Yelp, the local-reviews site, is as infamous in San Francisco as it is nonfamous anywhere else in the country. Its parties, always hedonistic rampages of drunken conversations, burlesque troops, and makeout sessions in the photobooth, helped establish its local reputation and cement the loyalty of hardcore users. (Even the founders get in on the action!) Last night, Yelp held its holiday party at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Upon entering, I was greeted by a mass of San Francisco Yelptards, each louder than the next, all laughing, cajoling, flirting, and hugging each other. Self-congratulations were clearly in order.

Pictured, above, is the reception tent for this weekend's nuptials of recent Stanford Ph.D. Lucy Southworth and her beau, Larry Page, the Google cofounder worth about $20 billion. A curious charter captain in the British Virgin Islands decided to take the boat for a spin around the wedding site — the Richard Branson-owned Necker Island — and took these shots of the preparations. The tent above has apparently been outfitted with air conditioning and security cameras, more clearly pictured in the image below. The captain also noted that it looked like workers were adding sand to the beach and placing fake plastic palm trees along a sandbar to give it that authentic tropical look, I guess. What happened to Larry and Lucy's eco-friendly bash? More pictures after the jump.

I remember, distinctly, when former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner's love affair with Facebook began this spring. He couldn't stop talking about it, and I could hardly avoid hearing about it, since my office was next door to his. With all the zeal of a late convert, Quittner evangelized Facebook for most of this year — and now, feeling betrayed by Facebook's Beacon ads, he has attacked them with all the betrayed fury of a new apostate. Facebook is dead — to him, at any rate. Quittner's fickle rage perfectly captures the Silicon Valley hype cycle, and the press's complicity in it. Having built up Facebook, Quittner and his fellow reporters must, inevitably tear it down. But in this latest episode, it's Facebook's critics, not Facebook, who have jumped the shark.

Wired 15.12 comes in at two pounds, half the weight of a September Vogue. Most of it's the water weight of ads and a shopping guide, and I've summarized the meat of the issue in 1,200 words, so now you don't need to pick it up and risk ergonomic injury.

Entrepreneur Christine Comaford-Lynch (above, in an old Fortune photo) has gone from Valley millionaire to bestselling author with her memoir-slash-business book, Rules for Renegades. But making a million or two in stock options could be the worst thing that ever happens to you. Why?

Self-appointed Apple evangelists are far and away the Valley's most exasperating demographic. Yet I feel sorry for them.

An anonymous reader writes:

It was an odd venue for a tech party — a greasy diner by day, the Grill sits on a corner near the ballpark, neighborhing Border's, McDonald's, and dozens of men in Giants windbreakers asking passerbys if they need a ticket. They say open source is about software that's free as in "free speech," not "free beer," but the open bar featured plenty of the latter.

In a landslide the likes of which we haven't seen since Brew PR's Brooke Hammerling destroyed Ogilvy's Justin O'Neill in a "snacky or flacky" head-to-head, 94.8 percent of readers believe that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stole Christmas. All this because his new ad product might tell your friends which presents you're getting them. And Zuck had stiff competition, too. Scrooge essentially kills poor Tiny Tim and the Grinch, well, he made a right mess out of Who-ville, didn't he?

When I read Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's deposition in one of his pending lawsuits with the founders of ConnectU, who claim he stole the idea for the social network from them, my first thought was, "Did anyone at Microsoft read these before investing $240 million in Facebook?" Zuckerberg is at his worst in these transcripts — by turns arrogant, befuddled, condescending, and obfuscating. And then it hit me.

Disney's buying 20 Internet startups in the next two years, and suddenly startuppers have a whole new world to imagine. They know about selling out to the same old tech giants: At Google, get rich and leave for another startup; at Yahoo, get bogged down in bureaucracy; at Microsoft, disappear like Haley Joel Osment. But what happens to a startup at Disney? Here's an inside look.

I got hooked on iTunes TV shows last year, marathoning my way through Battlestar Galactica and then Lost. My TV-hating wife went from rolling her eyes to rolling up a chair to watch with me. But NBC has yanked the rug. My favorite shows of the moment — Galactica and the outstandingly witty 30 Rock — are no longer being added to iTunes. They're on Hulu, the new NBC/News Corp. site. I hate Hulu, for four very good reasons.

Internet video is booming. Presidential candidates take questions from YouTube users. VH1 talks about the week's best clips. Bill Murray and Danny DeVito star in straight-to-web skits. When Miss Teen South Carolina lost her mind on the air, millions saw it — online. But after all this excitement, why is the most famous Internet video of all time a four-year-old home movie?

Amazon's new e-book reader Kindle was released today to great fanfare — and a Newsweek planted story "exclusive." The Kindle — supposedly named after the "crackling ignition of knowledge" — holds 200 books, each downloadable for $10 over a works-anywhere-sort-of EVDO data connection, fetches the New York Times for $13 a month, and generously allows you to pay a subscription fee to have blogs like Huffington Post and TechCrunch pushed to your Kindle. That's all well and good, but how does it stack up to the book? You know, the thing that Amazon has made billions of dollars shipping to you? Our easy-to-read chart is after the jump — and you don't have to pay $2 a month to read it.

Every geek's favorite show of the moment Heroes is set to expire in three episodes due to the Writers Guild strike. What will the twitchy geeks do without their superhero fix? Fortunately, we have a solution. Have you ever noticed that Yahoo vice president Jeff Weiner, rumored to be on the outs with new president Sue Decker, bears an uncanny resemblance to Heroes villain Sylar? Or that CEO and cofounder Jerry Yang could stand in for the cuddly, bespectacled Hiro Nakamura? That's right: Substitute the hit show's cast with Yahoo's management team, and let the boardroom drama play out. No script necessary.

The latest issue of Wired devotes pages and pages to Adeo Ressi, the anonymous "Ted" who runs TheFunded.com. Wired worked with Ressi to coordinate his unveiling with the story's publication at Wired.com on Thursday evening. Ressi's thrilled, right? Wrong. He complained at yesterday's event that Wired still didn't give him enough play. His take: He's a hot tech celebrity. His site is a big story. He expected to be this month's cover. Mr. Ressi, your wish is our Photoshop command. Click the thumbnail for full size. Apologies to Wired creative director Scott Dadich, who we're sure would never, ever use ITC Stone Sans Bold on the cover.

When you can't take market share, take credit. That's the unspoken motto of Yahoo since Google overshadowed the Web pioneer, and no one has mastered the art like Salim Ismail, the desperately unpopular VP in charge of Yahoo Brickhouse, the San Francisco incubator charged with inventing the company's future. One Yahoo insider calls him "notoriously slimy," and points to Ismail's recent announcement of Fire Eagle as an example of how Valleywag's latest and lamest Silicon Valley Tool does his work.

After Rackspace experienced two power issues Sunday and Monday, a truck collided with a power transformer on the side of its Dallas-area data center in Grapevine, Texas. As a result, power was lost again. Two of the chillers that keep the servers cool failed to restart and a number of servers were taken offline to prevent heat damage. As far as we know, all servers are back up and functioning and Rackspace is very apologetic. Now, everyone is asking "how did this happen?" The short answer: Low blood sugar. Find out more sweet details after the jump.

Snooping on user profiles isn't the only special privilege Facebook employees have. They also get to test the site's latest features. Like news feed voting. Above is a mockup of my news feed as a Facebooker would see it, based on real screenshots from an inside source. (Showing a screenshot of his actual news feed would out my source to Facebook management, I fear.) Notice the "plus" and "minus" buttons? Those are new. Not yet available to the public, those will allow users of the social network to vote on items that appear in their news feeds. The news feed is a stream of friends' activities on the site, filtered by Facebook's algorithms which try to predict what you'll find interesting. Voting means users will have active input into those algorithms. If you're thinking "cute feature," think again. Here's why Facebook's voting-rights move is worth watching.

You know what Facebook members are? 50 million suckers. See, through Facebook's new ad product, Facebook Beacon, each of us will soon begin endorsing products to our friends. That much I'm fine with. My friends are not too good for spam. But if my good name is going to get Facebook paid, I want a cut, too.