes with a Google or Yahoo search box built in. "The most successful case for [Mozilla Corporation] will be when the corporation itself is sort of invisible," Lilly writes. Now, why would Lilly want you not to pay attention to his very profitable business — $66.8 million in revenues for the foundation, $56 million of which came from the corporation, in 2006, the most recent year for which it reported results? Perhaps it's because there are questions he'd rather you not ask.
It's curious that rumors of a Plaxo sale exploded at the same time that Robert Scoble got his Facebook account suspended using a secret, unreleased tool for extracting data from Facebook. Curious, too, that Plaxo is so eager to milk the incident for good PR. While a battle of words takes place in public, we hear that quieter talks are happening behind the scenes: A sale of Plaxo to Facebook. A clash between the companies' backers, though — the powerful VC Michael Moritz and the rising VC star Peter Thiel — could sink any deal.
Illustrious egoblogger Robert Scoble, the Paris Hilton of Silicon Valley, has committed the geek equivalent of a DUI. He has, by his own admission, violated Facebook's terms of service, and had his account suspended — 5,000 friends and all. Scoble's sin? He used a script to export his Facebook address-book information to Plaxo, which runs a competing social network. Running such scripts has long been forbidden, though Scoble argues Facebook should open up its information. Unlikely, given Facebook's history.
Yahoo has axed its Picks blog, which has highlighted a notable new site webevery day for the past 12 years. In an age of 24-hour blogs, a one-link-a-day site was antiquated. And Picks, at 12, was a Methuselah of the Web. But we owe so much to the long-neglected site that it deserves a better obituary than the one Yahoo afforded it.
Few outsiders understand the degree to which the Valley is driven by data. Even your guilty pleasures — like this gossip rag. After Google Reader introduced a feature which tracks users' most-browsed RSS feeds, people have come up to me and confessed that — mathematically, statistically — Valleywag is their favorite blog. They're loathe to admit it, but the data reveals it. That's why I'm not going to do a year-end list of my favorite stories. Instead, here's a list of Valleywag's 20 most-read stories. You may pretend to be high-minded world-changers, but you're really into Facebook, babes, datacenter meltdowns, Google, Kevin Rose, geeks behaving badly, fired Gamespot editor Jeff Gerstmann, and anything written by Nick Douglas. Here's the list. (Click through to see how many pageviews each one got.)
Want to know what the Googlephone fuss is about? WhatsOpen.com, the first app to be built for Googlephones, has just launched in beta. The site looks much like the screenshots leaked to Valleywag last month: It's a local search engine which mashes up Google Maps with a directory of store's operating hours. Want a late-night coffee, or beer at 3 a.m.? WhatsOpen tells you which stores to go to. Here's a screenshot of the search results.
The Financial Times reports that Apple and News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox film studio have signed a deal for digital movie rentals. Consumers will be able to rent the latest Fox DVD releases from iTunes for a limited time. The deal, which will likely be announced at Macworld in January, would likely be matched with an upgrade for the woebegotten Apple TV which has been de facto dead on arrival since it was released. It is suspected that Disney, which has extremely close ties with Apple — Steve Jobs is its largest shareholder after Mickey bought his Pixar animation studio — will be on board at launch as well.
Hollywood, abetted by Internet pundits, has drawn the wrong lesson from the rise of YouTube: that the only way to make cash on the Internet is to offer bite-sized chunks of content. Hence Quarterlife, the microshow about 20-nothing artists. The only reason anyone cares about it is NBC picked it up for broadcast distribution, impressed by Quarterlife's 700,000-viewer debut, and will splice together 8-minute Web segments into six hour-long episodes that will air on broadcast TV this February. The only problem is that Quarterlife episodes, shown on YouTube and MySpace, are now averaging a mere 100,000 viewers.
You know that old story about how the English and German soldiers sang carols to each other from the trenches on Christmas Eve? Then the next day they went back to killing each other? The Valleywag staff dipped into the eggnog and got all feel-nicey about five people we've picked on all year. Each of them, we decided weepily, taught us something about humanity. And that was before the drinking started. Quick, read it before we wake up with a hell-hangover and delete the whole thing.
The trick to running a gossip blog is to reject most of the rumors you get. Otherwise, no one believes anything. You quickly learn to spot the gullible chatter, the obvious attempts to plant a story, the too good to be true. Well, usually. We blew it big three times this year by trying too hard for the scoops.
They were going to CHANGE EVERYTHING. Whoops. presenting five biggest technology disappointments of the past year. No, not Vista and the Kindle — you didn't expect anything there.
Valleywag is of course known for its dead-on accuracy, so our predictions for 2008 need no introduction. Inside, my 25 predictions (made without inside information) cover the futures of Facebook, Google, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, the Wall Street Journal, Apple, Yahoo, Gawker Media, AOL, Dell, LOLcats, the president, and more.
