Bldg 44 has a vintage Defender video game. I own high score: 65000. Like riding a bike. Best perk ever.

Sort of. That figure doesn't actually peg any particular severance package. But considering VP types likely walked away with much fatter packages, this low estimate helps explains why Bradley Horowitz and Jeff Bonforte waited until February 11 to skitter out Yahoo's portholes. (Photo by AussieGold)

Left Yahoo. Reactions: "Thanks for all you've done", "How could you?!", "Congrats!" Yahoo was my first "real job." I expected to stay one year, to see a corporation operate. But there was excitement, passion and talent. Not aspiring made it easy to do what I thought was right. I never got pushback. I created the Advanced Development Division: "We work on lots of things, for a little while..." As VP of ADD, four years is a very long time! I am amazed Yahoo held my interest. Thank you. FAQ. Laid off? I wish. Why now? So many people were leaving on Tuesday. Your teams, Brickhouse? The teams are under Chad Dickerson. You've lost faith? Not in the least. Don't want to work for Ballmer? I have no insight on MSFT / YHOO. What will you be doing at Google? Save that for another post.

(Photo by caterina)

At the bottom of the Yahoo Video page, there's a section titled "More With Video." Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield promised Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site, would add video "soon" last summer. But his promise was empty: No engineering work had started at the time, and Butterfield himself would soon leave Flickr to go on paternity leave. (We hear he's coming back to Yahoo in another role, but not returning to Flickr.)

Still, video's long been seen as a natural extension for Flickr. The same digital cameras which take still photos almost all now capture video too, as do cameraphones. Why force users to go to two websites for the output of one device?

Which raises the question: Why did Yahoo Video relaunch with user-generated content? The rumor I'd heard was that Yahoo Video would become a showcase, much like NBC and News Corp.'s Hulu.com, for professional content, while the amateur stuff moved to Flickr. The obvious conclusion: Flickr's video features aren't finished, while Yahoo Video's were ready to go.

One would think proper leadership would have sorted this out. But of the managers in Yahoo's advanced-development division, one, Bradley Horowitz, just left for Google; another, Salim Ismail, was thankfully laid off; and the last, Chad Dickerson, had just been installed in his job before he got handed the management of what's left. It's no wonder that even when Yahoo manages to launch a promising new site, mismanagement haunts it.

Gatz has been mum. But likely as not, Gatz may have gotten sick of working withSalim Ismail, the publicity-hungry Silicon Valley Tool charged with Brickhouse, the sexier part of Horowitz's innovation empire. Either that, or Gatz is just eager to spend more time nerdspotting for Valleywag. Scott, we have an opening for a party correspondent, if you haven't heard.

It was an odd venue for a tech party — a greasy diner by day, the Grill sits on a corner near the ballpark, neighborhing Border's, McDonald's, and dozens of men in Giants windbreakers asking passerbys if they need a ticket. They say open source is about software that's free as in "free speech," not "free beer," but the open bar featured plenty of the latter.

Elevation's Marc Bodnick greeted me by saying I wasn't drunk enough, and he was rarely without a can of Coors Light the entire night. The user-contributed entertainment was karaoke, backed by a talented, and very patient, live band. The clip above, captured by Irene McGee's cell phone, is a video of Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales and Creative Commons creator Lawrence Lessig announcing their collaboration and singing the Sonny and Cher classic "I Got You Babe." Seriously.

And apparently, no one's putting in long hours over at Yahoo; there was a large contingent from the troubled portal there. Shouldn't they have been back in the office, saving the company? Yahoo Brickhouse head Salim Ismail, our latest Silicon Valley tool, and Yahoo VP Bradley Horowitz took the mike, breaking out "Don't You Want Me," a fitting anthem. (The answer: No.)

Later on, I succumbed to the call of the spotlight, bleating out the Johnny Paycheck classic "Take This Job and Shove It," which given the events of last week seemed so appropriate. (Video by Irene McGee)

Tom Coates, the London-based Yahoo who's actually running Fire Eagle, had been quietly talking it up among people interested in the project, which aims to make it easier for people to broadcast their locations across various websites. But when Ismail decided to make a big announcement and brief the Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch, Coates's name was nowhere to be seen. What's worse, his engineering team was still working on it and the project, which Ismail said would launch by the end of the month, wasn't ready to go live.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a clever exercise of the classic software-company management trick: Boss preannounces project in order to spur programmers to actually ship code. But Coates was irate enough to force Ismail to backpedal on his blog:

Lots of coverage, mostly good. However, it's important to note that it's just an announcement. The developer launch will happen later this month. Tom Coates and the team have been working tirelessly with some of the world's leading geo-coding experts, and we're almost ready.

Brickhouse, an inspiring idea, is at once an object of envy and ridicule within Yahoo. With few successful projects coming out of the San Francisco incubator, Ismail's boss, Bradley Horowitz, have been trying to extend the brand to efforts housed in Yahoo's R&D labs and its Advanced Products Group. That, of course, will end up drawing more attention to the San Francisco group's failures.

What really makes Ismail a Silicon Valley Tool? Horowitz is using him. Ismail and Brickhouse are being set up to fail. If Brickhouse has another success like Pipes, expect Horowitz to take credit. And if Brickhouse flops for good? Ismail gets the blame. One almost feels sorry for him.

Ismail's plight wouldn't matter, of course, except for this: While the purple people play political games over who should get the most points for innovation, Google and Facebook are actually inventing useful new software. Maybe people at Yahoo are, too — but thanks to bosses who can't even steal credit successfully, you'll never hear about it.

I worked at Brickhouse and quit. The place smelled like dirty socks and had no ventilation. In general the building feels cursed, probably from the old Organic days. [Organic, an online ad agency, used to occupy the same building, which Yahoo now shares with Wired. — Ed.]I even question the seismic soundness of that building. Don't take your kids there either, they could fall through the railings on the stairs.

Old Horowitz suffers from god syndrome and needs to get over himself. It would help if he learned some of his team member names.

The old rumor is that Brickhouse is the last leg before good Yahoos die. Overall I found the pace like molasses and my compensation not correlated with performance. It was my last frustrating and annoying experience with Yahoo, thank god those days are over.

Surprised to hear about the Pipes team breaking up. Last I talked with them they had some pretty big "platform" plans and strong exec backing.

Yahoo might as well buy AOL and merge all services and change their brand too: "The worlds largest loser base!"

Alaina Browne and Anil Dash The foodblogger and Six Apart executive are not pregnant, though Dash has been looking a little chunky.

Heather Powazek Champ and Derek Powazek: Flickr's community manager and the famous Web designer are not pregnant.

Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield: Flickr's cofounders made no secrecy of Fake's pregnancy, which ended yesterday with the safe delivery of a newborn daughter.

Jennifer Granick and Brad Stone: The lawyer and New York Times reporter are expecting, and are telling people about it.

Maryam and Robert Scoble: Would you really expect Robert Scoble, whose blogger wife, Maryam, is pregnant, not to blog about the fact?

Now we all know: Ben Trott proved so irresistably hot that his wife and fellow Six Apart cofounder, Mena, found herself in a family way. Until recently, she'd been trying to keep the fact private.

To the pregnant couples: Heartfelt congratulations and best wishes. To Fake and Butterfield: Mazel tov! To Browne, Dash, and the Powazeks: Get cracking! Valleywag is going to need readers in 2025.

(Photos by Anil Dash, edyson, granick, jacksonwest, Scott Beale / Laughing Squid, and simoncast)