They are going to have to think about whether they can continue with the motto “Done is better than perfect.”

– Altimeter Group’s Susan Etlinger, talking about Facebook in the New York Times

That will happen in the middle of 2014, says Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar, when circulation growth at the paper will start offsetting the decline in the Times’ ad sales. Here’s what that looks like in chart form:

True, one reason that circ growth will lap ad losses is that the losses will be slowing after much steeper declines. Still, the best-case scenario for most old-line media businesses is that digital sales increase faster than physical sales drop, and that’s essentially what Venkateshwar says is happening here. A year after the Times introduced its pay wall, it now has 450,000 digital subscribers — a number that impresses lots of industry skeptics.

Earlier this spring, when the Times said it was making it harder to read the paper online without paying for it, by dropping its free article limit from 20 per month to 10 per month, I wondered if the Times had made the move out of necessity — because it needed to boost its digital sales — or optimism — because it was confident it could boost its sales with a taller pay wall.

But after some thought, and bouncing the idea off a few industry folks, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s both. The Times would sure like to accelerate Venkateshwar’s timeline, and that’s probably not going to happen by fixing its ad problem. Meanwhile, the paper seems relatively confident that raising the pay wall equals marketing the pay wall. And the nice thing about the system the paper has built is that if it doesn’t work, it can fiddle with the controls some more.

The Washington Post reported this morning that its online ad revenue dropped 7 percent in the first three months of 2012. That follows a New York Times earnings release which saw that publisher’s Web ad business drop 2 percent.

(We should get some color on the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, when parent company News Corp. reports its earnings next week; News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

The Times said that digital sales were “under pressure” in the first quarter of the year, while the Post didn’t bother to add any color to its results. But it did note that online display ads were down 11 percent, while classifieds were down 1 percent.

Unlike the Times, the Post is essentially a regional newspaper, so it is harder to argue that its travails reflect a larger trend. And it’s also worth noting that the Post faces fierce competition for its core political coverage from Politico, an online/offline competitor that basically sprouted overnight.

But for the record: The rest of the Web publishing business — including not only Google but laggards like Yahoo — has been posting Q1 revenue increases.  [An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that AOL's ad revenues were up for Q1; the company won't post its numbers until next week.]

And, as it turns out, the engineer in question was the creator of one of the leading “wardriving” applications used for driving around with a laptop while looking for unsecured wireless networks.

While it sounds scary, wardriving doesn’t necessarily involve slurping up personal data, just measuring nearby Wi-Fi signal strength.

But, although Google was cleared of wrongdoing on this issue by the FCC (it was fined $25,000 for obstructing the agency’s investigation), the company’s lack of oversight over the supposed “rogue” engineer’s work didn’t make Google look very good.

Now, learning about the supposedly responsible engineer’s personal history makes it clear that he was an expert on the topic and his contribution was no random act.

The Times reporters say the engineer is a Google employee named Marius Milner. They did a good bit of reporting, including getting his name from a former state investigator and visiting Milner’s house.

Milner is the creator of Windows wardriving software NetStumbler, which was first released in 2001. He has been with Google (and now YouTube) since 2003, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Milner’s background is important because Google has downplayed this data collection incident from the start — at first denying it happened altogether, and then calling it a mistake.

Even if the Street View wardriving wasn’t found to be illegal, Google still has an ongoing issue around public trust and privacy to deal with.

Google, which didn’t confirm the Times report about Milner, had told the FCC that an unnamed engineer who wasn’t on the Street View team created the program to collect user data as a side project. Google employees admitted to the FCC that the project had sailed through an approval process and not been reviewed for privacy considerations by company lawyers.

But Milner, without admitting he is “Engineer Doe,” seemed to dispute Google’s characterization, according to Steve Lohr and David Streitfeld’s story in the Times.

“Depicting his actions as the work of a rogue ‘requires putting a lot of dots together,’ Mr. Milner said enigmatically Sunday before insisting again he had no comment. He said he was closely following the news reports on the issue.”

Now that we know Milner’s history, if you look back at the FCC report, it explains that “Engineer Doe” was specifically “tapped” by the Street View team to help with wardriving — although not to collect payload data.

“As Street View testing progressed, Google engineers decided that the Company should also use the Street View cars for “wardriving,” which is the practice of driving streets and using equipment to locate wireless LANs using Wi-Fi, such as wireless hotspots at coffee shops and home wireless networks. By collecting information about Wi-Fi networks (such as the MAC address, SSID and strength of signal received from the wireless access point) and associating it with global positioning system (GPS) information, companies can develop maps of wireless access points for use in location-based services. To design the company’s program, Google tapped engineer Doe, who was not a full-time member of the Street View project team.”

When Google released a less redacted version of the FCC report via the Los Angeles Times over the weekend, it issued a statement saying “We hope that we can now put this matter behind us.”

As more information about the project surfaces, that seems to be wishful thinking.

Six years ago this month, I revealed in Businessweek that Apple had incorporated in Nevada where the corporate tax rate is zero. So I found the Times’ account — written by Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski, about the many financial tricks that Apple employs to minimize its tax exposure — to contain a lot of old news, but also some new, fascinating details. Who couldn’t love a phrase like “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich” to describe arcane accounting and legal tricks?

But the implication the story leaves a reader with — that Apple is somehow doing society a disservice by not paying its fair share of corporate taxes — is simply wrong on many levels. The most dubious of the lines that the Times attempts to draw is between Apple and the budget crisis at De Anza College, a Cupertino community college where Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was once a student. The college is facing a “death spiral” because of a decline in funding from the state. This funding, the reader is led to conclude, would be more plentiful if corporations like Apple were to step up and pay, and not escape the tax bill by setting up an office in neighboring Nevada.

What the Times fails to make clear is how community colleges are funded in California. The picture is much more complicated. California community colleges draw the majority of their funding from the state’s general fund — which is drawn directly from the state’s personal and corporate income taxes — and from local property taxes collected by counties. As of the 2009-2010 budget cycle, these two buckets made up about 88 percent of the system’s funding. State lottery funds, federal funds and student fees made up the remainder.

Tax policy wonks — which I’m not — will remember that California was the birthplace of the property tax revolt movement in the 1970s. In 1978, California voters overwhelmingly approved a measure that limits the amount by which property taxes can increase each year. Since then, at least one estimate pegs the amount that the state’s taxpayers have avoided paying at north of half a trillion dollars as of 2009. In February, the property tax shortfall facing the state community-college system was $41 million. Conclusion: If there is to be blame for the shortage of taxpayer funding at De Anza College, a healthy portion of it should be laid at the door of California’s own voters and taxpayers, who in 1978 thought that property-tax limitations were a good idea.

I had a few other problems with the story. Take sales taxes. When you buy a Mac in New York, you pay a sales tax of 8.875 percent. For a base-level iMac, priced at $1,199, that works out to more than $106 in taxes. While some states charge no sales tax — Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon — the average sales tax in the U.S. works out to 9.6 percent.

Putting aside the fact that the average sales tax in Canada is higher, let’s assume that Apple’s North American sales of $38.3 billion in its fiscal 2011 were taxed at that rate, and do the math: We get $3.7 billion in sales taxes paid into the coffers of states and municipalities, except in those five states that have no such tax. That amounts to more than 1.5 times the $2.4 billion the Times says Apple would have owed the federal government. Factor in VAT and other similar taxes in the U.K. and throughout Europe, and you get the idea that Apple is generating tax revenue aplenty on the sale of its goods. Yes, those taxes are passed on to customers. But isn’t that the case with every tax a corporation making consumer products pays?

Finally, you may remember that earlier this year Apple released an extensive report on the number of jobs it had created and supported both through direct employment and in the orbit of the products it creates. It seemed an odd thing for Apple to release at the time, and now we know why: It reads almost like it was prepared by Apple in advance, knowing this story was in the pipeline at the Times. The final number, by its reckoning: 514,000 U.S. jobs are created by the Apple universe, including 47,000 employees; 210,000 jobs were created as part of the app economy, which didn’t even exist until 2008.

Assuming that each of those jobs pays a salary north of $35,350 a year, taxes collected on that income could range anywhere from 25 percent to 35 percent, depending on the income bracket. And that’s before accounting for any stock-based compensation.

At this point, the discussion turns to a deeper question: Is it better for society to have a company pay more in taxes, or to create more jobs? You can argue that had Apple not taken advantage of the various strategies it employed to pay less taxes, it might not have flourished as well as it has, and thus created fewer jobs. But people smarter than I will likely hash out the finer points of this argument in the coming days.

(Image is a screen grab from this silly Beatles cartoon built around the group’s song “Taxman.”)

They all seem pitched toward the same mythical viewer, presumably the one prized by Internet advertisers, whose mind appears to be occupied with a sticky mix of celebrity gossip, blockbuster movies, video games, zombies, action sports and news of the weird.

– Mike Hale of the New York Times, writing about new channels on YouTube

The New York Times says its digital paywall strategy is a success with consumers. But its digital advertising business stumbled last quarter, and dropped by 2 percent.

Times CEO Arthur Sulzberger Jr. blamed an “uneven U.S. economic environment and uncertain global conditions” for weak ad sales in general — overall ad sales were down 6.1 percent at the publisher’s core News Media Group — and said digital sales were “under pressure in the first two months of the year.”

The publisher says it expects to see similar ad results for the second quarter of 2012.

Meanwhile the Times’ About.com content farm continues to struggle, and saw its revenue drop 23.1 percent.

Times readers, though, seem happy to pay for the paper.

Circulation revenue was up 9.7 percent, and the Times has close to half a million people shelling out for digital access. The Times is trying to boost that number by pulling back on the free digital content it gives to nonsubscribers.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Ritu Manoj Jethani)

While it’s tempting to see the Huffington Post’s Pulitzer as a “big win for new media,” or something like that, the real story is that these organizations — the Huffington Post, the New York Times, the Washington Post — are becoming more like each other. Old media and new media are increasingly antiquated terms.

– Journalism professor Jay Rosen to HuffPo media writer Michael Calderone (via GigaOM)

The gap between the individual and the household is perhaps most evident and annoying on personalized recommendation sites, like Netflix and Amazon. The person who loves “Yo Gabba Gabba” is not always the one who watches every Jennifer Aniston movie or the one who can’t be budged from the Criterion Collection. But then, we watch movies and TV together, or sometimes we’re just in the mood for something different from our usual taste.

Netflix is asked to address this personalization problem all the time by analysts and users. On Netflix’s most recent earnings call, CEO Reed Hastings said to expect “multi-account options” within the next year. The company has talked about making this a premium feature, where customers pay extra to maintain multiple user accounts on one bill.

Single-user accounts are certainly more straightforward to manage for both companies and users, but they ignore the reality that we live together and depend on each other. If a personalization system doesn’t even understand the difference between two people, then it’s not very good, is it?

A very interesting Netflix developer post from this weekend about the company’s recommendation system noted that the company already implicitly tries to acknowledge different users in a household. “It is important to keep in mind that Netflix’ personalization is intended to handle a household that is likely to have different people with different tastes. … To achieve this, in many parts of our system we are not only optimizing for accuracy, but also for diversity.”

Because of this focus on diversity, the “Top 10” recommendations on each user’s personalized Netflix homepage are really for each household, wrote Netflix personalization engineers Xavier Amatriain and Justin Basilico.

Really? Because when I log into Netflix on my joint account with my husband, I see “Top 10 for Michael.” It doesn’t exactly make me feel acknowledged.

But Netflix isn’t the only one. A household or “inner circle” setting makes sense for any online content seller, from the New York Times to iTunes. For instance, the household finance manager, Mint.com, has no household account option. Two people who use the service have to associate the account with one of their emails and a joint password. I don’t have high expectations of the wide range of banking and utility bill sites, but they suffer from the same problem.

Or how about counting multiple devices as members of a family? Family mobile data plans are finally supposed to arrive in the U.S. this year.

I’d propose that these sites and services create a level between billing account and user account. They should understand and design around the idea of a household and allow users to switch between profiles — like players on gaming consoles — without logging in and out each time.

PandoDaily writer Hamish McKenzie seems to be thinking along some of the same lines in a post today suggesting that Pair, the new app that helps romantic couples share their days with each other, could become a platform for joint management of calendars, travel and bank accounts. I think he’s getting at a similar concept — but this is probably a setting that would be better done by each service individually, rather than an outside authenticator.

These joint household accounts would present challenges — and opportunities. It’s not as simple as designing for just one person or the general public.

For one thing: privacy. Are you as a household member allowed to see everything your family watches, reads, listens to, pays for, etc? I’d say generally it makes sense to be open within a household, but there are reasons to build in secret or incognito activity. For instance, I don’t necessarily want my husband to be able to anticipate what I’m giving him for his birthday by seeing the purchase pop up on our joint Mint account.

There could also be interesting design around the Venn diagrams of multiple users. I was chatting about this topic with investor Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures, who suggested a Netflix interface where people sit down to watch a movie and tell the service who is in the room — kind of like a check-in. Then, Netflix would be able to recommend something for the group, and also capture better data about how to make recommendations for each person in the future.

I’d be interested to know what you think, and whether you’ve seen examples of people doing this well.

The Times is cutting back on the number of “free” articles it lets nonsubscribers read, from 20 a month to 10. The change goes into effect in April.

The rest of the paywall’s architecture appears to remain unchanged. The publisher will still let visitors who end up at the paper after following a link from Twitter or Facebook go over the 10-article limit as many times as they want. And it will offer a similar, but more limited dispensation for those sent there by Google.

The idea is to offer a “porous” wall that lets the Times have it both ways: Avid readers will need to pay up, but the paper still gets the benefit of search and social Web traffic.

At launch, that strategy seemed to befuddle the Times’ critics, and the paper didn’t do the most effective job at communicating the details. But consumers seem to have figured it out. In the last quarter of 2011, circulation revenue was up about 5 percent, driven by digital-subscription uptake.

But the Times’ overall revenue continues to decline, and late last year, CEO Janet Robinson was shoved out the door (along with a very generous parachute).

So here’s the important question about today’s news: Is the Times cutting back on its free reads because:

A) It can, having proved that people will pay to read the paper online?

or

B) It has to, because the rest of its business continues to weaken?

Discuss.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/contax66)

Boy, oh boy, is Mike Daisey confused.

After a weekend of savage pounding by the media, Daisey, the opportunistic fabulist who was caught lying to one of the most respected radio documentarians in the history of broadcasting, reemerged in public today. In his latest attempt to mitigate the damage done to his reputation, he appears to compare himself to Mark Twain, opening his latest blog post by quoting — his words — another famous monologuist: “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Instead he seems to be borrowing from Phineas T. Barnum, the great American showman who is often credited — perhaps apocryphally — with saying “There is no such thing as bad publicity.”

I couldn’t tell you how ticket sales to Daisey’s show have been affected by the ensuing controversy and, frankly, I don’t care. I know that Daisey addressed it in opening comments before his performance of “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” on the night of March 17 in New York.

In summary, his defense is that his work is theater based on a body of facts that are largely true, and though they shouldn’t have been aired as factual on “This American Life,” he stands by it as theatrical work. Never mind that he insisted, not once, but repeatedly according to one account, that the words “This is a work of non-fiction,” be printed on his show’s Playbills. (For an example see page 3 of this PDF.)

But the money quotes that give the deepest insight into his state of mind are these:

“Especially galling is how many are gleefully eager to dance on my grave expressly so they can return to ignoring everything about the circumstances under which their devices are made. Given the tone, you would think I had fabulated an elaborate hoax, filled with astonishing horrors that no one had ever seen before. …

“If people want to use me as an excuse to return to denialism about the state of our manufacturing, about the shape of our world, they are doing that to themselves.”

Right. Mike Daisey, a confessed liar who parlayed his appearance on “This American Life” into a months-long string of media appearances on CBS, MSNBC, HBO and PBS — which helped raise his public visibility, built buzz and goosed ticket sales — thinks he can retake the moral high ground?

The only benefactor of all this attention certainly hasn’t been Chinese workers, but Daisey himself. Some 70,000 people have seen his show in 18 cities, and tickets in New York have been going for $75 to $85.

Worse, he continues to believe it is he alone who has been shining a light on the problems that have emerged over the years with Apple’s manufacturing arrangements in China and around the world. “Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components …”

Sorry, Mike, but the discussion about Apple, Foxconn and its employees was going on well before you elbowed your way onto the scene.

For openers, at the D8 conference in 2010, AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg asked Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs about the situation at Foxconn, in the wake of a string of suicides.

That same year — indeed, only weeks after nine suicides by Foxconn employees — Bloomberg Businessweek’s Fredrik Balfour conducted a three-hour interview with Foxconn CEO Terry Gou, and also several unsupervised interviews with Foxconn workers, for a story featured on the magazine’s cover. The Atlantic Monthly considered Foxconn in the wider context of the rise of China as a leading economic power. The BBC looked at Foxconn after the suicides. Indeed, there had been a great deal of attention paid to matters related to Apple, Foxconn and workers in China, well before the days of Daisey. Who does he feel has not been talking about this?

In fact, let us not leave Apple itself out of that conversation. The way Daisey tells it, you might assume that the electronics giant is sweeping its dirty laundry under the nearest rug.

This is not the case. Awakened to allegations that emerged in 2006 of worker abuses and bad conditions at a Foxconn plant in Longhua — in a British tabloid newspaper, no less — Apple started issuing an annual document it calls its “Supplier Responsibility Progress Report.” The latest one, from 2012, is here (PDF). Reports are available from 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007.

These reports hardly let Apple off the hook. Rather, they document progress made, as well as progress yet to be made. Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted to The Wall Street Journal earlier this year that a priority for 2012 is to reduce the number of hours that employees at Foxconn and other companies work. It is, as you can see by Apple’s own admission, the most difficult of its China labor issues to solve.

Hard as this is to believe, employees often want to work long hours — and to earn the overtime pay that comes with them. In being too aggressive, they run afoul of Apple’s demand that no one work more than 60 hours a week, six days a week. And keeping accurate records that prevent employees from overworking themselves is proving difficult. If you visited Foxconn, Apple’s own disclosures suggest, you would probably have no trouble finding someone who recently worked more than 60 hours in a week.

What you would have trouble finding are the underage workers that Daisey said — in a now-debunked statement from his stage show and radio appearances — were so plentiful. Apple’s 229 audits found none of those at the final-assembly plants owned by Foxconn and others, and found only five active and 13 historical cases of underage workers at other facilities it does business with.

You would also have trouble finding people poisoned by n-hexane. As Apple documents in its 2011 report, a poisoning incident did happen, and when it did, Apple ordered the factory in question to stop using the chemical, the use of which I understand, is already a violation of Chinese law. Most of the 137 people who were poisoned had returned to work by the time the report was published. One plant using the chemical was shut down entirely by local authorities.

Read any of these reports by Apple, and you’ll find not the PR-sanitized language you might expect, but instead a rather unvarnished assessment of a company trying to come to grips with the human costs of a deeply complex industrial operation. Each report, which Apple releases voluntarily generates a new round of negative press coverage. Meanwhile, China is, despite its size, still a developing nation, and it will be some time before workplace standards there come close to resembling what we take for granted in the U.S. It is an evolving situation, one that will improve over time.

And while I readily admit that consumers and activists should continue to pressure and engage Apple on the subject of workers’ safety and rights, in China and in the other countries where it does business, it rarely gets any credit for the progress it has made and the leadership it has shown.

On that note, I think the discussion on the matter has been a healthy and engaging one for the better part of a decade. Contrary to his own inflated sense of self-importance, Mike Daisey has added nothing of value to it, and should consider shutting up.

I said as much on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” yesterday, and have embedded the video below:

CNN Reliable Sources March 18 2012 from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

In what is either the boldest gamble of its history or the most boneheaded, Yahoo has filed a massive patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook.

The attack by the Silicon Valley Internet icon against perhaps the most powerful consumer social networking site today — also based in tech’s heartland and also an important partner of Yahoo — is sure to be a controversial one, pitting Yahoo against a company that has surpassed it handily in recent years in regards to popularity among consumers.

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

That includes, Yahoo alleges, Facebook’s popular News Feed, advertising methods, privacy settings and more. The company adds that Facebook has been “free riding” on Yahoo’s intellectual property and that royalty payments alone will not suffice.

So what does Yahoo want for this alleged free ride? Triple damages and to enjoin Facebook from operating by using said patents.

The 19-page lawsuit over 10 patents — related to advertising, privacy, customization, messaging and social networking — comes as Yahoo is seeking to right itself under new CEO Scott Thompson.

Multiple sources said he is primarily driving this new aggressiveness from Yahoo.

Since Yahoo told the New York Times that it was considering such a move last week, the issue has been widely debated within the company, with many top techies there opposed to it, due to the company’s longstanding ethos of using patents for defense rather than offense.

Thus, the decision to move was closely held, sources said, with only Thompson and legal chief Michael Callahan largely working on it.

Still, patent lawsuits have become ever more prevalent among tech companies, as they seek to battle for advantage in a rapidly changing competitive landscape. Apple, Google, Microsoft and others are involved in several legal actions, although they are largely related to mobile technology.

Yahoo’s lawsuit is the most prominent in the social networking arena, a sector that has seen a huge explosion of late. Its timing could not be worse for Facebook, since it is in a quiet period for its upcoming IPO, which is expected to value the company at close to $100 billion.

Yahoo has done this kind of thing before, of course, having wrangled with Google until right before it went public in 2004 over search patents from its Overture acquisition. The pair settled 10 days before the Google IPO, with Yahoo getting several million more shares of that stock.

Yahoo is shaking Facebook down for much more here and with much higher stakes for both companies. If successful, Yahoo could seriously damage Facebook’s initial public offering; if not, Yahoo will cement its growing reputation as a company with nothing to lose, whose value is built not on its current business, but on non-operating assets.

More importantly, at least initially, the move did nothing to boost Yahoo’s moribund shares — the stock was down about one percent to $14.49 in after-hours trading.

More to come, but here is the entire document below. The lawsuit has been filed in San Jose, Calif., federal court.

Lastly, the official PR back-and-forth:

Said Yahoo, in its statement:

“Yahoo! has invested substantial resources in research and development through the years, which has resulted in numerous patented inventions of technology that other companies have licensed. These technologies are the foundation of our business that engages over 700 million monthly unique visitors and represent the spirit of innovation upon which Yahoo! is built. Unfortunately, the matter with Facebook remains unresolved and we are compelled to seek redress in federal court. We are confident that we will prevail.”

Facebook, obviously, disagrees, and also threw in a jab about the lack of discussions over the issue between the pair:

“We’re disappointed that Yahoo, a longtime business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation. Once again, we learned of Yahoo’s decision simultaneously with the media. We will defend ourselves vigorously against these puzzling actions.”

I’ll admit to also being puzzled about the strategery here, but I am sure there will be much more to come.

Until then, read on:

Complaint

And here is what I wrote last week on the subject:

Apparently, Yahoo’s new motto: If you can’t beat ‘em — and it can’t — sue ‘em.

That would be Yahoo — the perpetual 98-pound weakling of the Internet these days — threatening powerful Facebook, which had cleanly bested it by attracting hordes of users with a plethora of popular products and services.

Yahoo has already lost its audience to Facebook, which was most recently followed by its frittering away a commanding lead in display advertising, too.

That would also be the Yahoo whose most recent success in improving its increasingly tenuous connections with customers was, in fact, by deeply integrating Facebook’s social hooks into its Web properties.

That would be the Yahoo which has failed time and again to innovate its own offerings so drastically over the years that it has now apparently decided that its first and best strategic move under Thompson’s rule is a shakedown.

Such a cynical move on rights Yahoo has long held seems more a play for the cheap seats of Wall Street, given that the company needs to look like it is doing everything it can to turn things around right now as it faces a proxy challenge.

First, it ended difficult talks with its Asian partners, Alibaba Group and SoftBank, over selling back lucrative stakes there.

Now, according to sources, Yahoo’s Thompson has actually been trying to make very nice with activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point — on-the-down-low chitchats that might have played a part of this latest unusual move.

At least Kodak had a good excuse. The once iconic camera company had recently been trying to take advantage of its trove of patents as a way to stave off declaring bankruptcy.

That didn’t work for Kodak, and it will also not work for Yahoo, whose only real option is to try to innovate its way out of the mess it has landed itself in.

You know, with good ideas.

Instead, the company’s leadership has opted for a road that could rain down trouble and paint Yahoo as a company bereft of talent to win any other way.

And while a range of intellectual property lawsuits have broken out all over the digital sector, involving Apple, Microsoft, Google and many others, such a strategy for Yahoo could be dangerous if it fails in its legal effort to take advantage of its 1,000-plus patents, including those related to search and advertising.

Others — including such tech luminaries as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, who co-owns the seminal Six Degrees patent for constructing a networking database and system — hold a number of critical social networking patents, too, so who knows where this thing will go.

Nonetheless, Yahoo has decided to emulate those companies with one of the few valuable assets it might have, waging its little war, right as Facebook is in the midst of its initial public offering period.

Yahoo has done this before, of course, having wrangled with Google until right before it went public in 2004 over search patents from its Overture acquisition. The pair settled 10 days before the Google IPO, with Yahoo getting several million more shares of that stock (which it then, of course, sold too soon).

That certainly could happen here, with Yahoo managing to grab a chunk of Facebook’s pre-IPO stock.
That would mean that Yahoo’s most valuable asset would be those shares, as well as its stake in Asian companies it bought a while back for a bargain and now makes up a bulk of the company’s valuation.

As to Yahoo’s core business — investors consider it almost entirely worthless.

And let’s not forget: Facebook could also sue right back, which it very well might do. Or, perhaps, cut off agreeable ties that have aided Yahoo in recent years.

In other words, in poking Facebook, Yahoo might now learn what it is really like to be de-friended.

And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

Not only is Google Plus not a ghost town, we have never seen anything grow this fast. Ever.

– Vic Gundotra, VP of engineering at Google, in an interview with Nick Bilton

It was Yahoo legal head Mike Callahan who had the thankless task yesterday of calling Facebook’s general counsel Ted Ullyot to tell him the Silicon Valley Internet giant was intent on pursuing patent lawsuits against the social networking giant.

The charge was being led by Callahan, as well as Chief Product Officer Blake Irving and, especially, Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson.

Much of Yahoo’s senior leadership had no idea of the impending move until Callahan informed them it was about to happen at meeting Monday.

Facebook had known of the patent concerns of Yahoo for some months — the issue had also gotten some coverage in the media — but had not engaged formally on the topic, several sources said.

So, the suddenly aggressive call also apparently blindsided Facebook, even though it had been aware of the possibility of such an outcome.

Thus, it had little time to respond, since Yahoo was also simultaneously briefing the New York Times, according to numerous sources at both companies, and then released an astonishing statement to the newspaper:

“Yahoo has a responsibility to its shareholders, employees and other stakeholders to protect its intellectual property. We must insist that Facebook either enter into a licensing agreement or we will be compelled to move forward unilaterally to protect our rights.”

Apparently, Yahoo’s new motto: If you can’t beat ‘em — and it can’t — sue ‘em.

That would be Yahoo — the perpetual 98-pound weakling of the Internet these days — threatening powerful Facebook, which had cleanly bested it by attracting hordes of users with a plethora of popular products and services.

Yahoo has already lost its audience to Facebook, which was most recently followed by its frittering away a commanding lead in display advertising, too.

That would also be the Yahoo whose most recent success in improving its increasingly tenuous connections with customers was, in fact, by deeply integrating Facebook’s social hooks into its Web properties.

That would be the Yahoo which has failed time and again to innovate its own offerings so drastically over the years that it has now apparently decided that its first and best strategic move under Thompson’s rule is a shakedown.

Such a cynical move on rights Yahoo has long held seems more a play for the cheap seats of Wall Street, given that the company needs to look like it is doing everything it can to turn things around right now as it faces a proxy challenge.

First, it ended difficult talks with its Asian partners, Alibaba Group and SoftBank, over selling back lucrative stakes there.

Now, according to sources, Yahoo’s Thompson has actually been trying to make very nice with activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point — on-the-down-low chitchats that might have played a part of this latest unusual move.

At least Kodak had a good excuse. The once iconic camera company had recently been trying to take advantage of its trove of patents as a way to stave off declaring bankruptcy.

That didn’t work for Kodak, and it will also not work for Yahoo, whose only real option is to try to innovate its way out of the mess it has landed itself in.

You know, with good ideas.

Instead, the company’s leadership has opted for a road that could rain down trouble and paint Yahoo as a company bereft of talent to win any other way.

And while a range of intellectual property lawsuits have broken out all over the digital sector, involving Apple, Microsoft, Google and many others, such a strategy for Yahoo could be dangerous if it fails in its legal effort to take advantage of its 1,000-plus patents, including those related to search and advertising.

Others — including such tech luminaries as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, who co-owns the seminal Six Degrees patent for constructing a networking database and system — hold a number of critical social networking patents, too, so who knows where this thing will go.

Nonetheless, Yahoo has decided to emulate those companies with one of the few valuable assets it might have, waging its little war, right as Facebook is in the midst of its initial public offering period.

Yahoo has done this before, of course, having wrangled with Google until right before it went public in 2004 over search patents from its Overture acquisition. The pair settled 10 days before the Google IPO, with Yahoo getting several million more shares of that stock (which it then, of course, sold too soon).

That certainly could happen here, with Yahoo managing to grab a chunk of Facebook’s pre-IPO stock.

That would mean that Yahoo’s most valuable asset would be those shares, as well as its stake in Asian companies it bought a while back for a bargain and now makes up a bulk of the company’s valuation.

As to Yahoo’s core business — investors consider it almost entirely worthless.

And let’s not forget: Facebook could also sue right back, which it very well might do. Or, perhaps, cut off agreeable ties that have aided Yahoo in recent years.

In other words, in poking Facebook, Yahoo might now learn what it is really like to be de-friended.

First it was the baggage fees, and charging for legroom. Then it was denying us our Words with Friends. Now, the New York Times reports, it’s bringing Facebook and LinkedIn to the seat-selection process, so you can gather more information on customers … I mean, pair up fliers with similar interests.

Soon enough, we’ll hear people’s no-longer-serendipitous tales of purposely meeting their soul mate, or maybe selling their company to the passenger in seat 24E.

I’ve got one word for you, airlines, or really, one word that’s used twice to create another single word: GoGo. Wasn’t it just a few years ago that Internet broadband access became an in-flight possibility, allowing us to bury our heads in laptop screens, plow through work while 30,000 feet above the ground, and effectively avoid human interaction? Even the subject at the top of the Times story, Jeff Jarvis, grumbles that he usually has work to do.

And now, you want us to talk to people while we fly? (How does one do that, anyway?)

In case you missed the story, KLM Airlines and others have recently integrated aspects of social media with customer profiles, allowing prospective passengers to share personal information and choose seat buddies based on their profiles.

Sharing the social info is completely optional, and if a customer is uncomfortable with the person who has chosen to sit next to him or her, the seat can be changed up until two days before the flight.

As the story points out, this is likely to appeal to business travelers who are interested in real-life networking, not just social networking.

On one hand, providing more personal info to airlines could help them tailor the flight experience to suit fliers’ preferences, going beyond just the standard meal selection.

And one of the services mentioned, Hong Kong-based Satisfly, lets fliers indicate their preferred level of chattiness during a flight. So the tired mom might not get the talk-shop guy, and maybe the fearful flier won’t get paired with another white-knuckler. (In the videogaming world, I’m told, multiplayer gamers find this kind of feature to be invaluable when they create profiles, so jabberers and silent Halo-ers can peacefully coexist.)

But allowing fliers to handpick their seatmates based on social profiling could also have its pitfalls. As Jarvis aptly says, “Pity the poor venture capitalist who gets seated with the start-up guy who talks his ear off for four hours.”

Which might present another opportunity for airlines: Charge extra for high-tech noise-canceling headphones …

Readers, what do you think? Would you use a social networks to choose a seatmate on a flight, or opt not to share your profile?

(Photo courtesy of Flickr)

I had tried in the past — in very slight ways, without a real goal — to eat better and I would fail every time because no one around me knew I was trying. This time, by having it on Twitter, both my friends and family — as well as strangers — would hold me accountable. So if I did screw up and if I did have too many cookies, I’d hear about it from people on Twitter …

– New York Times reporter Brian Stelter on WGBH radio, talking about using Twitter to lose weight

When people talk to one another long enough, they want to meet, and when they’ve been in one another’s presence, they want to keep in touch.

– Clay Shirky, talking to David Carr about the “ingredients of communication” in the digital world

As the world has realigned from being about portals and then search and now social, how do you build a media company for a social world? And a big part of that is scoops and exclusives and original content, and it’s also about cute kittens in an entertaining cultural context.

– Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed, in conversation with David Carr of the New York Times