There’s a popular maxim in Silicon Valley: Find your user base and the revenues will come later.

For a while, it seemed to be the easiest way for a founder to explain his or her way out of a proper business model. But with Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of the entirely revenue-free Instagram, that adage now carries more weight than ever.

Enter: Viddy and Socialcam, two of the hottest start-up apps that both have the buzz of being the “Instagram for video.” The pair have exploded in popularity over the past few months, with each garnering user bases in the tens of millions seemingly overnight.

But the growth of one of these apps is not like the other.

Using a combination of fortunate timing, Facebook’s Open Graph influence and a new way of playing the system, Socialcam has effectively gamed Facebook, YouTube and the App Store to keep a strong grip on that ever-so-valuable user base. In the short term, at least, the three-man Socialcam startup team has discovered a method to beat the 20-plus person outfit that is Viddy.

The method is so effective that Socialcam skyrocketed from around 1.4 million monthly active Facebook users to a whopping 40 million in a span of little more than two weeks. Socialcam surpassed Viddy in the Facebook app rankings last week, and currently sits fat atop Apple’s powerful App Store as one of the most downloaded free applications.

Some have started picking up on Socialcam’s tactics. Threads arose on Quora and Hacker News questioning the validity of the app’s growth, and TheNextWeb picked some of this apart on Thursday.

But there’s far more to it.

History

The concept of social video has been simmering for some time. Viddy was founded in December of 2010, while competitors like Mobli, Klip and Socialcam came along at various points during 2011.

But it was only over the past few months that the mobile social video concept began to boil. Socialcam hit the three million user mark in December. The Instagram acquisition announcement hit the web on April 9th. Two days later, Viddy hit 4 million users.

At some point on April 24th, social video apps exploded, and it suddenly became clearer that Viddy and Socialcam were leaving all of their competitors behind.

Web view traffic to Socialcam through Facebook skyrocketed from around 10 million monthly active users to an astounding 40 million MAUs over a period of two weeks. Viddy jumped from around 8 million MAUs to upwards of 36 million over that same period.

It was as if someone had flipped on the awesome traffic switch.

What Happened That Fateful Day in April?

What isn’t clear is just who or what flipped that switch. But I’m hearing many different theories.

Theory No. 1: Socialcam received its Facebook Open Graph integration around this time, thus increasing the app’s visibility in users’ Timelines. But Viddy’s Open Graph integration had already occurred more than a month previously at South by Southwest, on March 12 and both apps received immense boosts in traffic during that same time period.

It’s possible that Socialcam’s Open Graph jumpstart fueled Viddy’s growth by mere virtue of being another social video app. Or perhaps it was the announcement that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Shakira and Jay-Z would back Viddy financially, the news of which occurred two days before Socialcam’s Open Graph integration.

Theory No. 2: A more conspiracy-like theory in which Facebook itself made changes to its News Feed in favor of the “Watch” action for social videos on the whole.

Consider this: When the once-popular Facebook social reading apps like The Guardian and Washington Post Social Reader recently started tanking in their monthly active user ratings, Ryan Kellett, a Washington Post employee, confirmed to TechCrunch that it was indeed changes in Facebook’s News Feed that led to Social Reader’s decline. It’s feasible, then, to think that Facebook could tweak things in the other direction, in order to favor video apps.

And, indeed, SocialCam, Klip, YouTube, Viddy and DailyMotion all saw spikes in Facebook traffic on April 24 — some more than others — with Mobli’s traffic following suit shortly thereafter.

Facebook declined to comment to AllThingsD on the near instantaneous rise on April 24, although it did shrug off the date in question to The New York Times: “The popularity of videos and other user-generated content on Facebook is not new, so it’s no surprise that social video apps are growing as friends share with each other and as more developers experiment with this type of content on Facebook.”

In a tweet on Saturday, TechCrunch writer Josh Constine noted that the sudden burst of growth on April 24 was due to a reporting error from Facebook to third-party app tracking site AppData. That also seems reasonable, although doesn’t fully explain the sudden traffic explosion that occurred over that two to three week period.

Whatever actually happened, Socialcam saw the chance to seize its moment.

Gaming Facebook

After receiving the boost, Socialcam’s founders discovered the perfect way of keeping that veritable firehose of Facebook Web traffic pouring in.

According to multiple sources, it was around this time Socialcam began scraping video content from Vevo and YouTube to add to its own network of users, which essentially amounts to ripping content directly from other services.

As you might imagine, it’s not a welcome practice.

Then, sources said, Socialcam uploaded that video content to its own servers, where it then began distributing it via different dummy accounts on the Socialcam network. There’s a slew of “YouTube Popular” accounts doing much of the distribution, along with others.

So, in effect, when a Socialcam user on a mobile device clicked on what he thought was a Socialcam video, he was taken into SocialCam’s Custom player, where the ripped YouTube video was played from Socialcam’s servers.

Herein lies the cleverness of the plan: Scraping and ripping stripped each video of its YouTube wrapping, or in the case of Vevo, its pre-roll advertising. So initially, users weren’t even aware they were watching YouTube videos. Socialcam systematically targeted a number of the most viral videos uploaded YouTube in the past four to five years, said sources, aiming to harness that viral success and bolster Socialcam’s network.

Why go to this trouble, especially because it’s against the terms of service to rip off the YouTube APIs? That risks sullying a relationship with a large and powerful online content powerhouses. Embedding the YouTube code within a Socialcam video, instead of ripping YouTube’s content would comply with YouTube’s ToS. It’s also potential fodder to get its app booted from Facebook’s platform.

When asked if Socialcam was ripping YouTube videos, YouTube was cagey, only telling me this:

“While we don’t comment on individual cases, however, we take any violation of our open API’s Terms of Service seriously and take action against known abusers,” a spokesperson for YouTube told me.

A Facebook spokesperson concurred: “If it comes to our attention that an app is violating our policies, we will take action. We have no further details to share at this time.”

Vevo declined my request for comment.

Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel responded: “Socialcam has weekly and often daily interaction with the developer relations teams at both Facebook and Youtube. To the best of our knowledge, we are not violating the terms of service of either company.”

But what apparently happened, said sources, was that Socialcam got caught scraping and was told to knock it off. So to continue with its plan but stay compliant with Facebook and YouTube Terms of Service policies, Socialcam then began embedding the YouTube videos into Socialcam posts, effectively doing the same thing as before, only with the YouTube branding in place.

As of last week, nearly every top trending video on Socialcam’s site was a YouTube video.

Combine the viral nature of those YouTube videos with Facebook’s traffic-driving Open Graph, and you’ve got a recipe for success. If an app is integrated into Open Graph like Socialcam and Viddy are, using those apps publishes activity to three sections of Facebook: Timeline, Ticker and the News Feed. With every click, each user would broadcast the videos they had just watched, and that traffic fed on itself.

Despite the fact that social video on the whole received early initial traffic boosts by some yet-to-be-pinpointed variable, Socialcam was able to retain that traffic through proliferating YouTube videos throughout Facebook.

In a way, the guys behind Socialcam are brilliant, cracking a method of using YouTube and Facebook together to extend the app’s reach in a mere matter of weeks.

And it worked: The app still sits atop the App Store, using its Facebook viral success to boost download numbers immensely. It has soared beyond Viddy and other similar apps, most of which have been around much longer than Socialcam has.

Is All Fair in Apps and War?

And here’s the thing: Aside from the alleged initial screen-scraping, doing what Socialcam is currently doing isn’t breaking any rules.

Sure, its largest competitor, Viddy, is definitely not a fan of the practice. The company spent the past 18 months building its subscriber base out with user-generated content, not to mention raising tens of millions of dollars in venture funding in order to do so.

And Viddy CEO and co-founder Brett O’Brien is making no bones about his discontent.

“Viddy is built on 100% community-generated original content, which we feel is the only way to build a true social community as Facebook, Instagram and others have done,” O’Brien told me in an interview, a thinly veiled slight at Socialcam’s YouTube video poaching. “Our active community of over 27 million Viddyographers is passionate about Viddy and is actively growing the community through sharing. Viddy is clearly filling a consumer need to easily create, beautify and share original video content.”

The problem for Viddy is, others are catching on. Of the top 10 fastest growing Facebook apps from the past week, half of them are social video apps. Most recently, Chill gained more than 8 million users in as little as two weeks. All but Viddy use a mix of content, both user-generated and user-curated — although Socialcam still remains the most adept at working the larger ecosystem.

It seems, however, that in light of the recent negative press Socialcam has received, the company decided to tweak its app on Tuesday afternoon, incorporating a handful of subtle changes. YouTube videos are now labeled much more explicitly. A bug which kept users auto-sharing their videos to their feeds — whether they turned the option on or off — has been fixed. And now Socialcam’s “Trending Bar” — the one replete with YouTube videos — is gone from the site.

Still, as the social apps using these methods proliferate, it’ll only get harder for non-viral videos to rise to the top. According to one source, Facebook’s News Feed only allows for a certain percentage of its inventory devoted to video. The algorithm that determines which videos make it into that inventory is based on click-through rate, as well as the number of comments, likes and shares it received. Still, click-through rate weighs heavy on that scale.

In that case, it’s obvious that when Socialcam — and apps like it — seed Facebook with the most viral YouTube apps of all time, click-through rates and shares will skyrocket, and those apps will take a much larger portion of the video News Feed pie.

The question, then, becomes a philosophical one: Is it fair? Since Socialcam essentially cracked the video sharing code, does it not deserve its seat at the top of the charts?

That point remains contentious. As Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel told me, the company’s “simple goal is to allow users to create amazing videos and watch videos shared by their friends.” And as Seibel explained on Bloomberg West last week, “people want to see the videos that their friends are watching.”

But, if all that is being watched are the most viral videos Socialcam has seeded, are users not just watching what Socialcam directs them to?

The war isn’t over. Perhaps Facebook will tweak its algorithm to compensate for the types of videos. Or perhaps Socialcam and others like it will ride to the top on YouTube videos, then see an influx of user-generated content after reaching a critical mass of subscribers.

And again, like that old Valley adage goes — it’s all about the user base, right?

But there’s one thing that even the most ardent Facebook fan can’t argue with: Facebook advertising is very much a work in progress.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Facebook itself: “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads,” the company says in its IPO filing.

If you’re a Facebook bull, those words sound reassuring. Facebook sold $3 billion worth of ads last year, and it’s just getting started. Imagine what happens when things really kick in.

But if you’re a skeptic, and there are lots of them, that uncertainity is a real problem. When Google went public in 2004, it had already built AdWords, the search ad engine that still generates the majority of its revenue today. Facebook doesn’t have an AdWords, so it doesn’t have a tried-and-true plan it can present to advertisers: Put dollars in here, see results over there.

Instead Facebook marketers try different things over time. A few years back, they were all building Facebook apps. Then they started concentrating on amassing fans/followers. Now digital marketing people tell me with confidence that all of that thinking is outmoded, and that the real Facebook pros are the ones who create “engaging content” on the site, then buy ads to “amplify” that message.

Facebook’s challenge gets even tougher because instead of search ads, whose success and failure are easy for advertisers to evaluate — Did someone click on my search ad? If they did, did they buy something or fill out a form once they got to my site? — Facebook aspires to the big branding dollars that advertisers spend on TV. And those are much harder to score. So convincing GM or anyone else to move big money from traditional ads, which marketers are at least comfortable with, to the wild world of social, requires a lot of work.

The good news for Facebook is that it’s so big that it might succeed even if it never cracks the social ad code. Any Web site with 900 million users and counting, who spend a ton of time there, is going to pull in a lot of ad dollars through sheer force of gravity. If Facebook can keep its users happy, it may get away with muddling through on the ad part.

But being a big, lumbering giant that attracts ad dollars without knowing what it’s doing isn’t the message Facebook wants to sell to advertisers. Or to investors.

OK, on to the “this isn’t that big of a deal” arguments. I’ve heard a bunch, all of which come from (different) people who don’t want to be quoted.

• Obviously there’s a back story here. If GM didn’t want to keep advertising on Facebook, it didn’t have to announce that three days before an IPO.
• Big Fuel, GM’s social media ad agency, didn’t do a good job. That’s why GM fired them in December. For the record, here’s a quote from a Big Fuel rep: “GM never seemed persuaded of the value of social media in general and Facebook likes in particular. In a sales-driven culture, it is very hard to wrap your head around putting money in places where you don’t see immediate results in an uptick in sales.”
• Starcom, GM’s media buying agency, didn’t do a good job. That’s why GM fired them in January.
• How the heck did GM spend $3 on Facebook “content management” for every $1 it spent on Facebook ads, as the WSJ reports? That’s a sure sign that someone was doing something wrong.
• Ford loves Facebook.
• GM is pulling $10 million out of Facebook. Facebook did more than $3 billion in ads last year.

Again, all of those may be valid points.* But if Facebook really wants to allay outsiders’ fears, it needs to be able to prove conclusively that its ads work, in a scalable way, for a wide variety of advertisers. It can’t do that yet.

*I’m totally amazed by the $3-to-$1 ratio, and am wondering if it’s not to late to pivot myself into a “Facebook content creation consultant”. Those numbers also me remind very much of the late 90s, when companies like Organic went public based on the fact that they knew how to build Web sites and their clients didn’t, and they could charge accordingly. That didn’t last long.

The largest U.S. auto maker will continue to expand its use of marketing through Facebook’s pages, in which companies can display content at no cost, these people said.

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That can’t be right, can it?

Not exactly. That scenario is what Gawker’s Scott Kidder encountered when he read a story on Adweek’s site today, but that’s not what’s supposed to happen.

Instead, Kidder should have had a choice of filling out a one- or two-question survey or sharing the story on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Bug, not a feature, says a Google spokesrep, via email:

Generally, Google Consumer Surveys are designed to show a market research question along with an alternate, publisher defined action, such as signing in or sharing a piece of content. Along with the surveys, we also offer a number of controls to prevent abuse of the system. Unfortunately, in rare cases, as a result of these controls, a prompt runs without a survey question included. This is not the intended behavior and we are currently working on a fix.

[UPDATE: This is now fixed, a Google rep says.]

Okay, fair enough. As far as the survey that AdWeek users are supposed to see, which acts as an ersatz pay wall by generating a small fee for AdWeek and Google every time someone fills it out: Annoying and a little clumsy, but not terrible.

I’ve read about the tool, and I’ve used it several times, but each time I encounter it I think something’s broken on the site. Then I remember what’s happening, make a couple of clicks without giving it a lick of thought — today’s survey was about professional medical supplies, I think, but I really have no idea — and move on.

Hard to see how this is useful for the survey sponsor, but I’ve always found online sponsor polls to be baffling. So perhaps it’s a less-bad option.

In any case, it’s a couple of clicks, so I’d prefer that to having Adweek crap up their site with slideshows, or forcing me to make lots of clicks to read a one-page story, which happens all over the Web these days. I also prefer it to Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” via “social readers,” which end up automatically belching up my friends’ reading habits into my feed, whether or not either of us wanted that to happen.

And in the big picture, unless the site you like is using the “borrow money from investors, pay back by selling to Facebook” plan, you’re always going to end up paying something to use it.

Either you pull out your credit card, or you lend them your eyeballs so they can rent them out to advertisers. And if you don’t like those options, you’re going to end up with a much emptier Web.

In what may be the last headcount addition before Facebook’s forthcoming multibillion-dollar IPO, Facebook “acqhired” the full team from mobile photo-sharing service Lightbox on Tuesday, continuing its mini-spree of snapping up engineering talent and companies.

“The Lightbox team has incredible experience developing innovative mobile products that people love,” Facebook told AllThingsD. “We look forward to welcoming this world-class team of engineers to Facebook.”

It’s also something of a reunion for CTO and mobile head honcho Bret Taylor. As he noted on his Facebook page on Tuesday, Taylor worked on Maps with Lightbox co-founder Thai Tran, back when both were Googlers.

It’s not an acquisition. All seven members of the London-based Lightbox will join the company, but Facebook won’t acquire user data previously held by the service.

Users will have until June 15 to download their information from Lightbox, after which the company will shut down the service. After that, Lightbox says, the company will be open-sourcing some of its code for Lightbox, and posting it to Github for all to see and use.

So it’s obviously another step toward figuring out mobile for Facebook. The company realizes it needs mobile talent; Facebook acquired mobile discovery start-up Glancee last week, and of course bought Instagram last month for a whopping $1 billion.

Facebook is smart to bring on more minds that are focused on the problem of mobile. It’s mostly for product building, no doubt, but perhaps some of these hires will move toward making mobile a proper revenue stream for the company.

It’s also worth noting that Lightbox was predominantly focused not just on mobile, but on coding for the Android platform. The seven-man team, then, could be a perfect boon to Facebook’s Android brainpower. Instagram, on the other hand, was iOS for the majority of its existence, only recently releasing an Android application after hiring more engineers to tackle Android.

And in today’s mobile landscape, everyone needs Android-specific engineering talent. The platform accounts for more than half of smartphone market share in the U.S., while nearly broaching 50 percent of smartphone platform share globally, according to Canalys.

The most important thing gained? The newly hired Lightbox team’s bragging rights. Who else can say they were Facebook’s last talent grab before going public?

(Photo of Lightbox team members Nilesh Patel and partners at Mobile World Congress in February, courtesy of Lightbox.)

And hosting images could get expensive if any of them became popular. Also, it would be hard to make a lot of money.

Imgur COO Matt Strader and founder Alan Schaaf

That all was true then — and it still is now — but the three-year-old image-hosting site Imgur has succeeded to become a profitable business with a growing community, one of the top 100 most-visited sites in the world, with a growth curve that’s making venture capitalists drool.

Imgur gets one billion image views per day, up 1,200 percent from a year ago. A typical visitor looks at 11 pages per session.

Imgur (pronounced “imager”) was started by Alan Schaaf when he was an Ohio University undergrad. It’s not a photography site. The images it hosts are a mix of photos that have been manipulated in Photoshop, drawings, screenshots and memes.

The only time Imgur has ever been in the red, Schaaf said, was the $7 he paid for its domain. Since then the site has cost all sorts of money, but it has stayed ahead through advertising, donations and pro accounts, and keeps itself running with the help of EdgeCast’s content delivery network.

That advertising is notably restrained: a maximum of one ad per page. And most page views show no ads. Imgur allows users to link to images directly, so when viewers show up on the hosting page they only see the picture itself, with no metadata or ads surrounding it. Because that feature is so popular, the site has the ability to monetize less than 10 percent of its page views, Schaaf estimates.

“We’re not complaining about that at all. We love that,” Schaaf said in an interview on Monday. “We like allowing things like that that make users happy.”

Schaaf said he thinks the key to Imgur’s success has been this sort of irrational attention to what people want at the expense of what’s good for him and the company. That, and Imgur’s symbiosis with the Reddit community.

Back in 2009, Schaaf was a computer science student and a Reddit user frustrated with the user experience around image hosting. Redditors who uploaded their images to sites like TinyPic, ImageShack and Photobucket would get cut off when they drove too much traffic. (And driving a lot of traffic on the vote-driven service was sort of the point.)

Schaaf announced his new tool with a post on Reddit: “My Gift to Reddit: I created an image hosting service that doesn’t suck. What do you think?”

It took off almost instantly, jumping from a thousand hits per day to a million total page views in the first five months.

Reddit continues to be Imgur’s top source of traffic, and Imgur has become Redditors’ preferred image host. The sites share similar demographics; their audiences are primarily in the United States.

One wrinkle of the Reddit community is that it’s unusually attentive to linking to source images and crediting original content. This can hurt Imgur, which like many user-generated content sites has copyright issues. For instance, Imgur is banned in the section of Reddit devoted to Web comics out of respect for artists who would prefer that Reddit link back to their own sites.

Of course, Schaaf thinks that’s great, too. He’s all for proper attribution and sourcing.

I asked him if there has ever been any sort of setback on this happy growth curve. Has Imgur ever gone through a user backlash? Schaaf said he can’t think of one — maybe when one of the site’s ad networks accidentally included units that automatically played sound. But those were quickly removed.

Imgur’s bare basics business model is plenty to support a staff of five, now based in San Francisco. The site has never been anything but bootstrapped. “We would take funding if we needed it, but we’re not strapped for cash,” Schaaf said.

The Imgur staff is doing more than just keeping the site up. They’re working to develop social tools like direct messaging and replies for the Imgur community, who call themselves “Imgurians.” (Though Schaaf is careful to say he doesn’t want to compete with Reddit — he wants Imgur to be a YouTube for images, continuing its informal alignment with Reddit.)

The company is also adding native mobile apps (20 percent of traffic is now mobile), some direct ad sales, commercial versions (Stack Exchange is a customer) and content creation tools.

More people are paying to play social games than they were a year ago, but the average player is also spending less than in the past.

According to SuperData, the average social gamer who pays to play in the U.S. spent $37.59 in April, which is about $8 less than a year ago, when the average social gamer spent $45.58.

SuperData partners with publishers and developers to create an online gaming panel, which tracks more than a million paying online gamers every month. The report covers the U.S., Germany, Brazil and Spain, spanning all major social game genres, including city building, farming, and strategy and combat.

While the amount each player pays has fallen, SuperData found that as the industry has matured, more people have become more comfortable spending money inside the free-to-play games. In April, 2.5 percent of social gamers converted to spending users, compared to 1.4 percent a year earlier.

But the average paying game player should not be confused with the overall average spend per user. After all, you can spend a lot of time harvesting crops and building cities without ever paying a dime.

For instance, in the first quarter, Zynga said the average bookings per user totaled 5.5 cents, which is the company’s total revenue for one quarter spread across all gamers — whether they pay or not.

SuperData found that game players who play mid-core games, which include strategy and combat games, are spending the most right now. Meanwhile, the average spending player of farming games has been on a decline for the past few months.

The research firm estimates that the North American social gaming market will be worth $1.8 billion by the end of this year, and the worldwide social gaming market, including social games on mobile, is expected to hit $13 billion in 2015.

That brings the company’s highest valuation to just above $100 billion.

In all, Facebook will offer upward of 388 million shares — which includes an additional 50.6 million shares added Tuesday — raising $14.7 billion in the IPO.

Facebook also notes that while the company expected its recent acquisition of Instagram to close by the end of the second quarter, it now hopes to close the deal by the end of 2012. As reported last week by the Financial Times, the FTC launched a routine investigation looking into the acquisition, which would most likely delay the deal until well after Facebook’s initial estimated time frame.

Expect the official pricing to occur this Thursday, according to our sources, with $FB to debut on the Nasdaq exchange this Friday.

Curalate’s pitch: You need basic information about the way users and potential customers are interacting with your products on Pinterest, but it’s very hard to do it on your own, because users usually don’t identify the products they’re “pinning,” so there’s no effective way to search for your stuff.

The company says it can solve that with image-recognition technology, which it licenses from a  third party, and an analytics engine it created itself.

Curalate’s arrival is inevitable, because every big social platform eventually spawns a set of third-party analytics/brand tracking companies — see Twitter, Facebook. But the company didn’t exist a few months ago.

Up until late last year, Gupta’s company was called Storably, and it was pursuing another hot start-up meme, as an “Air BNB for parking and storage.”

But that one never got traction and, after six months, Gupta — a Philadelphia-based Wharton grad — looked for a pivot. He and his four-man team cast around for a new idea and, after considering some 70 ideas, landed on Curalate. At the end of 2011, the company raised a $750,000 seed round from NEA, First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures.

Now Gupta says he has 150 customers, including Kraft Foods and Time Inc.’s “Real Simple,” and he charges them up to $99 a month for his services.

According to several sources close to the situation, investors are being told that the IPO price range for Facebook will be from $34 to $38 a share.

That means the highest valuation will be just over $100 billion, fully diluted.

That is up from a much lower price of close to $31 a share last month, in filings related to its pending acquisition of photo-sharing start-up Instagram. Recent ranges have been pegged between $28 and $34.

Earlier today, reports surfaced about the possible rise in price, but it was slightly higher from $35 to $40.

The higher price is an indication that some reports last week saying there was weak investor interest were, well, wrong.

The official pricing for the blockbuster offering of the social networking site will take place Thursday, sources confirmed, with a public offering on Friday under the “FB” ticker symbol on the Nasdaq market.

And on top of it all, it’s May 14 — Mark’s 28th birthday.

Aside from the intense scrutiny of the company by the tech and financial press leading up to the IPO, Zuckerberg is doing all right. Especially when stacked up against some of the biggest names in tech that came before him.

Consider Steve Jobs. He was zooming along just fine in his twenties. Until, that is, in his 28th year he recruited the man who would eventually become his — and Apple’s — undoing (temporarily, of course). That man was John Sculley, then CEO President of Pepsi-Cola, who traded the position to be the CEO of Apple Computer after intense courting from Jobs. Of course, Sculley would eventually play a part in Jobs’s ouster from Apple; Sculley would also oversee the company in what proved to be the darkest years in its 36-year history. Jobs was also in the process of launching the Lisa when he was 28, one of the biggest commercial computer hardware failures the company has ever released. In other words, 28 wasn’t the greatest year of Jobs’s career.

Amazon luminary Jeff Bezos’s best years were yet to come. At 28, he was still at his hedge fund gig, where he first saw the opportunity in the fast-growing Internet use around the country. Two years later, he would go off on his own to start Amazon.

Bill Gates, on one hand, had founded Microsoft in 1976 — then known as “Micro-Soft,” begun in a small Albuquerque office in partnership with Paul Allen — at the ripe age of 20. It’s the same age Zuck was when he officially founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room. At 28, Gates was certainly upwardly mobile — the year before his 28th saw him begin to license MS-DOS — though his best years were yet to come: In two years, Gates would launch the first retail version of the Windows operating system.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still three years off from Google’s IPO when they turned 28 (Page in March of 2001, Brin in August). It was that year in which the two — who had run Google since they co-founded it in 1998 — decided to turn the reins over to Eric Schmidt, a learned executive well versed in leading technology companies. Unlike Zuckerberg, who retains full control over Facebook with his majority of voting rights, Page and Brin let a seasoned Valley veteran guide Google through its early days.

In all, it seems Zuck is doing just fine. Still two years off from the big 30, he’s number 35 on Forbes’ Billionaires List with an estimated net worth of $17.5 billion. Better still, he’s got a longtime live-in girlfriend and an adorable floor mop of a dog, “Beast.”

Happy birthday, Mr. Zuckerberg. And enjoy a quiet moment of reflection while you can; Friday isn’t too far off.

Quora Inc., a question-and-answer site started by two of Facebook’s earliest employees, Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, has raised $50 million in a new financing that values it at $400 million, up from a valuation of around $86 million two years ago, said people familiar with the matter.

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Which is why Twitter is launching a weekly email tweet digest to users, essentially a summary of the most relevant Twitter messages of the past week from those you follow (and a few you don’t follow, but probably should). Users will be able to see related tweets in context, and be able to tweet directly from the mail.

I’m also hearing that the weekly digest is the first fruit of Twitter’s recent Summify acquisition. Summify’s pre-acquisition product was essentially an email service that sent users daily dispatches containing the most important news stories of the day. It’s a natural extension of the product that the team initially created.

It’s a lot like Twitter’s redesigned “Discover” tab, which the company recently overhauled to combat user confusion caused by information overload. There have been rumors that Twitter could go after Flipboard as another possible solution to its discovery problem, though Twitter seems to be taking other steps to avoid burning through hundreds of millions in its war chest.

But as The Wall Street Journal’s Director of Social Media Engagement Liz Heron points out — in a tweet, mind you — in a world where news moves and changes within the span of a few tweets, is a week too long to wait for your digest?

Perhaps so. But on the other hand, Twitter is focused strongly on acquiring new users and teaching Twitter newcomers just how to use its service most effectively. Those new to Twitter face a mishmash of hashtags, @ symbols and other jargon unfamiliar to those outside the digiterati and the well-initiated.

To boot, it’s probably best to start with a weekly digest and not a daily one. You don’t want to bury your newcomers under a barrage of email, especially when they’re still getting used to real-time news updates delivered via tweet. Perhaps a smart move would be to allow users the option to choose the frequency of receiving emails. Daily, weekly, bi-weekly, what have you.

The new features, expected to be announced at Apple’s world-wide developer conference beginning June 11, will allow iCloud users to share sets of photos with other iCloud users and to comment on them, these people said. Currently, users can only store one set of photos in iCloud through a feature called Photo Stream, which is designed to sync those photos to other Apple devices, not share them.

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Assuming Yahoo gives its interim CEO real power — either by making him its actual CEO, or at least letting him behave as if he has the job — then he’ll finally have full control of a giant media company. That’s something he’s been working toward for a long time, despite his rep as a guy who enjoys buying companies more than running them.

Just like his predecessors, Levinsohn will have to untie Yahoo’s knotty Asian problem. He’ll also have to spend time repairing relationships with Facebook and figuring out what to do with a Microsoft search deal that hasn’t been a huge success.

But if Levinsohn gets to run Yahoo the way he wants to run Yahoo, he’ll focus on getting the most out of its media business, because that’s his strength.

Bear in mind that this is still a huge business — the portal attracts some 700 million visitors a month, which helped it generate nearly $1 billion in ad sales last quarter. But that business is listing and under attack from Google, Facebook, and a swarm of nimble start-ups pulling eyeballs and dollars away.

If you want to get a sense of what Levinsohn may try to do next, it’s good to review what he did last year, when he had control of the company’s U.S. operations — and what he tried to do but couldn’t get done.

• Ads: Yahoo used to have one of the Web’s best sales operations, but those days are long gone. Levisonsohn spent much of 2011 trying to fix that. Part of that involved restaffing his team, and part of it was a strategy that was supposed to cut out some of the ad tech middlemen and allow the company to increase its yield on the ads it sold. Those moves, which included a would-be alliance between Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, all went into a holding pattern when Scott Thompson took over in January. Levinsohn will try restarting that again now.
• M&A: Levinsohn has a reputation as a dealmaker because he’s made some pretty big deals. Most notably, he brought Myspace to News Corp. in 2005, then helped the company secure a $900 million ad deal with Google (News Corp. also owns this Web site). Last year, he tried to land another big fish, when he pushed to pursue Hulu. But Levinsohn couldn’t get buy-in from then-CEO Carol Bartz, and Hulu’s owners decided not to sell after all. I think Levinsohn would still be interested in the site under certain conditions, but he’d need more cash than he has on hand to do it. Selling off his Asian assets might make that possible. If he can’t land Hulu, I don’t see him chasing after Instagram-like companies with big price tags and no near-term revenue plans. I do see him making some plays on cheaper start-ups, as well as some technology plays, to shore up/replace the company’s very old infrastructure/platforms.

In January, as the freshly crowned CEO of Yahoo, Scott Thompson initiated a series of dramatic acts to get the company back on track. The most notable was to make the boldest — or most boneheaded — move the head of Yahoo could make: Filing a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook.

The controversial move was wildly unpopular in Silicon Valley, and even among many Yahoo employees.

But after a drawn-out weeklong controversy over a fake computer science degree on Thompson’s resume, he is reportedly headed out, and global media head Ross Levinsohn is in the driver’s seat as interim CEO.

Now one of the big questions is: Will Levinsohn take steps to repair Yahoo’s relationship with Facebook, especially since it has proved to be one of the most fruitful the ailing Silicon Valley Internet giant has seen in years?

Sources say that some members of Yahoo’s board, as well as the top exec, would welcome a settlement with Facebook on the litigation. Thompson was the main advocate of the in-your-face strategy against the social networking giant, levying a barrage of legal claims at a critical time — the quiet period before Facebook’s public offering this month.

So, if Yahoo wanted to turn back the tide of rancor toward Facebook, now is the time it could happen.

The lawsuit essentially deemed Facebook a thief of Yahoo’s social innovation, claiming that were it not for Yahoo’s many years of research and development, products such as Facebook’s News Feed, privacy settings, advertising models and more would never have come into existence.

“Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology,” one line from Yahoo’s lawsuit reads.

It’s unclear how much Levinsohn, acting as temporary CEO, will be able to change, in terms of the progress of the lawsuit. But if he’s looking to dial things back, his first call could be to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who would be instrumental in reaching some sort of detente in the case.

The initial act of aggression from Yahoo caught many in technology — including Yahoo’s employees — by surprise.

That’s because the various partnerships that the pair have struck in recent years have been hugely successful.

Yahoo’s Facebook-integrated Social Bar application, for example, has essentially been a traffic funnel from Facebook to Yahoo, with nearly 40 million monthly active users accessing the application, according to AppData statistics, and it is now one of the top Facebook apps.

It’s what Director of Product Development Jonathan Katzman called, in an interview last year, “the future of social for Yahoo.”

Finding a middle ground in some sort of settlement with Facebook could win back Yahoo detractors, a culture that praises innovation and largely rebuffs the practice of patent litigation as an act of trolling.

Facebook declined to comment, as did Yahoo, but several sources said to expect some movement sooner than later.

The price for the company would be about $100 million, according to one of the sources.

Meebo's latest product promises to help users cut through information overload.

Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg did not reply to requests for comment. A Google spokeswoman gave me the standard “We can’t comment on rumor or speculation” response.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Meebo has been around since 2005, when it was founded by Sternberg, Sandy Jen (who is CTO), and Elaine Wherry (now an advisor), who met at Stanford.

The company has dedicated the past seven years to all sorts of different social products and customers. First it was a Web-based instant message client (that’s still live as Meebo Messenger). Then it launched the Meebo Bar for publishers to add a persistent social sharing and advertising overlay on their sites. Currently, Meebo’s homepage is pushing a tool for users to “create an interest profile to get new and timely information about the things that matter to you.”

Meebo has raised quite a bit of funding over that time — more than $60 million, including a $25 million Series D round led by Khosla Ventures in 2010. Its other backers include Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Ordinary investors, however, would be better off waiting until some of the buzz dies down, experts say.

The initial public offering, expected on May 18, could value the company at anywhere from $77 billion to $96 billion based on its $28- to $35-a-share price range — making Facebook the biggest company to go public in U.S. history, according to Dealogic. Some analysts already have issued one-year price targets as high as $46 a share.

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