Today, the site is launching a new product, called Boards, that lowers the burden of participation a bit.

Quora Boards is basically a social bookmarking tool. Users can curate posts from Quora, links from around the Web, and other content. It’s similar to other sites like Pinterest — though Pinterest tends to be more visual and product-oriented — and Snip.it, (both of which Katie Boehret recently reviewed).

Introducing Boards wasn’t necessarily a play to broaden Quora’s appeal to a larger audience, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever said in a phone interview. The intent was to give users tools they wanted — such as ways to feature their favorite Quora answers, or ways to acknowledge outside resources from the rest of the Web.

“It’s easier to put stuff on a Board than it is to write a five-paragraph answer,” Cheever said.

And the regular Quora tools will continue to exist, Cheever said.

His co-founder, Adam D’Angelo, said in a blog post that Quora has evolved away from its original question-and-answer format. Now the service wants “to connect you with everything you want to know about.”

Boards can be public, subscriber-only or secret, and they can have multiple contributors. Users can also add descriptions and commentary to anything they add to a Board. That’s more personal than Quora’s traditional upvote, which Cheever described as “a blunt instrument.”

Boards take Quora further from the “best source” mentality of its questions and answers, and bring in a bit more personality and nuance. For instance, Cheever said, a math teacher might be interested in higher-level content than the general audience of the site, so she could create a Board of her favorite Quora content — and non-Quora content too.

Quora has traditionally been highly structured and organized, with its moderators collapsing overlapping questions into each other and editing top answers into wikis. Boards, by contrast, seem like they’ll be redundant, overlapping and personalized by nature. That could be a good thing.

But the current market tempts VCs to change the game plan by buying shares of late-stage Web companies wherever they can find them–from start-ups directly or from employees and previous investors.

VCs didn’t start the fire; folks like Yuri Milner from Digital Sky Technologies (Facebook, Zynga, Groupon) and private company marketplaces that help stave off IPOs, like SecondMarket and SharesPost, did.

But these new Web giants’ valuations just keep going up. Think Facebook’s valuation was bloated at $50 billion? After seeing huge demand at that price, a month later, the company is exploring selling employee shares at a $60 billion valuation.

Watching those numbers rise so quickly makes VCs lose their hang-ups about price and just want to get in on the hotness.

Kleiner Perkins is reportedly buying $38 million worth of Facebook shares from existing shareholders at a $52 billion valuation, according to VentureWire. Meanwhile, Andreessen Horowitz bought $80 million worth of Twitter shares on the secondary market, after not participating in the company’s recent $200 million funding round, led by Kleiner Perkins.

Both those firms, along with Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners, also invested in Groupon’s last huge round, after the daily deal site walked away from talks of a $6 billion buyout by Google.

It’s not just the big names doing such deals. Venture capitalists were the buyers in more than 40 percent of transactions on SecondMarket in the fourth quarter of 2011.

VC activity easily outpaced other buyers, which were individuals, hedge funds, mutual funds, secondary funds and asset managers.

According to SecondMarket Head of Public Affairs Mark Murphy, VCs representing the largest percentage of buyers is a recent trend that started in the third quarter of 2010.

This comes at a time when raising money for a VC firm is tougher than ever.

What are VCs buying on SecondMarket? Facebook accounts for the single largest portion of transactions, at 39 percent. After that are LinkedIn, Etsy, Chegg, Epocrates, Silver Spring Networks, CafePress and Reply, and some other companies that declined to be named.

SecondMarket does not share pricing or volume stats or trends, except to say it sold $157.8 million worth of stock in the fourth quarter, up from $75 million in the third quarter.

Some VCs are steering clear of secondary markets and late-stage deals. Redpoint’s Geoff Yang was willing to go on the record about it in a recent interview. “What do venture capitalists know about being a momentum hedge fund?” he said.

It’s not just proven hits big enough for the secondary markets that are attracting funding interest. Everyone is still eager to find the next Groupon or Zynga. The Q&A site Quora, led by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, raised $11 million at a valuation of $86 million last year before it had even launched to the public. After success with early adopters, the start-up is now fending off offers of much more money than that.

So there’s pressure to either get in very early, or get in late if you can, because the time in between is fleeting.

VCs are also actively trying to get more involved in seed funding deals. For instance, Google Ventures recently set up its Startup Lab to attract early-stage companies where it charges them $5 per month for office space (see our video tour). And just this morning, NetworkEffect covered how VCs are actually more active than angels on the early-stage investment matchmaking service AngelList.

Vicarious is designing artificial intelligence software intended to learn to “see” and recognize objects and things just as the human brain does from the time of a baby’s birth. This is much more complicated than designing a program to recognize a shape, say a shoe, and then find many other similar shapes, according to Vicarious.

The company just raised its first institutional funding led by Founders Fund with participation from Felicis Ventures; Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook; Adam D’Angelo, co-founder of Quora and former CTO of Facebook; and Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Instagram, which is available only for the iPhone, has grown quickly from its launch in October, and now has 1.75 million users and 290,000 photos posted per day. The company thinks of itself as a sort of personal digital magazine, and will likely monetize through sponsored accounts and advertising from brands that fold in with its community’s stream of pictures.

Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom was a former Google and Nextstop product manager who also interned at Twitter predecessor Odeo. His San Francisco-based company has a team of just four people.

Instagram is in a class of peers who seized on similar concepts (smartphone-enabled media-sharing communities) at similar times. Picplz was first to take its Series A, with $5 million led by Andreessen Horowitz (there was some drama because that firm had also invested in Instagram early on). Path yesterday raised $8.65 million led by Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures. Now for the hard part: Building real companies.

With higher-resolution cameras in our smartphones, everyone seemed to be adding social photo posting to their apps.

Hi-res photos hit Facebook, pictures came to Foursquare, and phones filled with apps to crop, stretch, filter, sketch and generally punch up our often marginal photography.

So, in honor of a big year of sharing photos with friends, here is a quick gallery of shots from the holidays, gathered with care from the walls and feeds of a few of tech’s most social shutterbugs.

Adam D’Angelo (pictured here) is too shy to subject himself to a BoomTown video–or perhaps too savvy–but he did agree to a sit-down for a short interview recently in a nondescript room in the Palo Alto, Calif., office building that houses Quora, the hot social answers start-up.

D’Angelo was, of course, the CTO and VP of Engineering at Facebook, as well as a prep school friend of the massive social networking site’s co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

But D’Angelo left the company in mid-2008 and with former Facebooker Charlie Cheever launched the question-and-answer site in January, after much venture capitalist shoving to get on board.

With more than $10 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and a whole lot more hype to contend with, D’Angelo and his small team have been trying to move the site well beyond its Silicon Valley-tech-dudes forum to one in which a plethora of topics and memes thrive.

As was the initial goal, D’Angelo said the aim remains to become the best place to find pertinent information about just about anything.

“The Web is a great place for finding information, but a lot of information that is really important is actually in people’s heads,” said D’Angelo. “If I had to pick one, I would say Wikipedia is a good comparison [to Quora], but there is room for more.”

Not such an easy task, which is why D’Angelo believes most Q&A sites still come up short for users.

“Quora is a simple interface, but it is very complicated underneath,” he said. “Q&A sites in the past had good systems, but they did not add in identity, reputation and quality.”

The hope is that by adding those elements, as it develops, Quora can more correctly answer the questions people are looking for.

“We are really interested in info that changes quickly and in unstructured info,” said D’Angelo, which he noted was at the heart of a lot of searches and well beyond data that search engines such as Google (GOOG) provides.

And for answerers, D’Angelo believes, it also gives them a place to feature their expertise in a much easier way than if they used their own Web site.

“We think people have found that Quora is different from a blog, in that people now have to think up what they think people might want to know,” said D’Angelo. “Here, they are given the topics and the questions, which means they are hitting areas they already know their audience is interested in.”

Interestingly, D’Angelo said he has wanted to turn down the spotlight on the site in recent months, as he hopes to get Quora on as solid footing as possible.

“We want to make a product that markets itself and not because we are big in Silicon Valley,” he said. “So, we want to tone down anything that does not have to do with improving Quora itself.”

Perhaps one of the reasons is the competing effort by his old pal and employer at Facebook, which launched its own Answers product soon after D’Angelo did.

D’Angelo declined to answer any questions related to the obvious and decidedly odd competition, although it is clear the move irks him, since it was a longtime interest Facebook was never interested in until he was and Quora attracted a giant amount of attention.

“There were a lot of different things I could have done [when I left Facebook]. But I felt this was an area that was completely neglected compared to other stuff,” is all D’Angelo will say.

Luckily for Quora, so far the Facebook Answers product has not garnered a whole lot of buzz, although D’Angelo discounted that as being a sign of Quora’s success.

“This thing is up to us, whether we succeed or fail is something that only we can determine,” he said.

We all want to be something else, don’t we?

And so it is with Google (GOOG), the robotic, algorithmic, black-box search behemoth girding the globe with datacenters stacked up to heaven.

As it turns out, all it really wants is to be our friend.

The big question is when it is going to do that, by introducing a social strategy that actually works, even as perceived rival Facebook barrels ahead.

Sources close to the company, as well as some voluble Silicon Valley players–such as Digg’s Kevin Rose and Quora’s Adam D’Angelo–insist that Google is zeroing in on a plan for a service internally called Google Me–get it?–that it will begin to unveil in the weeks ahead.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it did so today, when Google is holding yet another product feature-fest at its San Francisco offices, as it did recently about its cool Voice Actions mobile offering.

(Memo to Google PR: Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski will be liveblogging the event, but you can’t ask press not to talk about a public company event before it takes place–even if it is invite-only.)

That’s unlikely, but some answer in the social space couldn’t come soon enough, especially because all of Google’s various and sundry efforts have yielded little in the way of any gains and, well, have shown a lot of losses.

Yesterday, for example, it was reported by The Wall Street Journal that Google’s Orkut social networking service had lost primacy in India to Facebook.

Orkut, as is well known, has lagged worldwide, except for inexplicably rocking India and Brazil.

Now, even though Google has added more punch to Orkut of late, it is down to just Brazil.

And then there was Buzz, which Google launched in February to much fanfare, followed by much more confusion.

That’s because, by using Gmail as the central organizing principle for Buzz, it quickly degenerated into an “Animal Planet” episode called “When Email Attacks.”

As for Google’s overhyped-by-bloggers communications and collaboration app Wave, it soon became “Wave Buh-Bye.”

To be fair, it is admirable that a big company like Google, which made its bones from search, has rolled out so many attempts at innovation over the last two years in areas such as apps, cloud computing and especially mobile.

And, in those categories, it is doing well, even as its stabs at social media have fallen so far off the target.

Is it because Google is inherently as social as a digital version of a telephone book, or an encyclopedia or an almanac? Which is to say helpful, but not at all attracting of friendship.

Or, as with its early efforts to find its golden business model, has Google just not yet hit on the social equivalent of AdSense and AdWords?

Meanwhile, over at Facebook HQ in nearby in Silicon Valley, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has his team working all night on a multitude of feature launches, which he described to me at the recent rollout of the social networking powerhouse’s Places geo-location feature as fast and furious.

That’s probably the right tone, although if I were Facebook, I would take it down to Defcon 5 with regard to Google.

At least until Google Me is more than just a clever, rainbow-colored search term, that is.

Until then, let’s all enjoy this music video of the incomparable Lionel Richie singing the classic song “Say You, Say Me”:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

After longtime Internet tech exec Owen Van Natta was ousted from his job as CEO of MySpace last February, after clashing with News Corp. (NWS) digital chief Jon Miller and also the other two top execs at the troubled social networking site, he seemed to drop off the map a bit to chillax and regroup.

Not for long, though, as the high-profile Van Natta (pictured here)–he was also a top exec at Facebook in its early days, as well as at Amazon (AMZN) before that–soon began doing mentoring and also unofficial consulting work with various start-ups in which he was an angel investor or had developed an interest.

Most especially, according to numerous sources, that effort has now been largely focused on Zynga, the red-hot social gaming company that has been on a growth and revenue tear of late.

Under CEO and founder Mark Pincus, that has included big new rounds of investment, renewing its partnership with Facebook after some contention, striking another deal to put its popular games such as Farmville throughout Yahoo (YHOO) and, reportedly, working on an even bigger deal with Google (GOOG).

It’s been a very active time for Zynga, which has been contemplating an initial public offering.

All that, sources said, has prompted Pincus to increasingly bring in Van Natta as an adviser to the start-up, focused mostly on strategy and operations.

And, said sources, that could eventually result in a more formal role, such as Van Natta joining Zynga in an official job, like COO. Many say that both have been seriously contemplating such a move in recent weeks.

In fact, at the recent Allen & Co. media confab in Sun Valley, which both attended, Van Natta and Pincus told many of Van Natta’s more substantive advisory role.

A COO job like that would not be a big leap for Van Natta, who was COO and close advisor to Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg at the nascency of the company.

Van Natta was key to some important early deals, such as bringing on Microsoft (MSFT) as an investor and staffing the young service.

In doing so, he formed a close bond with the then less experienced Zuckerberg.

Eventually, though, that relationship cooled, and Van Natta’s job shifted as more execs joined.

Van Natta left the social networking giant in early 2008.

He did a short stint as CEO of music discovery site Playlist later in 2008, but was put in charge at MySpace as part of an awkward troika of leadership by the following April.

Although he moved to reinvigorate the tarnished service, Van Natta’s job there was short-lived, After much internal wrangling with COO Michael Jones and product head Jason Hirschhorn, Miller suddenly fired him in a tense meeting earlier this year.

To be sure, to grab a big job at Zynga would be a splashy move for both the company and Van Natta, who has clearly seen quite a few of them in his Internet career.

When I contacted them to ask about Van Natta’s role, Pincus declined comment and Van Natta has yet to respond.

Don’t ask Eric Schmidt. At least not in public. Someone did that at the Guardian’s tech conference yesterday, and he gave the following non-answer: “That would be a product announcement and I won’t say.”

Okay, then. We’ll add that to the rather thin body of evidence that suggests that the search giant is, in fact, working on something called “Google Me.” The list so far:

• A tweet, now deleted, from Digg CEO Kevin Rose, describing a “rumor” from a “very credible source.”
• A much more confident assertion from former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, who wrote about the project on Quora, his new Q&A start-up.

And that’s it, as far as I know. On one hand, it would be easy enough for Schmidt to bat this one away if it were a complete fabrication; on the other hand, if he got into the habit of denying reports about Google (GOOG) projects under development, he’d never get anything done.

Meanwhile, if you’re trying to assess Google’s chances at building a plausible social network, I think it’s fair to look at Orkut, its original attempt (big in Brazil!), and Google Buzz, its weird and unwieldy Twitter response. But I wouldn’t count Google Wave against them–best I can tell, that non-starter of a messaging product was truly a lab experiment conducted by a handful of engineers. If there really are a “are a large number of people” working on Google Me, as D’Angelo maintains, this could be interesting.

Don’t ask Eric Schmidt. At least not in public. Someone did that at the Guardian’s tech conference yesterday, and he gave the following non-answer: “That would be a product announcement and I won’t say.”

Okay, then. We’ll add that to the rather thin body of evidence that suggests that the search giant is, in fact, working on something called “Google Me.” The list so far:

• A tweet, now deleted, from Digg CEO Kevin Rose, describing a “rumor” from a “very credible source.”
• A much more confident assertion from former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, who wrote about the project on Quora, his new Q&A start-up.

And that’s it, as far as I know. On one hand, it would be easy enough for Schmidt to bat this one away if it were a complete fabrication; on the other hand, if he got into the habit of denying reports about Google (GOOG) projects under development, he’d never get anything done.

Meanwhile, if you’re trying to assess Google’s chances at building a plausible social network, I think it’s fair to look at Orkut, its original attempt (big in Brazil!), and Google Buzz, its weird and unwieldy Twitter response. But I wouldn’t count Google Wave against them–best I can tell, that non-starter of a messaging product was truly a lab experiment conducted by a handful of engineers. If there really are a “are a large number of people” working on Google Me, as D’Angelo maintains, this could be interesting.

One of the hopefuls, Quora Inc., launched to the public Monday evening after months of private testing. The Palo Alto, Calif., company, co-founded by two early Facebook Inc. engineers, wants to collect and organize information people have in their heads but that may not be available online, such as background on the inner workings of a company and advice on how to get a reservation at an exclusive restaurant.

The service allows people to pose and answer questions–working behind the scenes to route questions to the users who can best answer them. People must use their real name on the site, and register by connecting their Quora accounts with a Facebook or Twitter account, which helps Quora connect them to people they know using the service.

“It really seems like a big opportunity to get all this stuff that isn’t on the Web onto the Web,” said Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, who started the company with partner Adam D’Angelo in April 2009.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

I just clicked on an innocent-looking Facebook ad asking for beta testers. What followed was a page explaining how Facebook is launching a new product that involves getting users to ask and answer questions that will be published to Facebook as a whole.

Note: I’ve copied and pasted the beta user offer from Facebook at the bottom of this post. Decide for yourself if I’m reading this right.

For those with only a moderate level of tech obsession, the service I’m talking about is one in which users interact with one other, posing and answering questions that are available to all users. Sort of what user forums are for software.

Google has tried it, Yahoo has tried it, and Quora, a tech darling of the moment–which just happens to be run by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, with guidance from original Facebooker Matt Cohler–is trying it. I’m a beta tester for Quora, and have used several ask-answer type services online. A weakness has always been the scale of the user community.

We’ve all heard the “if Facebook were a country” statistics–or, if you haven’t, here’s a handy infographic, which is already two months old (click to enlarge).

I include the table above only to illustrate that if Facebook has anything, it has scale. Even considering the recent privacy hullabaloo, 80 percent of Facebook users who couldn’t care less still add up to a ferociously huge user population for an ask-answer service.

Okay, okay. Yes. Google (GOOG) has scale. Yahoo (YHOO)–well, it once had scale. But both sites boast core services based on moving freely in and out of their pages. Nothing keeps users in like a walled garden.

Additionally, there is something inherently social about asking questions that early ask-answer crowd seems to have missed.

Yes, I want an expert to answer my question about how a catalytic converter works (or Wikipedia), but if I want to know how to throw the best dinner party, I am just as likely to take notes on an answer from a friend of mine who throws great parties as I am from Paula Dean. Maybe more so.

Quora realizes this. It has built out a whole social networking component to its service, and encourages you to connect the other networks you are already a part of.

But what’s harder? Getting people to know one another or getting wannabe pundits to pontificate about something they are interested in–on the Internet? I know I’m an easy sell on the latter. Just ask me

Below is the copy and pasted text from Facebook’s “so you wanna be a beta tester” questionnaire. Decide for yourself what it’s up to.

Help us build the future of Facebook.

We at Facebook are preparing to launch a brand new product to the world. We think it will be as exciting as Facebook Photos and Facebook Events, but we need your help to make it great.

As a beta tester, your job will be to ask great questions and provide great answers about your favorite topics. Economics? Skydiving? Relationships? Mexican Restaurants? It’s up to you. You’ll be the first person outside of Facebook to use this product. Your expert writing will be seen by tens of millions of people–including job recruiters. And we’ll bring our best beta testers out to California to tour Facebook headquarters and meet the team.

Ready to get started?
Before we can give you exclusive beta access, we’d like you to submit three great sample questions and answers. We’re looking for evidence that you can write clearly and authoritatively on familiar subject matter.

Here are some guidelines to follow when submitting your questions and answers:

Choose provocative questions. Write about things you know. Some examples:
How can I get over my fear of flying?
What are some fun family activities to do with two small children on the weekend?
What caused the U.S. stock market to crash in 2009?
What’s the secret to throwing a great housewarming party?
What are the main differences between Google Chrome and Internet Explorer?
What are women looking for in a relationship?
What methods has BP tried to clean up the oil spill?
What should I do to prepare for the Bar exam?
How did The Beatles find success?
Write detailed, articulate answers.
Where relevant, cite and link to third-party sources such as Wikipedia.
Your answer must be original. Plagiarism is unacceptable.

Here’s one certainty in the hubbub that has resulted in the wake of the departure of high-profile exec Ben Ling from Facebook last week: COO Sheryl Sandberg is definitely not responsible for the melting of the polar ice caps.

That’s the joking question–”Was global warming Sandberg’s fault too?”–asked at a staff meeting at the social-networking start-up last Friday afternoon after the news of Ling’s departure on the heels of previous employee exits suddenly morphed into a series of increasingly vituperative posts on the Valleywag tech gossip site centering on what blogger Owen Thomas called Sandberg’s “reign of terror” at Facebook.

Using Photoshopped images–one of Sandberg wielding a rifle and another with the bright-red word, “LIAR,” plastered under her mug–the vaguely sexist and decidedly over-the-top picture painted was of Sandberg (at right) as some unholy cross of Lady Macbeth, the bad side of Hillary Clinton and a really grumpy fascist dictator of a small third-world country.

“She demands total loyalty, and brooks no dissent–even the healthy, boisterous debate that’s common to start-ups,” wrote Thomas dramatically, as if Sandberg might really use that fake rifle on errant minions. “You’re either with Sheryl, or you’re against Sheryl. And if you’re against Sheryl, you’re not long for Facebook.”

Owen, you have now officially scared the bejesus out of BoomTown with that added dash of Rosa Klebb!

(And, of course, this image conveniently leaves out the very pertinent fact that Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is still firmly and much more militantly in charge at Facebook than ever before, but we will get to that later.)

In any case, Valleywag used all of this to postulate that Sandberg’s insane reaction to Ling’s leaving–complete with a sneaky-sounding stock bribe to buy his silence–was evidence of her mad grab for power over all of Facebook.

The talented and strong-willed Ling was portrayed in an odd way too, as some sort of whiny victim of circumstances he was unable to control.

Except–while BoomTown likes a good “Tom and Jerry” cartoon as much as the next person–it’s a deeply inaccurate portrayal of Sandberg, who arrived at Facebook in March; of what happened with regard to Ling; and most of all, of the often-painful growing-up process that has actually been occurring inside of Facebook.

The Ling incident is, in fact, a perfect example of this.

According to multiple sources from all sides, Ling (pictured here) was offered the choice of resigning or being terminated last Monday, and he and Facebook senior management wrangled over how he would leave the company and announce his return to Google (GOOG)–in a big job at its YouTube division, in fact. But the true story of his departure is highly typical of how small, promising Web companies stumble forward.

From mismanaging expectations related to Ling’s job after his arrival from Google last fall (after Facebook widely touted the new recruit), to constant shifts in how the company was organized, to a series of miscommunications and misunderstandings on both sides, the curious case of Benjamin Ling and Sheryl Sandberg is–more than anything–completely human.

Which is to say, it is a bit of a mess.

Here’s what I found out, after spending the weekend talking to as many people with knowledge of the situation as possible, in a very long report:

To begin, as someone who has been consistently tough on the company for its insane valuation, criticized its sometimes ham-handed management and pressed it to show the true path to sustainable monetization, I think I cannot be considered a cheerleader for Facebook or for its shifting management.

Thus, I and many others looked closely at the recent departures of CTO Adam D’Angelo (to take time off) in May and longtime exec Matt Cohler in June (to become a VC at Benchmark Capital) with a gimlet eye.

Looking further, I learned from several sources that the 20-something D’Angelo had issues with the company inevitably becoming larger and more bureaucratic, and there were also questions about his ability to run the much larger and increasingly complicated technical organization.

The sudden exit of Cohler (pictured here), who had become Facebook’s VP of Product Management, had an even a more complex set of variables, sources said, including his longtime interest in being a VC, the highly attractive offer he got from Benchmark and, most of all, his lack of interest in running a much larger organization.

While some say Cohler–who was, in fact, key to bringing Sandberg in–quickly grew disillusioned with her and the direction of Facebook, it seems a bit of a stretch to me to say he left because of her.

As Zuckerberg’s earliest and most trusted of execs, who is also well-liked by all, Cohler had as much–if not more–power as Sandberg over the organization. More likely, I imagine Cohler would have stayed if he thought she was laying waste to the place.

In any case, the arrival of Sandberg–followed quickly by the hiring of former Google PR head Elliot Schrage–heralded massive changes and an eventual path to an IPO for Facebook, a journey that not everyone welcomed, to be sure.

With their much more disciplined and controlling management styles, highly polished Harvard, Washington, D.C. and Google resumes, and obviously sharper edges, Sandberg and Schrage (pictured here) represented a contrast to earlier, less-intense times that not everyone at Facebook has liked.

Many execs–used to the chaos of jostling for attention and power from the close-to-the-vest Zuckerberg, whose attention to various employees seems to always wax and wane–also resisted a No. 2 in charge.

Typical was discontent from Technical Operations VP Jonathan Heiliger, whom many sources pointed to because of his vocal complaints around the company and around Silicon Valley about Sandberg’s more brusque and meddlesome style.

(Heiliger now gets along better with Sandberg, according to many, as do many execs previously wary of the new regime.)

Interestingly, Ling was not in this disgruntled camp, having known Sandberg from Google and hoped her arrival would clarify his growing disappointment with the job he thought he had been hired for.

According to many sources, Ling thought his job as director of platform product marketing, as described to him by Zuckerberg and others who recruited him in the fall of 2007, would be much more expansive than it turned out to be.

And, indeed, the letter from his new boss, Chamath Palihapitiya, heralding his arrival seemed to indicate that Ling would have a lot of responsibility:

Hi Guys,

Please join me in welcoming Ben to Facebook as our Director of Platform Product Marketing, working on my team. He joins us from Google where he was the General Manager of eCommerce, where he ran Google Product Search and Google Checkout and was the founder of Google Checkout. Ben also led the mobile efforts at Google in 2004, where he launched Google SMS. Prior to Google, Ben received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Ben is responsible for overseeing Platform aspects of Product Management, Product Marketing, Technical Support, and Partner Solutions.

Zuck, D’Angelo and I are psyched to have Ben on board. *BLING*, as he is known to his friends, sits on the 2nd floor of 156 if you want to come by and introduce yourself.

Chamath”

It was a wide swath of duties, which seemed to indicate that Ling was, in essence, the lead manager of the platform.

This turned out not to be the case, as Facebook runs more as a “functional” organization rather than a “cross-functional” one, which is to say, no one manager is in charge of all the many parts it takes to get a product out the door.

For someone like Ling, sources said, the lack of structure meant chaos and no clear lines of accountability, and he pressed his bosses for more definition of his role.

For their part, sources said, those execs–Palihapitiya (pictured here) and then Cohler–felt Ling was too interested in internal politics, his title and control rather than in taking the lead in a more organic way. They also felt Ling, while a good executor of tasks, lacked the vision to be the overall manager of the platform.

Whether they ever did anything about it, of course, remains unclear, except for the fact that this kind of thing happens a lot all over Silicon Valley.

Let me just stop here then, because one can go round and round with this kind of wrangling over job performance issues and never be able to determine who exactly is to blame.

But it is safe to say Ling was not happy with Facebook and Facebook was not happy with Ling.

When Schrage was put in charge of platform marketing (and not in charge of the platform itself, as many have misconstrued, since he is decidedly nontechnical), the controversial move caused more problems and threw Ling’s status into even more confusion.

Ling and many others did not like the move, of course, but Ling did go to Schrage to share his disappointment and then took his gripes to Sandberg.

That, from what I can tell, is where things went most awry.

In that meeting about 10 days ago, Ling told her that Google had been tring to recruit him and that he was unhappy with the structure of the Facebook organization. According to those who back Ling, he was not making a threat, but seeking advice.

That is not the way those at Facebook see it. “Ben wanted a bigger job, and he was using the prospect of going to Google as a hammer,” said one person. “But he was not doing a good enough job with what he had been running to make such demands.”

Sandberg said she would discuss it with other senior execs, most especially Zuckerberg, and get back to Ling with some answers on Monday.

That was when discontent with Ling bubbled up among his managers, and suddenly a series of smaller slights and problems with Ling added up, and not in his favor.

Curiously, although Facebook sources claim they were dissatisfied with Ling’s work, there seems to have been exactly zero effort to remove him before he revealed the Google offer.

Nonetheless, all now agreed that Ling should not have the larger job, especially if he was also considering a job at rival Google–although, once again, it is not clear that he actually asked for a larger role within Facebook.

What has been lost in this story, though, is that the final decision came from Zuckerberg (pictured here), who was irked by Ling’s demands and his perceived disloyalty.

Sandberg and Schrage came back to Ling on Monday of last week with a startling decision: He could either resign immediately and write an email to his staff announcing it or he would be terminated by them that night and they would announce it.

Ling was, many sources said, flabbergasted that what he thought was an attempt to get some clarity had turned into this. His detractors maintained he was threatening Facebook by dangling the Google offer.

Ling wrote his letter to staff, and news of his departure leaked by the next day, both to me and VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon.

In my post, Ling did not say he resigned under pressure, nor did Facebook say it was about to fire him if he did not resign.

“I have huge respect for Elliot and work well with him,” Ling told me. “Facebook is a tremendous organization, and I would not leave it if it were not for a great opportunity.”

Facebook’s statement said, in part: “Facebook confirms that Ben Ling will be leaving the company in the coming weeks to pursue other interests. We wish him well and appreciate his great contributions to the early success of Facebook Platform.”

No surprise, but things got worse when the discussions quickly turned to the terms of his departure. Ling was only a few months away from his “cliff” for vesting one-quarter of the equity he got for coming to Facebook.

Facebook offered to either accelerate that completely or even make an offer of some of those shares, but only if Ling stayed on the Facebook payroll–taking a two-month vacation–and did not accept an offer from Google or anyone else in that time period.

In addition, deeply sensitive to the perception of a high-profile Google hire going back to the mother ship, Facebook wanted the deal to include a provision barring an immediate announcement that Ling would return to the search giant.

Obviously, given that the original story had been all about talent leaving Google to come to Facebook, the opposite was a much less palatable plot.

Still, this kind of request to refrain from going right to work for a competitor in exchange for shares is not untypical, and companies almost always ask for strict nondisparagement clauses.

But in the hothouse blogging environment of today, of course, to ask for help stopping such news from leaking is like asking to hold back the ocean waves. External optics on Ling’s departure clearly became too much of a focus of Sandberg, Schrage and others.

More to the point, although he did consider delaying acceptance of the job at Google, even though there were other contenders for the position, Ling did not want to agree to Facebook’s messaging about his departure.

Said one Ling supporter: “How could he guarantee that someone was not going to find out and then he would have had to tell a lie about his plans? Especially, given that Facebook is the leakiest place in the Valley?”

Good point and thank goodness! Valleywag wrote about Ling lunching at Google and I wrote of the details of Ling’s new YouTube job on Friday.

Facebook sources, though, said Ling threatened to badmouth the company if they did not pony up. “He insinuated he was going to talk badly about all of us, and we did not want to deal with him acting like that,” said one source.

Sources supportive of Ling said this was not the case and that he was not ever going to impugn Facebook, although Ling was, of course, unhappy.

“Why they didn’t give him some credit for his work and align his interests with theirs by being more generous is a mystery to all of us,” said one Facebook exec, who noted that Ling was prominently featured onstage in the most recent rollout of platform changes at Facebook. “His fall from grace makes you think anyone could go from valued employee to bum pretty quickly.”

Other sources at Facebook disagree, noting Ling was simply a hire who did not pan out as expected and that the fault was in not dealing with the issue sooner.

They also note that the company would never have agreed to put Ling prominently onstage if they had known he was considering a move to Google.

But once again, if Facebook was unhappy with Ling’s work, why put him onstage at all?

It’s hard to get a good answer to that question, which–to me–underscores the disorganization around Ling’s leaving.

“Ben is a really smart guy and Google is probably a better place for him,” said one Facebook exec. “He will probably do well, but he did not do well here.”

Actually, neither Facebook nor Ling did very well in dealing with the disintegration of the relationship.

Ling got a new job at YouTube and a fat signing bonus, but no Facebook shares, some of which he probably deserved for his work on the platform.

And Facebook learned yet another hard lesson about growing up. It is doubtless going to be one of many, many to come.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

It looks like Facebook will definitely be moving from its funky multi- building setup in downtown Palo Alto, Calif., to a centralized campus in Silicon Valley by early next year, said several sources.

The high-profile social networking company–which has been undergoing a major managerial shift of late, as it matures from its start-up status to that of a more established Web player–has been growing quickly–to almost 600 employees today from a couple hundred last year.

It is not clear when the move will take place, but sources said it is likely to start by the beginning of next year, as there are multiple permits, design issues and other logistical issues to resolve.

But, one thing is clear: Facebook will relocate its Palo Alto-based HQ–scattered in about five buildings throughout the suburban town–to a single location.

New HQ possibilities include, first and foremost, the old Hewlett-Packard buildings on Page Mill Road, nearby to the west of Palo Alto.

Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg prefers to remain near Palo Alto, sources said.

But Facebook has also been looking at locations in Mountain View and Sunnyvale, further south, as well as also considering a San Francisco location in the city’s recently redeveloped Mission Bay area.

Until now, Facebook has expanded by filling up rented buildings throughout Palo Alto, the picturesque town right next to Stanford University.

The appeal of being located in Palo Alto–full of shops, restaurants movies and also within walking distance of the main train station into San Francisco–has been a draw for its employees, who have, until recently, gotten some rental subsidies for being located near its offices.

But–as it has grown–Facebook’s presence in town has also become a problem for it and also the town’s citizens, as its swarms of employees have taken up too much space and parking in the increasingly crowded streets.

Growing further in Palo Alto is almost impossible, given the lack of office space and the higher expense, compared to the more typical office-park setups off Highway 101 in Silicon Valley that most Internet companies settle into.

Given Facebook’s plans to grow to 1,000 employees by the end of this year, it’s not a surprise that managers would be thinking of the next home for the company, making a move that is typical for most start-ups.

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO brought in from Google (GOOG) recently, saw such a thing happen to the search giant, which now has a large campus called the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif.

Over the past six months, there has been a lot of upgrading of Facebook’s looser culture to bring it up to a more professional operation it needs to be if it wants to IPO at some point.

That has meant a lot of internal rejiggering, as well as what BoomTown can only describe as a maturing of its frat-like culture.

There have also been departures of several of its early employees, which also always happens as start-ups mature. Those who have left include: former top exec Owen Van Natta and CTO Adam D’Angelo.

And, just last week, Matt Cohler, its VP of Product Management and longtime adviser to Zuckerberg, announced he will leave Facebook in the fall to become a venture capital partner at Benchmark Capital.

And, as usual, I was video-harassing Greylock Partner’s David Sze and James Slavet about the acquisition of Yahoo (YHOO) Network division head Jeff Weiner into the firm as an executive in residence.

I prodded: “This is the pair that sucked Weiner away from Yahoo. Not that it was hard.”

Sze then joked: “Hah! It was enjoyable! I may do it again!”

He may, apparently, because the man eating his dinner to Sze’s immediate right and quietly snickering at my video attack of the VCs is none other than Qi Lu (see the screen grab of the video below), the beloved rock star Yahoo tech leader.

Big irony: News of Lu’s departure from Yahoo was broken in this column last night.

Yes, I am an ace reporter, given I don’t even recognize my prey!

So why was Lu there at the Greylock table, especially since he is not an HBS alum?

Perhaps Sze was actually telling the truth and is interested in bringing Lu–who is incredibly well regarded at Yahoo and is said to be a prince of a guy–into Greylock as an executive in residence like Weiner.

Or maybe, just maybe, as the new CTO of Facebook, a job that is open now that Adam D’Angelo–longtime friend of Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg–vacated it recently.

Greylock is one of Facebook’s big investors and Sze is an observer to its board.

As Silicon Valley turns!

Here’s the whole video of the dinner again (Lu’s appearance is about four minutes in):

It is an apt goodbye for the 23-year-old D’Angelo, who is leaving the social-networking site to boldly go where few other geeks have gone before (that would be away from one of Silicon Valley’s hottest start-ups before its much-anticipated IPO).

D’Angelo, in a story broken by BoomTown last night (while not getting to eat our lovely Mother’s Day dinner), is leaving Facebook for parts unknown after, said sources, he “felt his responsibilities no longer fit well with his skills and interests.”

But kudos to the soft-spoken D’Angelo, a high school friend of Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for building a service that is one of the more elegant to appear on the Internet in years.

While BoomTown has been tough on the start-up for management woes and its nutty valuation and its need for a more robust business plan, there is no denying that Facebook itself–at its most basic techie core–is really well done.

Thus, for D’Angelo, I am guessing this is not the final frontier, before another Internet outfit beams him up.

(No, I could not resist.)

BoomTown called Facebook PR last week about the rumor of D’Angelo’s departure, but did not get a response. The company confirmed the departure by D’Angelo (pictured here) tonight.

The 23-year-old D’Angelo, the top tech exec for the social-networking site, will be leaving the company to take some time off.

He has known Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg since high school.

D’Angelo wrote a letter to Facebook staff on Friday about the move. He said he wanted a break.

But, according to sources close to the company, D’Angelo felt his responsibilities no longer fit well with his skills and interests.

There were rumors of some tension with Zuckerberg, who is still in India on a long work and personal trip around the world. But sources said D’Angelo simply wanted to do something different.

D’Angelo said in his letter that he would remain a strong and enthusiastic supporter of the much-hyped start-up.

Facebook will not be replacing the CTO role, sources said, but has a search underway for a VP of engineering.

The quiet, self-effacing D’Angelo should get a lot of credit for Facebook’s elegant and robust architecture.

As I wrote about him in mini-profiles of Facebook’s execs:

Chief Technology Officer Adam D’Angelo, a longtime Zuckerberg pal. He’s in charge of keeping Facebook from breaking apart as it grows, kind of like Scotty in ‘Star Trek.’ But there’s no warp drive that can save the site from all those surly college students and surlier Silicon Valley types if it all went kerflooey. His Facebook bio says the computer-science grad from the California Institute of Technology was one of the ‘top 24 finalists in the Topcoder Collegiate Challenge, which tests the ability to design and implement complex algorithms in a timed environment.’ Color me impressed, even though I have no idea what that means.”

The very talented Eric Eldon at VentureBeat also had the story on D’Angelo’s departure with some more details about the young techie.

And surly, given that we always have a lot to say about Facebook. (OK, OK, one tidbit: Its execs and investors have been disagreeing over how big a new investment to take–the operations folks want more cash and the VCs less dilution.)

That does not mean I do not hope to break news of what Facebook finally manages to decide to do, both with regard to partners and its funding, but that I will bow out of parsing this particular set of deals in excessive detail.

But our ennui got us thinking to back in mid-August, when we did a post making our own Facebook of the top execs there using your basic corporate shots.

So now, before they become all rich and start flying private, we compiled from less corporate pictures we found right on Facebook and the Web–we were going for a more fun Facebook of the players here.

We used all the execs from the last one, but we also added one woman, PR maven Brandee Barker, as well as the three principal VCs.

Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a picture presumably taken at Harvard. He looks so young and naive. Kind of like now.

Zuckerberg best buddy and tech genius Adam D’Angelo (VP and CTO) on a thrilling night at Foo Camp! What could be more fun than an overhead projector and a room full of geeky guys!

Who knew co-founder and VP of Engineering Dustin Moskovitz was such a fox? His future is so bright, he needs those rad shades!

What deft bit of performance art is wacky Owen Van Natta, VP of Operations and Chief Revenue Officer, performing here? A meditation on life as an underling of various and sundry Web moguls–all Silly String and sorrows?

We have no idea what Chamath Palihapitiya, VP of Product Marketing and Operations, is doing, but it looks cool, and he’s dressed natty as always.

Hey, who also knew that VP of Strategy and Operations Matt Cohler was in a 1990s techno-rock duo? (Oh, he’s the one without the shades.)

VP and CFO Gideon “Death Cat” Yu used to have to drink from public fountains, but soon he’ll have his own, spewing only the finest champagne!

It is hard to know where to begin with this picture of PR head Brandee Barker (is she headed for the Castro Street Fair?). But I say: Own it, sister!

There are exactly zero interesting pictures of doubtlessly interesting Founders Fund VC Peter Thiel online (and we looked hard). That’s him on the right, looking the most normal of this PayPal crew.

Again, it is hard to know exactly what Accel Partners VC Jim Breyer is up to here, but we think the hat might be a new and exciting look for him.

Greylock Partners VC David Sze is thinking really hard about how he can say Facebook is worth $15 billion and still keep a straight face and refrain from cackling in front of all the other VCs at Il Fornaio.

So we are all up to date, here is the new–and much more helpful–Facebook page on top management.

And it seems now that all the executives at the hotter-than-ever social-networking company have become simple vice presidents (although some get extra titles, too).

While some were already VPs, it appears to all be part of a novel attempt at title deflation that is kind of admirable. No EVPs or SVPs or presidents or anything else.

While too many of the execs appear to be in charge of operations of some sort, it feels a bit clearer than before. And it definitely positions all the execs on the exact same level (almost like some commune!).

This was all set in motion, of course, with the recent downgrade in title of COO Owen Van Natta.

Of course, there is one who rules above all with the big title: Chief Executive Officer and Founder Mark Zuckerberg or, as I plan to call him when I see him next, the Man.

So, after the jump, is that skinny with pictures, of course, which is slightly different than when I posted my own Facebook of Facebook execs:

Mark Zuckerberg remains CEO and founder.

Owen Van Natta was COO and is now vice president of operations and chief revenue officer.

Chamath Palihapitiya is now vice president of product marketing and operations.

Matt Cohler is now vice president of strategy and operations.

Gideon Yu is now vice president and chief financial officer (and I like to call him Death Cat, too, because he is like that cat named Oscar for his unusual ability to get a sweet job at the hot Web company of the moment at just the right time).

Dustin Moskovitz is now co-founder and vice president of engineering.

Adam D’Angelo is now vice president and chief technology officer.

I also gave a rundown of all the top execs at the fast-growing social-networking company and their duties (there are an awful lot of vice presidents with operations in their title, which I shall leave to another post to parse).

But, silly me, this is Facebook after all, and I forgot the photos of each of the members of co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s brain trust, who will presumably make the popular site hugely profitable and an inevitable part of every man, woman and child’s life on the planet.

Right, boys? (Because there are no ladies in this group.)

So here’s the dream team head shots and a little background on each below the photos from their bios on the site and elsewhere.

Mark Zuckerberg needs no introduction these days what with all the magazine covers and morning news shows. My mother knows who he is now and my mother can hardly turn on a computer. But let’s try, shall we?: Harvard. Almost Quarterlifer. Co-founder. Flip-flop wearer. Genuine visionary with potentially Gatesian dreams of dominance over all he surveys. I think that about covers it.

Owen Van Natta was COO and is now, as I said above, chief revenue officer and vice president of operations, where he is in charge of important parts of the business, like ad sales and other money-making efforts. Van Natta came to Facebook from his stint at Amazon.com, where he held the weighty title of vice president of worldwide business and corporate development and also was part of the founding team of its A9.com site. With a handsome surfer-dude look, is it any surprise he went to college at the University of California at Santa Cruz?

Chamath Palihapitiya, who was born in Sri Lanka and was raised in Canada, was recently hired as Facebook’s vice president of marketing and operations. The former AOLer, where he was in charge of its instant-messaging division, is widely credited with turning it around. He also did a stint after AOL at the Mayfield Fund, where he waxed on in a section of its Web site about his love of poker, noting that he regularly played, “very high-limit or no-limit hold ‘em games in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and have played against many of today’s top pros.” We like him already.

Matt Cohler, vice president of strategy and business operations, was one of Facebook’s earliest hires and feels like the Yoda figure at Facebook to me (he is also in charge of the critical international expansion). A New Yorker, he went to Yale, worked in China, was a management consultant at McKinsey and was also part of LinkedIn’s founding team. And don’t be fooled by the baby-faced looks–he apparently worked for a year as a jazz musician in Europe and, therefore, is a hep cat.

Gideon Yu is also a recent hire at Facebook as its chief financial officer. Like that cat named Oscar who can detect death, Yu seems to have an amazing ability to get a sweet job at the hot Web company of the moment at just the right time. Case in point: He left Yahoo as its treasurer and went to YouTube as its CFO just a month before it sold to Google for $1.6 billion, a deal in which Yu apparently played a key role. Then, on his way to a spot as a junior partner at also-hot VC firm Sequoia Partners, he grabbed the Facebook CFO job in July. I say we watch where Yu goes and follow stealthily behind so as not to be detected.

Is it just me or does Dustin Moskovitz remind you of cuddly actor Seth Rogen from “Knocked Up” with his hair cut short? As Facebook’s vice president of product engineering, he oversees the site’s architecture and more (like mobile strategy and development). More importantly, the economics major shared that Harvard dorm room with Zuckerberg, where they and others created the service (while most other people’s college dorm mates basically drank beer and passed out).

Last but not least, Chief Technology Officer Adam D’Angelo, a longtime Zuckerberg pal. He’s in charge of keeping Facebook from breaking apart as it grows, kind of like Scotty in “Star Trek.” But there’s no warp drive that can save the site from all those surly college students and surlier Silicon Valley types if it all went kerflooey. His Facebook bio says the computer-science grad from the California Institute of Technology was one of the “top 24 finalists in the Topcoder Collegiate Challenge, which tests the ability to design and implement complex algorithms in a timed environment.” Color me impressed, even though I have no idea what that means.

In any case, I look forward to meeting you one and all.