For quippy superstar engineer Cal Henderson, the fellow who has kept Flickr from crashing all these years, attendance at Yahoo's Hack Day developer event was all but mandatory, since he works there. But what attracted Pownce cofounder Leah Culver, Henderson's ex-girlfriend? A Valleywag tipster's spy camera caught the two of them hard at work, laptops side by side. All business, clearly — until it came time for the awkward parting hug, and perhaps more. "Looked like they were kissing in the pic with him holding her, but can't say it looked very enthusiastic or romantic," our tipster analyzes. Full photos below, so you, too, can interpret the body language in the comments.

Our apologies to Ms. Ariel Waldman — she is not dating Cal Henderson: "I need dates — stop ruining my game, yo," she Twitters. Good, because that would make for some awkward meetings at Pownce, where she spends time as a community manager working with cofounder Leah Culver, a former Henderson paramour. This also means that polytalented Flickr code jock Cal Henderson is probably available. Probably. "How did Valleywag miss the girl I was actually there with?" he later asked us.

Like it or not, we're stuck with Mark Zuckerberg's ego-driven redesign of Facebook, which becomes mandatory for all users today. What to complain about now? Why, Flickr! The Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site has introduced a new look which emphasizes its social features. Like Facebook's redesign, it's currently optional, but will be forced on all users in a few weeks. (Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/News.com)

In an upcoming New York Times magazine, already teased online, Wired contributor Clive Thompson argues that Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr are not alienating us from one another as human beings, as social-network fearmongers claim. We're just becoming more digitally intimate, present in the lives of our 500 "friends," one update at a time. “Sometimes I think this stuff is just crazy, and everybody has got to get a life and stop obsessing over everyone’s trivia and gossiping,” a 20something Facebook user Thompson interviewed said. We know how well that goes.We can't stop — and that's okay, Thompson writes:

Click for full size. I took the liberty of sharpening it a bit in Photoshop Elements. (Photo by Maitri)

After Yahoo bought Flickr from the wife-and-husband team of Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield in 2005, then-executive Jeff Weiner charged Fake with "building the next Flickr at Yahoo." It never happened — though one result of those instructions, the ill-managed Brickhouse incubator, did provide some entertainment along the way. Fake is now joining a New York-based startup called Hunch. "It is a consumer Internet application, it will have a lot of user participation, and it is more than a little fun," she writes. It is the next Flickr, in other words, or so she hopes. But not at Yahoo. Jeff, shouldn't you be asking for half of Yahoo's money back?

In an interview with ZDNet, Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield says that he wished Microsoft's bid for Yahoo had gone through — and that the now-scuppered deal wasn't the reason he resigned from Yahoo earlier this month. "Once the ball was rolling I would have rather seen the acquisition happen, he said. "I think a lot of damage was done to Yahoo." The admission will likely shock the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site's faithful core of hardcore fans, who created satirical Microsoft Flickr logos in response to the software giant's bid. Butterfield also implies that Flickr would have been better off under Google's ownership, since that company was more willing to spend on speculative ventures. It's not a purely hypothetical question: Google was very interested in buying Flickr, but the search engine hesitated, and Yahoo ended up buying Flickr instead. I could go on analyzing Butterfield's comments, but I've become too distracted by a Flickr search of photos which demonstrate how fricking cute he is. The results:

We've been remiss in informing you of this: Cal Henderson, the eminently scalable Flickr engineer, and Leah Culver, the shrill-voiced cofounder of Pownce, San Francisco's favorite way to share MP3 files while evading copyright cops, broke up some time ago. (We hear it wasn't exactly his idea.) But don't feel sorry for Henderson, or Culver. She has no shortage of suitors — including, it seems, Technology Review editor-in-chief Jason Pontin, who was taken enough with Culver to put her on his magazine's latest cover. Pontin's married, but a man can dream, can't he? Sorry, Jason: We now hear Culver's hooked up with a Googler. (Photo of Henderson by magerleagues)

Yahoo's photo-sharing subsidiary, Flickr, announced it has partnered with Getty Images to streamline the process for Getty's photo editors who want to buy images from Flickr users. For the privilege, Getty will pay Flickr a fee. It's a good idea, but one that took to long to come to fruition. Two years ago at a party in New York, Flickr cofounder Stewart Buttefield told me one way the photo-sharing site could finally make money for Yahoo:

Aww, you guys, this is so cute. Making actual babies out of Web people didn't go so well, but these larval stage sketches of popular Web 2.0 sites before they spawned? Adorable. Look, Vimeo was a little funny looking even then! Taken as a whole, it kinda makes you want to pinch someone's Moleskine where it counts. Full-on prototyping-porn after the jump.

Now that Caterina Fake has left Yahoo and Stewart Butterfield has tendered his abstract resignation letter, what will the widely beloved Flickr cofounders do? And where will they go? Brendon Wilson, who worked in the Valley himself before returning to his native Canada, pointed us to an effort by a group of geeks to convince Fake and Butterfield to come back to Vancouver, British Columbia, where Flickr was launched. The welcome wagon even turned out a video slideshow of Flickr photos to remind the couple just how beautiful the city can be. Look, a rainbow! And it may just be working — last night, Butterfield added himself to the Bring Stewart and Caterina Home! group on Facebook. Fake may have other plans, though.

Stewart Butterfield, the cantankerous cofounder of Flickr, has, as we've noted, tendered his resignation to Yahoo, as has wife and cofounder Caterina Fake. The two recently celebrated, along with Flickr's other original employees, a "Vestfest" for their take from the $35 million sale of Flickr to Yahoo three years ago; we'd heard as long ago as October that Butterfield was ready to leave. But we couldn't have anticipated the manner of Butterfield's exit. In a long, rambling email to Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse, under whose aegis Flickr fell, Butterfield described the company as a tin-smithing concern, but found that there was no place for him as the company left its metallurgical roots. Better this entertaining nonsense than some tired cliche of "bleeding purple," I suppose. I'm also told that this email is classic Butterfield, and that his employees at Flickr would stage dramatic readings of some of his better missives at Flickr's San Francisco headquarters, which will now be run officially by Kakul Srivastava, Flickr's longtime de facto chief. Butterfield's full resignation letter:

When Ludicorp co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake sold Flickr to Yahoo, they also moved from their Vancouver headquarters to the Bay Area to take up jobs at the Sunnyvale campus of the new parent company. Their biggest innovation since was the birth of their daughter, Sonnet — which took considerably less time than adding video to the photo sharing site. Now Fake and Butterfield have joined the stampede, with Fake having left Yahoo on Friday and Butterfield due to stick around until July 12, reports TechCrunch — confirming rumors we'd heard regarding Butterfield's plans to move on. (Photo by Caterina Fake)

What if Facebook let you properly express your rage against the tool who just added you to the "Buying and Selling Friends" app? What if Netflix knew you'd skip to the dirty bits? I paid Jay Hathaway a slave's wage to draw up what this would look like.

LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick is a prankster, as evidenced by his Halloween costume last year, when the new Googler dressed up as Facebook to mock his coworkers' fears of the social network. I'm told that in Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Sarah Lacy's new book about Web 2.0, there's an anecdote about Fitzpatrick submitting an expense report — successfully! — for "hookers and blow" when he worked at blog software startup Six Apart. That was likely a reference to the early days of LiveJournal, when users made ridiculous accusations that Fitzpatrick was spending money meant for servers and bandwidth on "hookers and blow." We'd love to hear more, but alas, Fitzpatrick only got 8 out of 294 pages, according to the book's index. Here's the page for "D" through "F":

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.

"Cathy Brooks is a typically unapologetic Silicon Valley Web addict," writes Brad Stone in the New York Times. "Last week alone, she produced more than 40 pithy updates on the text messaging service Twitter, uploaded two dozen videos to various video sharing sites, posted seven photographs on the Yahoo image service Flickr and one item to the online community calendar Upcoming." Usually, when one identifies a friend as an addict, an intervention is in order. But Stone, who seems to have spent so much time in San Francisco's tech circles that he's gone native, suggests more technology instead: Specifically, FriendFeed, which gathers all of this online activity in one place, making it marginally easier for Brooks's benighted friends to keep up with her online logorrhea.

If scenesters from Brooklyn to San Francisco's Mission District want to have Tumblr cool-kid bragging rights, they'll have to pay, founder David Karp has decided. Why has Karp finally set his unflinching blue eyes on Tumblr's bottom line? His hosting bills must be starting to pinch. He'll begin peddling paid Tumblr Pro accounts later this year. Flickr, which just added video for its pro members only, charges $25 a year for extra storage, but Karp tell us he hasn't figure out how much to charge his users just yet. What will Tumblr "Pros" get for their money? Karp says he's got "more than 10 features in the queue" including a tool that allows readers to submit content, more customizable themes and special page layouts. Check out screenshots of the new features below, and then wonder with us: Are they enough for ego-tumbling millennials to agree to pay Karp's fee?

Photobucket, the News Corp.-owned photo-sharing site, is introducing an application programming interface, or API, in an effort to catch up with Yahoo's Flickr. One of the benefits, Photobucket CEO Alex Welch implies, will be having independent developers do Photobucket's R&D for it and come up with new ways to line Rupert Murdoch's pocket: "If we see a noncommercial application that's doing something clearly in our commercial terms of service or doing something very creative, it's our responsibility to go out and figure a way to partner." [News.com]