The case was dismissed without prejudice at the request of Fatdoor founder Raj Abhyanker, who said that Benchmark and its EIRs — which in 2007 included Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia, as well as current Facebook CTO Bret Taylor, who was also named in the complaint — had stolen his pitch for a local social network with neighborhood-level privacy controls.

Nextdoor VP communications Dabney Lawless said her company felt vindicated that the lawsuit was dropped without a paid settlement. “We’ve always said the lawsuit is completely without merit,” she said.

Abhyanker, though, said his fight was not over. He is currently contesting the Nextdoor trademark, and he is hopeful that he can persuade Google to take up the fight, since it owns the Fatdoor intellectual property through its purchase of a later version of the company called The Dealmap.

Further, it came out over the course of my reporting today that Abhyanker also sued Facebook in January over Fatdoor trade secrets; that case has already been dismissed, as well.

That complaint, filed Jan. 20 and embedded below, said Taylor stole various ideas from Fatdoor for broad concepts related to Facebook’s news feed, “Like” button and other products.

Abhyanker told me that the lawsuit and quick dismissal was all part of his litigation strategy to enlist Google to pursue the Fatdoor patents.

I asked Google for comment on the matter, but I doubt it will have much to say.

Abhyanker framed the cases as a fight between a lone entrepreneur and the “incestuous old boys club” of Silicon Valley. “People are afraid to stand up. We stood up and I’m proud of that,” he said.

Making a lay judgment on this particular battle was harder than usual because of the people involved. Tolia and Benchmark had somewhat infamously been sued, and settled with shareholders in a previous start-up, Epinions, after the shareholders were mostly left out of an acquisition deal. Meanwhile, Abhyanker is an intellectual property lawyer, and pursuing patents and trademarks is literally his business.

Raj Abhyanker Facebook lawsuit

Facebook confirmed our report that it has reorganized its technical teams around key product areas, naming Bret Taylor, Chris Cox, Greg Badros, Mike Schroepfer and Sam Lessin as leaders of product groups reporting to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

So who are these newly elevated execs and what are the details of their new roles?

Sources said the company is still figuring out what to officially do about shuffling the five mens’ titles. Currently, its public-facing management page remains unchanged and a press release is nowhere to be found.

Facebook seems to be trying to get the most out of every last second it has as a private company, not revealing important bits of information. That includes which person is assigned to which product area, and even what those product areas are.

If Facebook PR wants to get all cryptic about it, that won’t stop AllThingsD.com! (We’re like the War Operations Plan Response (W.O.P.R.) computer in “WarGames” — soon we’ll have all the launch code numbers and let loose the missiles.)

Before that, the first and most important thing to remember is that CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg remains the king of product power at Facebook. It all rolls up to him, seated at the dead center around which all these new spokes turn.

Of the new arrangement, what’s also key to keep in mind, as one source aptly describes it, is that this is a ”verticalization” of Facebook, which had largely been horizontal before, with top execs covering a wider range of areas.

Now, it is more siloed and — presumably — more nimble, with more powerful lords of product areas in charge.

That’s a lot like the management rejiggering Google has done recently under its aggressive new CEO and co-founder Larry Page, although Facebook’s slicing and dicing seems to be more a matter of addressing internal growth and making the organization more functional.

Here’s the rundown that we have pieced together so far:

Privacy and Identity — a critical area for Facebook, since it seems to have an ongoing issue with it (or lack thereof) — will go to Lessin.

Communications and Apps — the real guts of the product — will get the leadership of Cox.

Infrastructure — the nuts and bolts of keeping the global megopolis of Facebook humming — will be the purview of Schroepfer.

Mobile and Platform — the big forward-looking areas — will be run by Taylor.

And Monetization — which includes advertising products and will pay for this whole shebang — will come under the sway of Badros.

But, until all is revealed by the social networking giant, here are some details of the newly named product potentates of Facebook — all men, it should be noted — you might want to know about:

Bret Taylor: As was previously reported here, Taylor is currently leading Facebook’s “Buffy” phone project, which is its HTML5-oriented smartphone effort.

Taylor was named Facebook CTO in June 2010 and has historically had no direct reports. His projects at Facebook have included platform, search, News Feed and mobile.

Taylor is a consistent presence at Facebook’s big public events. Even though he presents about technical stuff, his delivery is considered by many observers inside and outside the company as much smoother than his often awkward boss, CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Prior to Facebook, Taylor co-founded FriendFeed, a geeky social app aggregator bought by Facebook; the app’s influence is seen in many of Facebook’s social products today. Prior to that, while at Google he helped create Google Maps.

Taylor has a young family and is a really big Stanford football fan.

Chris Cox: Chris Cox is Facebook’s well-liked product head and the company’s only real home-grown management star. He joined Facebook in 2005, shortly after graduating from Stanford, and has worked on products such as News Feed early on in their gestation. At one point as a young staffer, he was promoted to be in charge of Facebook’s human resources and helped set a tone for the company’s culture.

Cox often appears at Facebook events to talk about the human impact of Facebook’s products, and the merits of “social design.”

The charismatic exec got married this year and has played in a reggae band.

Greg Badros: Outsiders have been less familiar with Greg Badros. Badros had been in charge of advertising engineering at Facebook for the past two years.

Prior to joining Facebook in June 2009, Badros worked at Google for six years, where he was particularly instrumental on its well-known AdSense and Gmail products.

“Star” is the word multiple of Badros’s acquaintances and former colleagues used to describe him.

Badros is technical, entrepreneurial, articulate and humble, said former Keval Desai, his Google colleague and current VC at Interwest Partners.

“He can speak to a crowd of engineers and sales people with equal ease,” he said. “He was a star at Google and instrumental in scaling the AdSense platform.”

Badros has a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and did his undergrad at Duke.

Mike Schroepfer: Along with Cox and Taylor, Schroepfer has been at the top of Facebook’s org for a while as VP of engineering.

Schroepfer, who’s known internally and externally as Schrep, was previously VP of engineering at Mozilla and, before that, at Sun Microsystems.

He’s recently done a bunch of traveling with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to encourage women in tech and to open Facebook’s New York engineering office.

The affable exec also has a young family and just bought a Nissan Leaf.

Sam Lessin: The most recent addition of the group to Facebook, Lessin joined last October when Facebook nominally acquired his start-up Drop.io. Along with other “acqhired” CEOs, he has been influential within Facebook as a product manager.

Lessin was the major driver of Facebook’s upcoming Timeline redesign, which makes users’ profiles into visual journals of their lives. Timeline has not rolled out as soon as Facebook said it would, but it’s a major ongoing project that it seems natural for Lessin to continue to lead.

While still at Drop.io, he started a side project called letter.ly for paid personal email newsletters. Before that, he worked at Bain & Company.

Lessin went to Harvard at the same time as Zuckerberg and seems to be tightly integrated into the inner Facebook social circle. He recently became engaged to his longtime girlfriend, Wall Street Journal tech reporter Jessica Vascellaro.

(Full disclosure: Dow Jones owns both The Wall Street Journal and AllThingsD.com. Dow Jones is owned by News Corp.)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in Liz’s ethics statement.

Here’s the statement:

“We can confirm that in order to streamline the product development process, we have reorganized our technical teams into product groups that report into Mark. These groups will be lead by Bret Taylor, Chris Cox, Greg Badros, Mike Schroepfer and Sam Lessin.”

As I wrote last night:

Facebook has done a major corporate reorganization in an effort to be more nimble, sources said.

The new structure integrates design, product and engineering teams around key product areas such as privacy and communication.

We’ll have more details as we get them.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

(Image credit: Flickr user Scr47chy)

Facebook is now partnering with HTC to build an Android-based phone — code-named “Buffy” — around its own social operating system platform, as we reported yesterday.

But hasn’t Facebook been working on this phone thing for a long time?

This was the response from many people who track the company and recall the first reports about such a project from TechCrunch and Business Insider last September, as well as the bits and pieces that have cropped up since then.

The answer is complex, as Facebook’s original phone effort was stillborn.

About a year and a half ago, a Facebook mobile special ops team was formed, with its own building separate from the rest of the company. The workspace was accessible by keycard only to people intimately involved in the effort.

This Facebook team was indeed trying to build a phone – really build a phone — much as Apple did, with integrated hardware and software.

But when the project became too big and too political and different from where it started, many of the people involved left the company or went on extended leaves of absence, and the effort was shelved.

But the new effort had its origins in the first — including its code name, Buffy.

The first Facebook phone project was called the “Social Layer,” which was then shortened to “Slayer,” a sly mashup of the phrase.

But that was deemed too violent, and the gentler Buffy was chosen — after the popular television vampire slayer.

The team working on Slayer/Buffy included its leader, Chamath Palihapitiya, as well as Firefox founder and Facebook iPhone app creator Joe Hewitt, Google Chrome OS creator Matt Papakipos, biz dev exec Priti Choksi, developer Zhen Fang and designer Matt Cahill.

This was an exclusive and handpicked group, which generated awkwardness within Facebook’s flat organization.

That’s because Facebook has historically only ever made one product — its social platform. To have a secret team operating out of a separate building drew a lot of interest and also jealousy from other employees, multiple sources said.

The Slayers were working on everything from industrial design to carrier subsidies in order to build the ultimate Facebook phone. They had discussions with potential partners such as AT&T and Intel, sources said.

But, as often happens in ambitious efforts like this, the project quickly spiraled out of Facebook’s expertise and into budgets that were impossible without an IPO or perhaps a billion-dollar fund raising.

With its horizon more limited, those involved — many of them longtime Facebook employees — lost faith amid power struggles and a growing concern that they wouldn’t have the leeway to create something that could truly compete with Apple’s iPhone.

So the team scaled back and looked at building on top of Android. Soon many of them ended up quitting Facebook altogether.

Palihapitiya, for instance, founded his own venture capital firm in June, while Hewitt left Facebook in May to work on his own projects.

Thus the first version of Buffy was slain, until it recently got new life under Facebook CTO Bret Taylor. A source familiar with the older version of the project said the company “undid and then remade” the decision to make an Android-based phone emphasizing HTML5.

A spokesman for Facebook declined to comment on Buffy directly, but told AllThingsD:

“Our mobile strategy is simple: We think every mobile device is better if it is deeply social. We’re working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers, and application developers to bring powerful social experiences to more people around the world.”

HTC also declined to comment.

But, said multiple sources, that’s where we are today, with an HTC-made Facebook phone being prepared for release in the next year and a half.

Rest in pieces, Slayer.

Related Posts on the Facebook Phone:

1. It’s Finally Real and Its Name Is Buffy
2. Forking Android Offers Both Promise and Pitfalls
3. The “Slayer” That Wasn’t
4. If It Comes, Will It Already Be Too Late?
5. The Facebook Phone: Why Would You Want One?

Full Facebook Phone Coverage »

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

After years of considering how to best get into the phone business, Facebook has tapped Taiwanese cellphone maker HTC to build a smartphone that has the social network integrated at the core of its being.

Code-named “Buffy,” after the television vampire slayer, the phone is planned to run on a modified version of Android that Facebook has tweaked heavily to deeply integrate its services, as well as to support HTML5 as a platform for applications, according to sources familiar with the project.

Facebook only recently chose HTC, after also considering at least one other potential hardware partner — Korea’s Samsung. That means the products themselves are still a ways from hitting the market, potentially as long as 12 to 18 months.

Although it has changed scope and leadership, Buffy has been an ongoing area of concern at the social networking giant for the past two years. These days, the project is led by Facebook CTO Bret Taylor, several sources said.

A spokesman for Facebook declined to comment on Buffy directly, but told AllThingsD:

“Our mobile strategy is simple: We think every mobile device is better if it is deeply social. We’re working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers, and application developers to bring powerful social experiences to more people around the world.”

HTC also declined to comment.

Mobile is critical to Facebook’s future. And moving directly into the phone business, while fraught with challenges, may well be essential for the company.

Facebook says it has 350 million active mobile users, and relationships with 475 global mobile operators. Although it is one of the most popular applications on nearly every phone for which it is available, the social network generally plays only a supporting role.

In many cases, Facebook is just an app where people can view their friends’ feeds and upload their own photos and status updates. In other cases, Facebook has worked to take things a step further, allowing users to upload photos directly from the picture-taking app, or to integrate Facebook contacts with the phone’s address book.

But the fight for mobile control is only getting more fierce. Google and Apple run the two major smartphone operating systems, giving Facebook little say over its mobile destiny.

Apple has has fought to maintain strict control over payments within its mobile apps, even if those apps run off of Facebook’s platform, and it also made Twitter its social partner. Google is increasingly a direct competitor, as it is working to promote and integrate its own social network, Google+, across all its products.

The Buffy project represents a significant shift for Facebook, which has focused much of its mobile work on light collaborations with hardware makers looking to create more socially-oriented phones. The partnership with HTC is the latest incarnation of the long-running project, whose twists and turns we’ll detail in an upcoming story in this series.

HTC is one of several companies that have built phones with a dedicated Facebook button, having introduced the Salsa and ChaCha earlier this year. AT&T has sold a version of the ChaCha, dubbed the Status. Others, including Inq Mobile and Motorola, have also developed phones with dedicated Facebook buttons.

And France Telecom’s Orange unit last week announced a series of Facebook-centric phones aimed at emerging markets in Europe and Africa.

With Buffy, though, the integration will go much deeper, bringing friends and social activities deep into the mobile interface.

“Mobile devices are inherently social,” Taylor himself said at an industry conference earlier this year.

That pronouncement has to be awfully tempting for him to turn into reality.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in Liz’s ethics statement.

Related Posts on the Facebook Phone:

1. It’s Finally Real and Its Name Is Buffy
2. Forking Android Offers Both Promise and Pitfalls
3. The “Slayer” That Wasn’t
4. If It Comes, Will It Already Be Too Late?
5. The Facebook Phone: Why Would You Want One?

Full Facebook Phone Coverage »

Raj Abhyanker

Abhyanker alleges that he pitched a neighborhood site to Benchmark in 2007 and said at the time he would call it Nextdoor if he could buy the domain. Benchmark conducted due diligence on the deal and indicated it wanted to invest.

But the prominent Silicon Valley firm then pulled out, according to Abhyanker, who filed with the Superior Court of California in San Jose.

At fault, according to Abhyanker, are Benchmark and Nextdoor, as well as Facebook CTO Bret Taylor, who was at Benchmark at the time and had agreed at least informally to advice Fatdoor.

After the Benchmark funding fell through, Abhyanker was fired as CEO and Fatdoor changed focus to eventually become a local deal aggregator called The Dealmap. Earlier this year, The Dealmap was bought by Google, along with its one granted patent and more than 40 patent applications that name Abhyanker as the lead inventor.

Abhyanker — who is now a practicing patent attorney — is faulting Benchmark for getting him kicked out of the company he co-founded, because the VC firm’s failure to invest made Fatdoor’s investors lose confidence in the start-up’s original concept, and because the Fatdoor board used a CEO headhunter to find his replacement that was recommended by Benchmark.

Nirav Tolia

This all came to a head because Nirav Tolia — who was a Benchmark enterpreneur-in-residence later in 2007 — in October launched a local social network called Nextdoor that is funded by Benchmark.

Reached for comment, Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia said Abhyanker’s charges are without merit.

“I have never met this person, and the idea and naming of Nextdoor was originated solely by the employees and founders of our company,” he said.

Indeed, Abhyanker’s complaint makes the assumption that Tolia has been working on Nextdoor since 2007. Abhyanker omits any mention of Fanbase, the Benchmark-funded sports directory Tolia started out of his stint as a Benchmark EIR that launched in 2009.

Nextdoor is a pivot of Fanbase, using the company’s remaining funding and the same team, Tolia had told AllThingsD when the neighborhood site launched last month.

Tolia on Thursday said he had received an email from Abhyanker last month after Nextdoor launched, asking to be named to Nextdoor’s founding team.

The email, which Tolia forwarded to AllThingsD, says:

“I am wondering if you would be open to me being in your founding team, in exchange for me filling a part time general counsel, business development vp, and/or board role, and perhaps a small angel investment in cash, resources, and space.”

In addition to Benchmark, Nextdoor and Tolia, Benchmark partners Kevin Harvey, Peter Fenton, Mitch Lasky and Bill Gurley are named in the complaint.

Also named are Bret Taylor and Jim Norris, the FriendFeed founders who helped launch Google Maps and were Benchmark EIRs at the time and had allegedly committed via email before the Benchmark deal fell through that they would be Fatdoor advisors.

Abhyanker claims that Taylor and Norris specifically appropriated his idea for neighborhood-level privacy controls, a feature of Nextdoor that Tolia himself attributed to “an early Google Maps employee” in a recent interview with the San Jose Mercury News. Update: Tolia said he was referring to Prakash Janakiraman, his co-founder at Fanbase and Nextdoor who formerly worked at Google on Maps. Tolia also noted he joined Benchmark four months after Abhyanker made his pitch.  

The evidence for that accusation seems a bit vague, but is particularly notable because Taylor is now Facebook’s CTO.

A spokeswoman for Benchmark said the firm does not comment on pending legal matters. Taylor said he was not aware of the lawsuit and he has no comment.

Asked to clarify why the complaint doesn’t mention Fanbase, Abhyanker said through a spokesman: “Upon reason and belief, Fanbase was just a holding company to bid themselves time until everyone forgot about our Fatdoor/Nextdoor.”

Stamped-COMPLAINT – Abhyanker v. Benchmark Capital Et. Al. – FILED-PUBLIC

In reality, this assumption is probably less of a myth and more of an outdated statistic. Back in December 2009, when Facebook started more overtly mucking with its privacy defaults and options, the company stated that only 15 to 20 percent of Facebook’s 350 million users had ever modified their settings, as I reported at the time.

But today, Taylor said, Facebook’s 800 million users — especially the more active ones — are extremely savvy about their privacy settings.

“If you talk to a college student, they know exactly what their parents can see, they know exactly what an ex-girilfriend or ex-boyfriend can see,” Taylor said in an onstage interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Because Facebook is so widely used, “the increasing scrutiny on how we deal with privacy is appropriate,” Taylor said.

Taylor said his company’s philosophy on the privacy issue is, “if we can make your privacy controls transparent it will natually lead to people sharing more.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Where before, Facebook users had to use their computers for most of their Facebook gaming and app needs, now they should be able to play and participate from almost any device with a Web browser. And they may get a better experience if it happens to be an Apple iOS device.

In fact, though this launch had been described as an affront to Apple, it’s really not — whenever possible, the new Facebook mobile versions will defer to Apple’s native platform and even its payments system.

A big reason why Facebook apps, especially games, didn’t work on phones was because iOS devices don’t support Flash. Facebook has helped a select set of developers — Audiovroom, Branchout, EA, Flixster, Gilt Groupe, Huffington Post, Moblyng, Storm8, Wooga and Zynga — create HTML5 versions of a selection of their apps and game titles that will work in mobile Web browsers.

But HTML5 still doesn’t offer the performance that many complex apps require, so if the developers have created native versions of their apps, they can also connect Facebook users directly to that native app.

So now, when a friend sends you an invitation to play Words With Friends and you view it on the Facebook app on your iPhone, you can click to play and be taken to the Words With Friends app. If you don’t have the app, you’ll be directed to Apple’s App Store. If you’re on an Android phone, you’ll be taken to an HTML5 version in your mobile Web browser.

The combined native and Web app experience is only available on iOS for now. On Android and other phones with Web browsers, users will default to the Web experience. Facebook CTO Bret Taylor told AllThingsD today that Facebook is also working on an update to its native Android application.

While many people will appreciate having a more consistent Facebook app experience, the byproduct of this launch is that it could be much easier for users to find new mobile apps through their friends. Mobile app discovery has been a huge challenge for developers, and social could help unlock that problem by showing people what apps their friends are using.

“We really hope that we can fill a gap in app discovery here,” Taylor said.

On the downside, there’s one place Facebook wasn’t able to negotiate a consistent experience for users: payments. This was a major sticking point in ongoing discussions with Apple, as I’d written last week.

Facebook Credits can’t be used to pay for virtual goods within native iOS apps or mobile Web apps running within a Facebook app on iOS. Instead, users will have to buy separate in-app currency through Apple’s own in-app payment system.

And this after Facebook just required all of its game developers to switch to exclusive use of Credits earlier this year.

“We realize there’s some inconsistency,” Taylor admitted. He wouldn’t say if Facebook gets a share of revenue for in-app purchases it refers to Apple.

As for the Facebook iPad app, it has been close to being released for over a year, according to people who have seen it and worked on it — though the app has changed in scope throughout. Today at 1 pm PT it will finally be available as part of a universal iOS update.

Along with the ability to use Facebook platform apps, the iPad version will feature “an immersive and full-screen photos experience,” plus new and speedy chat and messages interfaces, Taylor said.

All this is being released three weeks after Facebook held its major developer conference, a week after Apple unveiled its new iOS, and just a few days after iconic Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died.

So why now for the mobile platform? “Honestly — because it’s done now,” Taylor said.

“The reason these [launches] are connected is about ease of use, which is particularly acute on something like a tablet,” he added. “We wanted our native apps to be as feature-complete as possible.”

Okay, but the new mobile versions — despite their focus on app discovery — don’t include Facebook’s new live Ticker, which is one of the main ways users can see their friends are engaging with various apps.

That’s true, but probably won’t be for long, Taylor said, attributing the lag time between Web and mobile features to the challenge of designing user interfaces on small screens.

As for Facebook’s relationship with Apple? “We have a good relationship with Apple and we’ve worked with them on all our iOS releases,” Taylor said.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The more popular an app is with one’s friends, the more likely a user is to see it on their feed, CTO Bret Taylor said. Also on the app side, Zuckerberg discussed an “add to timeline” button that developers can add to their apps allowing all of a user’s activity to be automatically sent to Facebook so long as the user agrees from the outset. (Cue the oversharing, notes colleague Tricia Duryee.)

Social discovery of apps is seen as the next frontier in solving the troublesome problem of finding useful and relevant programs from among hundreds of thousands of choices. GetJar, for example, has tried to build its own social signals into the latest versions of its app store.

In a blog post, Taylor touted the benefits of its approach.

“App discovery is an important part of the Open Graph philosophy,” Taylor wrote. “The structure of the Open Graph enables apps to grow more quickly based on usage. The more engaging your app is, the more people will discover it on Facebook.”

The f8 keynote speech is just wrapping up. Click here for AllThingsD’s liveblog.

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• Get Ready, Facebook Apps Will Ask for Your Permission Only Once
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But upstart apps don’t seem to be following Facebook’s lead. For the moment, developers prefer native apps with their homepage shortcuts and notifications over the futuristic HTML5. Many of the new mobile social apps I’ve seen launch on iPhone alone. Some, especially those who want deeper integration with a phone’s mobile operating system, go to Android. And as they get further along, support for multiple mobile platforms and tablet devices is a natural step.

I rounded up the mobile social apps that pitched me on their launches at SXSW this year. This isn’t narrowed down to those debuting for the first time ever, but as best I could, I culled it down to those with significant new functionality for the show.

Of my sample of 24 mobile social apps, 10 were iPhone-only. These 10 tend to be the newest of the bunch–like Ditto, Yobongo and Foodstream–who have dedicated their small teams’ development resources to getting it right on a single platform.

One of them, Instagram, comes from a small company that had made its first trial app, Burbn, in HTML5, but then shifted development entirely over to the iPhone, where it has had much more success with distribution.

Another six have presences on both iPhone and Android, including SCVNGR’s new LevelUp deals program, Fast Society and Tonchidot Domo. And six support BlackBerry.

But there was only one mobile Web app and one Facebook app. And there was only one company, the mobile sync provider Rseven, that launched apps on multiple mobile platforms and excluded iOS. Rseven has explained that this is because the iPhone doesn’t have an API for call history and messages, which are essential elements of its “life-caching” tool.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Here’s a scorecard:

An Ad Network: This is one that seems obvious to many industry watchers. Facebook has widgets and integrations around the Web, and could easily turn those into revenue-generating opportunities. It could use its social graph to introduce targeted advertising and provide real competition to Google and other ad networks.

But the company has denied repeatedly that it is working on an ad network. Dan Rose, the company’s VP of partnerships and platform marketing, said this week at DLD in Munich, “We get that question a lot, and the answer is always the same: there are no plans for that at this point.”

However, this week Facebook launched a reprise of its failed Beacon product that turns off-site behavior–user “likes”–into “sponsored stories” within its site.

Prognosis: Likely later this year. This would be a good revenue stream to turn on before Facebook goes public, as it says it’s likely to do in 2012.

A Facebook Phone: This one is a rumor mill regular, and it came up again Wednesday with a report that Facebook would launch two phones with HTC at Mobile World Congress this year.

Rose responded at another event in Europe, “This is really just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs and integrated them into their device in an interesting way….The rumors around there being something more to this HTC device are overblown.” (via Reuters)

But baking Facebook into a phone makes sense. As Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said on Tuesday, “Mobile devices are inherently social.”

Taylor said Facebook wants to take a platform approach to mobile, maximizing accessibility through use of HTML5. But it could be hard to resist demonstrating deep address book integration, instant personalization and other benefits of a Facebook-designed mobile phone.

Prognosis: The denials seem to be a matter of semantics. Facebook is likely to support these projects, and they are coming to market soon.

Payments for Non-virtual Goods: Another major move for Facebook this week was to announce that usage of its Facebook Credits virtual currency would be mandatory starting this summer. It’s a big deal that Facebook will be hooking up credit cards and PayPal accounts for many of the 200 million-plus users who play games every month on its platform.

The obvious next step for Credits is payments for non-virtual goods. But that may not be a viable model given Facebook takes a 30 percent cut of all Credits, which would destroy margins on just about everything but virtual goods. Asked this week at the Inside Social Apps conference whether Facebook would expand Credits to apply to other types of purchases, Deb Liu, the company’s commerce product marketing manager, said no.

“Facebook credits is built as a virtual currency and it’s really built for virtual goods,” she said. Facebook sees Credits as “an opportunity to drive better experience particularly in the games world.”

Still, that doesn’t mean Facebook couldn’t use a similar system to introduce ways for users to pay for digital goods like media within its platform. Margins for digital goods could feasibly swallow a 30 percent cut, as they already do in Apple’s iTunes store.

Prognosis: Facebook’s launch of Credits has been halting and unpopular, in large part because it’s awkward to layer a 30 percent tithing onto its platform after developers have built their businesses. It seems likely to continue to move slowly on payments.

Voice and Video Chat: The Daily What ran a screenshot on Wednesday of a Facebook voice call option appearing on the screen of a user participating in text chat. A company spokesperson didn’t dismiss it as a PhotoShop job, but said, rather, “We don’t comment on rumor and speculation and have nothing to announce at this time,” in response to an emailed inquiry.

As Facebook moves to unify its users’ communications through its Facebook Messages product, adding voice and/or video calls makes sense. And on that front, a Facebook-Skype partnership to fend off Google’s voice products has been in the works for some time.

Prognosis: Soon, given it appears to already be out for user testing.

Autonomous Cars: Not gonna happen.

Why might Facebook start being more audacious and challenging powerful incumbents now? Well, for one thing, there’s no point in trying to stay under the radar anymore.

Throughout its history, Facebook has been somewhat slow-moving and remarkably undiversified, iterating internally on things, such as its “like” button, for years before releasing them to the world, and ramping up revenue at an excruciating pace compared with market expectations.

But the company has done one thing extremely well: User growth. Now that it’s topping out on its potential growth in many markets, Facebook may have to make bolder moves on the product side to increase metrics like engagement. And now that it’s getting ready to face the public markets, it may finally need to prove it can open up the revenue faucets.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The company will soon give all users the option to use Facebook entirely over HTTPS, and recommends they do so if they use public Internet access points. It will also show members social captchas for authentication–where they must identify a few of their Facebook friends’ faces–whenever suspicious activity is detected on an account.

Facebook warned in a blog post that using HTTPS will slow down the site and isn’t compatible with all features, including some externally developed Facebook applications. It will roll out HTTPS access “slowly over the next few weeks” via its settings page, the company said.

Facebook still faces other ongoing security problems, such as spam, virus messages and wall posts. CTO Bret Taylor said yesterday the company had cut platform spam by 95 percent in 2010, but I believe he was referring to notifications and posts from applications, especially social games. Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public fan page was apparently hacked into yesterday and has since been taken down.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Taylor said Facebook will emphasize HTML5 development in order to have maximum impact across fragmented mobile platforms for both his company and those who build on the Facebook platform.

HTML5–which is the new browser standard that gives Web applications capabilities on par with native applications–Taylor said, “might be a little ahead of that curve, but that’s where we’re putting a huge amount of investment in the next year.”

Already, said Taylor, 125 million of Facebook’s 200 million-plus mobile users are using HTML5-capable devices like the iPhone and Android.

Even so, when Facebook introduces a new feature, it has to implement it across seven different versions: facebook.com, m.facebook.com, touch.facebook.com, its iPhone app, Android app, BlackBerry app and custom integrations for other handset OSs.

Facebook wants to reduce that friction for its own sake and its developers’ as well. The company’s first step toward this goal was its single sign-on for mobile apps introduced last year, which has already had significant impact on developers like Flixster, Taylor said.

Facebook’s HTML5 push brings it into step with Google, which has put a major emphasis on Web apps despite its own Android mobile OS. But even so, the two companies have had major success with native apps, when they’ve chosen to build them. Facebook has the No. 1 free iPhone app of all time, while Google Mobile for iPhone is No. 3. (Coming in second is Pandora’s streaming radio.)

“Mobile devices are inherently social,” said Taylor, noting that he feels that the combination of mobile, social and location will be an especially fruitful area for products like Facebook Places and Foursquare.

Taylor said Facebook is likely to create its own “high-quality location database”–which would compete with start-ups like SimpleGeo–though it’s not something the company has specific plans for yet.

Addressing start-ups wary of Facebook competing with their products by making them a part of its platform, Taylor said, “Our philosophy has always been to build products into Facebook that are generally useful, which is why we built location into the platform. We felt like it would have a really big impact for developers if they could all leverage a common location infrastructure.”

Facebook’s platform focus in 2010 was about improving user experience, Taylor said, and he considers that effort a success. He said Facebook reduced spam (a.k.a. unwanted posts about games like FarmVille and other applications) by 95 percent last year through policy simplifications.

Though it shut down ways for applications to recruit users, it wasn’t like Facebook prevented games from growing, said Taylor, citing the fantastic ascent of Zynga’s CityVille, which grew to 100 million users in 40 days, compared with the four years it took Facebook itself to reach that number.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Bret Taylor

But there’s also a pattern emerging for what happens to that talent once folks arrive at Facebook. Acqhired CEOs hold prominent roles on Facebook’s product team; nearly every recent Facebook product launch seems to have been led by an acqhired employee. Most recently, Facebook Messages was product-managed by Dan Hsiao, who joined the company with the FriendFeed acquisition. Hsiao had actually been a more junior member of the FriendFeed team, having started there as an intern in 2008. Now he is managing what Facebook called the largest engineering team it has ever put together for a launch.

Meanwhile, former FriendFeed CEO Bret Taylor is CTO of Facebook. Hot Potato CEO Justin Shaffer was product manager for Facebook Groups and is now product manager for the company’s Places and Events products (his company was only acquired in August). Divvyshot CEO Sam Odio is now product manager for Facebook Photos. Nextstop CEO Carl Sjogreen now holds the title “head of platform development,” according to a Facebook spokeperson.

And Gokul Rajaram, known for his seminal work as a product manager on Google AdSense, is now in charge of Facebook’s ad technology. Rajaram came to Facebook through the acquisition of his company Chai Labs, also last August. Multiple sources confirmed Rajaram’s role at Facebook, though Facebook declined to.

Gokul Rajaram

Facebook has its reasons for keeping a big-name hire like Rajaram under the radar; for one, Google can’t be happy to have lost the opportunity to buy his start-up. The former Googler has been an adviser and director to multiple companies, including Canoe Ventures and Associated Content.

Elsewhere, Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt from Facebook’s first acquisition, Parakey, have had significant roles on products like Facebook Questions and the Facebook iPhone app. Ross’s title is Director of Product, though he is currently on sabbatical. Hewitt is working on undisclosed projects but “more on the engineering side,” said the spokesperson.

Facebook is not yet talking about where it will assign Sam Lessin, CEO of the just-acquired storage start-up Drop.io, and Cory Ondrejka and Bruce Rogers, founders of the just-acquired gaming start-up Walletin.

Facebook says it has about “two dozen PMs,” so the acqhired folks account for a significant but not dominant portion of that corps.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told me last month:

We have a big footprint but we want to operate like a startup and take risks, and the best way to do that is to get people who self-select towards being entrepreneurs… The only real theme is that we haven’t bought any companies yet to get the company. It’s always been because we have a lot of respect for the people involved.

This kind of track record may make Facebook an even more enticing acquirer for small start-ups. On the other hand, it’s probably disheartening for Facebook’s homegrown talent to see these opportunities handed to people who are brand-new and who, in many cases, have little experience working at the scale of hundreds of millions of users.

*Facebook has also explored larger acquisitions of companies like Twitter and Foursquare (though Kara Swisher reported those talks were less serious than portrayed elsewhere), but those deals were never consummated.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Bret Taylor photo (CC) Brian Solis.

Paul Buchheit

Buchheit has joined Mountain View, Calif.-based Y Combinator as a partner, a move that wasn’t altogether unexpected as he had been closely affiliated with the start-up incubator program. As an angel investor, Buchheit is the all-time leader for total YC companies backed. By the time the last three-month YC session had ended with a public Demo Day presentation to potential investors, Buchheit had already funded five of the 36 companies.

Buchheit is most famous for his work at Google, where he created Gmail, built the first prototype of AdSense and came up with the motto “Don’t be evil.”

Today is Buchheit’s last day at Facebook, where he had not held a particularly public-facing role. That’s in contrast to his FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor, who quickly rose through the ranks at Facebook and was named CTO in June. FriendFeed had been acquired for $50 million in August 2009.

In a blog post announcing the move, Y Combinator partner Paul Graham said of Buchheit, “He’s a good friend as well as one of the world’s best hackers; for years we’ve considered him an honorary YC partner.” Within the Y Combinator community, Graham is known as “PG” and Buchheit as “PB.”

Harjeet Taggar

Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston said that the new expanded team of six partners should allow the program to invest in more companies. YC classes have grown significantly over time; the first session had only eight companies.

So, BoomTown was at the Design Center Concourse in San Francisco today for Facebook’s f8 developers conference.

There is a giant logo of an 8-Ball looming over it all, which suggested a questioning mood.

Not at all!

Lots of stuff was announced, including ventures with partners like Microsoft (MSFT). That particular one is called Docs.com, an in-the-cloud effort to smack Google (GOOG).

The staff of the social networking giant showed up in overwhelming force here, stuffing the press into the giant hall’s front rows as if we were prisoners on a United Airlines (UAUA) flight.

Free us, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg!

But, wait! At events like this past, Zuckerberg’s awkward speaking style–a younger version of Microsoft’s Bill Gates–has been painful, so this was clearly an elaborate plot by COO Sheryl Sandberg to torture the media.

Well played, Sheryl (and PR mastermind Elliot Schrage)!

While we waited and were being pummeled with loud hip music like Al-Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo Bay, I might add that it was impressive to see all the folks here–mostly dudes–paying homage to the massive growth of Facebook.

Here we go:

10:07 am PT: Zuckerberg–dressed in jeans and a hoodie and sneakers–ambled onto the stage quite casually without a lot of fuss.

BoomTown was expecting some fanfare–perhaps a brass band.

Like the geek he is at heart, Zuckerberg launched into the details right away, after a cursory nod to his company’s huge surge in size and influence.

He began talking about “social plug-in” offerings, namely a “Like” button that lets you share content from many Web sites without a lot of friction.

It is essentially Facebook’s clever plot to take over the entire Web and its conversation. I am extremely wary.

Let’s all try to remember: Facebook is Google is Facebook is Google. And so on until they both control our every breathing moment on this planet.

Like a nerd version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

But, admittedly, it was cool and innovative.

10:25 am: Zuckerberg brought out Bret Taylor, the guy from FriendFeed, which was bought by Facebook last August for $50 million.

It seems worth the dough, since Taylor is a natural presenter with the easy charm that all Zuckerberg’s money will never be able to buy.

He ran through the stuff–social plug-ins, recommendation boxes and a toolbar.

Taylor called Zuckerberg “Zuck” several times. He’s friends with Zuck!

He also is channeling Zuck with the idea that Facebook should be at the center of all things. Either a black hole or a benevolent god, depending on your point of view.

Soon, he moved onto the “Open Graph Protocol,” which he called a “valuable real-time connection” between Facebook and Web sites.

“My identity is not just defined by things on Facebook, but on things all over the Web,” added Taylor.

Things the evil geniuses of Facebook will control!

10:40 am: Taylor moved on to search, always an issue on Facebook, which still feels like it is a giant library with all the books strewn on the floor.

Yet another smack at Google! And Twitter.

He also announced that Facebook is adopting that OAuth open-source standard for authentication.

More divide and conquer.

10:45 am: Zuckerberg returned to intro Docs.com with Microsoft.

Zuckerberg then closed rather awkwardly, although somewhat endearingly, saying okay-that’s-it-you-can-go-now quite abruptly.

Realizing the oddness of the moment, he pulled it back to relate an anecdote about his girlfriend, who is studying to be a doctor.

Although Zuckerberg did not quite land it, it was all about feelings and memories.

“The essence of this is that we have a lot of early memories that, man, the world can be a lot better and we can make it that way,” said Zuckerberg.

Then he made an inexplicable reference to being in heaven and how everything is exactly how we want it there.

Let’s build it, said Zuckerberg, a very mortal–but now a very, very powerful–digital god.

Next up: Press conference with Zuck and more info about his stairway to heaven!

Until Facebook gets us there, though, here’s a video of the Led Zeppelin classic, “Stairway to Heaven,” which always reminds me of slow-dancing in a school gym and forever makes me just a little bit sad for, as Zuckerberg said, feelings and memories long gone by.

Not that Facebook or any Silicon Valley Web company is ever going to be able to retrieve even a scrap of them for real, no matter how many billions of social plug-ins and Like buttons they toss all over the Web.

Still:

Yes, that’s Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in shorts, knees and all, in a picture taken right “after signing the papers” to acquire FriendFeed for $50 million. The deal was announced today.

One of FriendFeed’s founders, Paul Buchheit, posted them on his account at the online content-sharing site, to much merry comment.

They look like they were taken at night in someone’s driveway in Silicon Valley (nice fence!), although the person who took the shots is not identified.

(BoomTown is assuming it was not Twitter’s Biz Stone, since it would be a total geek rumble.)

From left to right, above: Vaughan Smith, Facebook’s deal guy; FriendFeed co-founder Jim Norris; Buchheit; FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor; and Zuckerberg.

Buchheit said in a comment that the last co-founder, Sanjeev Singh, was boarding a plane and was not there.

In the second picture, below, social networking czar Zuckerberg is seen bathed in the light of one of his very best friends, an Apple (AAPL) MacBook Pro, yukking it up with his new minions–ex-Google (GOOG) execs, who will soon discover that one Mark decree is equal to one Sergey order plus one Larry declaration from on high.

After Facebook announced today that it had acquired online content-sharing site FriendFeed, BoomTown had a short chit-chat with Facebook’s Director of Product, Chris Cox, and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor.

Although neither budged on telling me about the purchase price, which various Silicon Valley venture capitalists I spoke to estimated to be about $50 million in cash and stock, they both talked about how copacetic the two companies were.

Benchmark Capital and angel investors had put about $5 million into the start-up, which–while innovative–has failed to garner the red-hot growth of either Twitter or Facebook since it was founded in 2007.

(I mean, even if No. 1 FriendFeed Fanboy Robert Scoble said that too, it must be so!)

Cox and Taylor said the companies came together after several months of casual conversations, probably sometime after Twitter spurned Facebook’s $500 million stock-and-cash offer last year.

But, as in failed love affairs, moving on is the next best thing to do!

“At its core, we have the same vision for these types of products around real-time sharing and discovery,” said Taylor. “The ideas we have and view from Facebook were converging, so this made sense.”

He also noted that Facebook’s huge user base of upward of 250 million people–especially compared to FriendFeed’s one million monthly unique visitors–”was an offer we could not pass up.”

While in a previous interview with me Taylor and one of his other co-founders, Paul Buchheit, said they wanted to remain independent, the former Googler said “this was right thing for our company.”

And how, since Facebook was working on a lot of the content- and update-sharing features that FriendFeed had been pioneering so well, and Twitter had pulled so far ahead in the horse race.

Taylor agreed, referring to Facebook. “When such a large successful company is working on solving that problem too, we realized we could work more effectively in their organization,” he said.

Facebook’s Cox agreed that one-plus-one equaled Twitter-killer. (Well, he did not say that–I did!)

“We have watched [FriendFeed's] products from the beginning and the people themselves are just amazing,” he said, making the purchase sound a lot more like a talent acquisition than anything else.

Cox noted that time was a-wasting too in the real-time and sharing arena.

“I think all this stuff is evolving very quickly and and at the speed of light and there are not many that understand it at a deep level,” said Cox. “We just feel it’s important to have those people in the room and in the building, and not just on Facebook.com, but everywhere in the world.”

While it is unclear what kinds of products would evolve, both said a “culture match” would facilitate good things.

Not that it will be easy, said Cox: “Facebook operates at such a scale that we approach this with a high degree of humility.”

Neither would comment about my question of which side would have to now reign in FriendFeed fanatic Scoble, who loves the service the way a tween girl loves Robert Pattinson of “Twilight.”

Here is my video interview with Taylor and Buchheit last December, as well as a tour of FriendFeed’s Mountain View, Calif., HQ:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090810/take-that-twitter-facebooks-cox-and-friendfeeds-taylor-talk-about-the-acquisition-but-not-the-price-at-which-boomtown-makes-a-guess/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090810/facebook-acquires-not-twitter-oops-friendfeed-plus-the-full-press-release/ http://allthingsd.com/20090810/facebook-acquires-not-twitter-oops-friendfeed-plus-the-full-press-release/#comments Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:26:16 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=17251

Facebook said today it is acquiring FriendFeed, the online content-sharing site.

It is a logical fit for the huge social networking site, which has lagged behind microblogging kingpin Twitter in the real-time news, search and status game of perception in Silicon Valley.

Mountain View, Calif.-based FriendFeed has also trailed well behind Twitter, despite its top-notch pedigree of ex-Google (GOOG) staffers, such as Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. The other ex-Google co-founders of FriendFeed are Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh.

Benchmark Capital and angel investors had put about $5 million into the start-up, which had been a darling among the digerati.

Despite that, the start-up only broke one million unique visitors recently, according to several reports, while San Francisco-based Twitter was reported to have upward of 44 million in June.

But FriendFeed will surely get a turbocharge from its Facebook ownership, especially as its technology is fed to its 250 million users.

While Facebook–which is based in Palo Alto, Calif.–has added some of the same functionality that FriendFeed has innovated into its famous News Feed, it will surely get its own boost from adding FriendFeed’s dozen employees, 11 of whom are engineers.

Terms were not disclosed, but the purchase price is likely well under the $500 million Facebook offered Twitter last fall.

In fact, sources estimate to me that the price was about $50 million in cash and stock for the company, which was founded in 2007.

It is also unclear what will happen to the standalone FriendFeed service in the long run, although Taylor said in an uber-cute blog post (see below) that it would remain intact for now.

This move, although prominently unmentioned by Facebook in its full press release below, is most certainly a shot across Twitter’s bow.

Here’s the official word from Facebook, as well as that blog post by FriendFeed’s Taylor about the acquisition:

Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed

PALO ALTO, CALIF.–August 10, 2009–Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.”

FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request

We are happy to announce that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle…

The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We’ve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.

What does this mean for my FriendFeed account?

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop–keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.

What about the FriendFeed API?

The FriendFeed API will also continue to operate normally. As above, we will let you know as we settle on our plan to more fully integrate with Facebook.

Check out the official press release for more information.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090810/facebook-acquires-not-twitter-oops-friendfeed-plus-the-full-press-release/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081208/kara-visits-friendfeed-now-in-six-new-languages/ http://allthingsd.com/20081208/kara-visits-friendfeed-now-in-six-new-languages/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:00:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=7389

This morning, FriendFeed, which is a kind of content delivery version of Twitter, went international, launching in six new languages–German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and simplified Chinese.

Now live, the move is a natural extension for the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up–which was founded earlier this year by a small gang of ex-Googlers: Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh. The company says that one-third of users already use FriendFeed in languages other than English.

More languages are planned, said the company, which specializes in super-aggregating updates of all kinds for social-networking and news items in an ongoing feed from places like Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Twitter and Flickr.

Given all the dissipated ways people communicate on the Web, FriendFeed lets users collect all these links, some of them in rich media and some just text messages, to share publicly or privately.

I find the service very useful and compelling, so I paid a visit to its HQ last week to chat up Taylor and Buchheit.

We talked about a range of topics, including–my favorite–monetization, or lack thereof, of a lot of terrific Web 2.0 services like FriendFeed and Twitter.

The pair, in a less overt manner than Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams, did acknowledge the focus on growth over revenue, although they did seem intent on figuring out a true business plan sooner than later.

FriendFeed certainly has time to do so–it is a small and inexpensive start-up with a dozen employees, funded with only $4 million from Buchheit and Singh and $1 million from Benchmark Capital.

Here’s the video (excuse my gruff-cold-and-cough voice):

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081208/kara-visits-friendfeed-now-in-six-new-languages/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080917/debating-the-real-time-web-at-stanford-university/ http://allthingsd.com/20080917/debating-the-real-time-web-at-stanford-university/#comments Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:15:46 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=3882

Last night, BoomTown was invited to moderate a panel for MIT/Stanford Venture Lab at Stanford University’s Business School on the topic of lifecasting.

In other words, the digital version of TMI (too much information!).

Called “Lifestreaming: The Real-time Web,” it was aimed at debating the trend toward “sharing our lives with others as they happen,” with three entrepreneurs and a venture capitalist in the space.

The panel included Bret Taylor, Co-Founder of FriendFeed; Seesmic Founder Loic Le Meur; Pownce Co-Founder Leah Culver; and SoftTechVC’s Jeff Clavier.

It was a lively discussion, which was also focused on monetization–or lack thereof–issues in the instant Internet space, in which users share every detail of their lives with friends and family in a digital millisecond.

Like I said, MTMI (much too much information!!).

In any case, here’s a video I did of the event, including snippets of the company presentations, as well as interviews with all the panelists:

[ See post to watch video ]

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