Bad enough that Facebook has stolen Google's buzz, recruited away top engineers, and dashed its hopes of being a player in social networks. Now, Valleywag has learned, a team of scrappy Facebookers has dealt those smug, self-satisfied, arrogant, overfed Googlers a humiliation where it really matters — on the ultimate frisbee field, that is. Ultimate frisbee, a sport mixing soccer and frisbee-tossing, is popular on the college campuses where Facebook first grew popular. Google's team, unwisely, challenged their Facebook counterparts to a game on the Stanford campus. The result? A 15-11 win for Facebook. Carolyn Abram, Facebook's resident blogger and a team member, adds a first-hand report:

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg takes open-source project Vanilla to task for including advertising links in its software. Of course, he doesn't note that he once ran paid links on WordPress.org until a commenter calls him on it. "My experience gives me unique insight into why this is such a bad idea," says Mullenweg, in an attempt to explain the omission. [Photo Matt]

Microsoft is unleashing its Content Ads program on August 26, opening up what has until now been a small beta test of a system that targets ads to the content of Web pages. Now all U.S.-based advertisers will be able to place ads via Microsoft's Content Ads, which hopes to do for Microsoft's MSN websites what AdSense has done for websites partnering with Google: Blanket them in context-sensitive, keyword-based advertising. While many speculate the Content Ads program will put Google and Microsoft in close ad-selling competition, and foster advertiser-friendly price and technology wars, Microsoft still has a lot of catching up to do in market share. AdSense is already widely deployed across the blogosphere, and has become the default business model for unimaginative startups everywhere.

"Just curious why do you lie in your public posts, yet try to sound so reasonable in emails? Answer is on the record of course." — Blogfather Dave Winer, in a not-very-private email to Valleywag writer Tim Faulkner. Tim's reply: "That's just how I roll, Dave. How do you manage to sound so unreasonable all the time, in every conceivable medium?"

Update below. Arguing with a child will just leave everyone frustrated, but some people never learn. If you thought blogfather Dave Winer's recent spat with blowhard Jason Calacanis was childish, you don't know the depths of the man's juvenility. In January, he argued with commenter Nick Irelan on his blog, Scripting News, about the origins of RSS, blogging, and podcasts. But unlike most Winer spats, the Internet manchild's typically disproportionate response could actually land him in legal trouble.

Yesterday's post about former TechCrunch UK staffer Sam Sethi's decision to take Michael Arrington's TechCrunch head-on in covering American technology startups didn't capture the whole picture. Oliver Starr, global editor for mobile content, will cover mobile and tech issues for BlogNation USA. Oliver Starr is also an ex-employee of Michael Arrington, as a founding author of MobileCrunch, a sister site of TechCrunch focused on mobile computing.

Sam Sethi, a former blogger for the UK edition of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington's tech blog, had tried to keep things cordial with his former boss. The site he started, BlogNation, is the global equivalent of TechCrunch, but direct competition was avoided by not covering American startups. No longer. Sethi is taking the fight stateside with BlogNation USA. TechCrunch UK, meanwhile, remains defunct despite Arrington's planned June 1 relaunch.

Gnomedex, the Chris Pirillo-organized geekathon that took place over the weekend, claims to "unlock the attendee's spirit." Instead, the highlight of the event was the opening of a giant can of whoopass. Relentless self-promoter Jason Calacanis and blather-prone blogfather Dave Winer locked horns, and it wasn't pretty. Calacanis's presentation, unsuprisingly, was an infomercial for his latest venture, the human-powered search engine Mahalo. A few attendees started to heckle Calacanis, and Winer jumped in with the proclamation, "You're spamming us!" The presentation continued but led to a one-on-one berating, a weekend blogfight, the dissolution of a "friendship", and Winer withdrawing from Calacanis's TechCrunch20 startup conference. Winer's offended by Calacanis's self-promotion, Calacanis by Winer's lack of manners; but what really cheeses me off is their rank amateurism when it comes to heckling.

On the left, Craig Newmark, the filthy-rich founder of Craigslist, the site that has, some say, decimated the newspaper business by making classifieds ads irrelevant. On the right, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, who, rumor has it, has decided to drop its subscription-only TimesSelect service. No word on if this was taken mere moments before Sulzberger decided to throttle Newmark, on behalf of wealthy newspaper families everywhere. Given Newmark's tendency to bloviate endlessly, baselessly, and tediously, in a monotone drone, on what he sees as biased reporting, we'd hardly blame Sulzberger for anything he did. (Photo by Esther Dyson)

When Jason Calacanis finds a bully — other than the one he looks at every morning in the mirror, that is — his Brooklyn streetfighting instincts kick in. That's why he's going after Aftervote so hard. His response to a review declaring Aftervote "pimp" and superior to Calacanis' Mahalo? He Twittered that he has "inside info" that they'll be shut down for being "illegal." Of course, Dave Naylor, noted search-engine "optimizer" and the man behind Aftervote, did start the fight when he declared on his blog: "Aftervote will end Mahalo." What's really behind the fight and some choice quotes from the scrap, after the jump.

Jason Calacanis and Kevin Rose, interviewed together on the second episode of the GigaOm Show? Of course, the "fur would fly" — or so hosts Om Malik and Joyce Kim promised. Despite recent photographic evidence of a peace accord, Calacanis did, after all, try to undercut Kevin Rose's Digg social-news site with a revamped Netscape during his short tenure at AOL. So, did the claws come out?

I listened in live to a conference call with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two of the plaintiffs in ConnectU's lawsuit against Facebook. "You may wonder why ConnectU is holding its first press conference now," says Tyler Winklevoss in a set of prepared remarks. "This dispute with Thefacebook is over three years old." Winklevoss cites his and brother Cameron's schedules as "Olympic hopefuls" training for the 2008 Beijing games. He says that ConnectU is not trying to shut down Facebook. (Oddly, he keeps calling it "Thefacebook," even though Mark Zuckerberg's company hasn't used that name in almost two years.) Cameron Winklevoss then joins in, largely reciting the facts stated in his lawsuit, but also emphasizing that he challenged Mark Zuckerberg shortly after he launched Facebook, not, as some press reports had it, only recently as Facebook became successful.

Facebook gets a reprieve: A judge has delayed a decision on whether to dismiss rival ConnectU's lawsuit for two weeks, seeking more information from the plaintiffs. A new hearing is set for August 8. [News.com]

Peter Thiel's behind-the-scenes war with Sequoia Capital continues. The latest battleground? Gideon Yu, YouTube's former CFO, had planned to leave after the Google buyout of the online-video site to hook up with Sequoia as a partner. Instead, he's joining Facebook, the social network in which Thiel is an investor and a board member, as its CFO. It's a loss for Sequoia partner Michael Moritz, who has feuded with Thiel's Founders Fund. But it's undoubtedly a gain for Facebook. The social network, whose board members already like to play fast and loose with revenue figures, needs a CFO who's not above a little white lie. Like, say, YouTube's budget. Or what his career plans really are.

At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Eben Moglen, director of the Software Freedom Law Center, told O'Reilly CEO Tim O'Reilly to "stop worrying about a little bit of money" and support free software. Later, Moglen slammed Web 2.0, calling it "thermal noise" and "a bunch of hooey." [Linux.com]

Prickly, volatile tech blogger Michael Arrington has disinvited our party correspondent, Megan McCarthy, from this Friday's TechCrunch gala. Anyone care to report from the scene and tell us what he's so desperate to hide from the Valley's eyes?

Ostensibly, MySpace was trying to highlight its MySpace TV video channels with this release. One slight hitch: The "Hott4Hill" video is also posted on YouTube, where it's gotten 600,000 views. And on MySpace TV? 1,400. Ouch. Even "Hott4Hill", on her MySpace profile, embeds a YouTube video, not the MySpace version.

Valleywag has already noted the curious resemblance of Andrew Frame, the founder of VOIP startup Ooma, to "Arrested Development" character George Oscar Bluth II, a failed magician. But that's not the only curious resemblance we've spotted, now that Ooma's launched its long-delayed product. It turns out that Ooma's Hub, a $399 pice of hardware for making cheap Internet calls, competes with a $99 product that does the same thing and is already on the market.

In yesterday's earnings call, eBay CEO Meg Whitman's comments on her company's relationship with Google sound like every codependent couple we know: They'll last forever, sparring all the while, or end disastrously. In the meantime, each partner will use every opportunity to chew your ear off about the other partner, hoping to gain leverage over the other in their petty, public battles. And if things get ugly? They'll just pretend they don't even exist:

This editor's note concerning a recent Jacob Bernstein profile of Hollywood gossip Nikki Finkke ran in today's Women's Wear Daily. According to Keith Kelly, WWD won't repost the story because "there is a legal question about whether one blanket 'yes you can tape [the conversation]' covered all subsequent follow-up interviews." Our immediate reaction was on what planet? But the planet is California. So we guess it's a cautionary tale for New Yorkers interviewing Californians. Or anyone interviewing Nikki Finke. Update: The whole story is online elsewhere.