From left to right are Facebook's Vaughn Smith, FriendFeed co-founder Jim Norris, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor. But the winner is clearly the guy on the far right, Mark Zuckerberg: if the Facebook CEO was the one dropping $50 million in this situation, that only made him more entitled, under Silicon Valley social mores, to dressing in shorts without socks. Let's just hope he never uploads pictures of a multi-billion-dollar transaction; it's a good bet a Speedo would be involved.

For comparative purposes, this is what a merger looks like in New York, with an old media company involved:

UPDATE: When Patricia Handschiegel sold StyleDiary in 2007, she snapped a decidedly unglamorous picture of herself at the end of the closing, when the fashionista found herself clad in a t-shirt, her hair pulled back. "This shit makes you humble," she told us at the time. Indeed!

(Top pic by FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit; bottom pic by Getty Images)

FriendFeed was, at one point, the darling of Silicon Valley; when one well-known blogger and database engineer left Yahoo last year, he publicly declared he'd rather work at FriendFeed than at Twitter. And no wonder: FriendFeed let Valley A-listers trade a wide array personal trivia from multiple services faster and faster, sating a deep hunger for narcissistic minutiae.

But if the rapid growth of Twitter over the past year has proven anything, it's that people outside of Silicon Valley are happy to source their trivia from a single, simple service, rather than from an aggregator like FriendFeed. Which is why we said more than a year ago that the latter's features were destined, one way or another, to be absorbed into Facebook.

Having invented GMail and Google AdSense, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Bucheit (pictured) will no doubt see his reputation burnished by successfully selling off his latest initiative; AllThingsD quotes a venture capitalist estimate of $50 million in cash and stock. But selling now highlights the limits of even that considerable accomplishment.

(Pic: Thomas Hawk)

Scoble — chubby, bespectacled, and awkward, the unlikeliest of all video personalities — main job for the magazine was to produce a seemingly infinite series of video profiles of startups. Scoble's unwatchable videos mostly consisted of him lapping up tech blather from CEOs of doomed startup ventures about how they would be reinventing some paradigm or another. But as bad as they were, he fell from old-media grace for two main reasons.

First, he picked the wrong backers. The Fast Company Web guy who hired him, Ed Sussman, was loathed by his counterparts at the print magazine and got fired last year. And the videos were sponsored by Seagate, the hard-drive maker. After the company fired CEO Bill Watkins, with whom Scoble had a mutual lovefest, it was only a matter of time before the gravy train ended.

Second, there was Scoble's dangerous overuse of the Web startups he covered. FriendFeed and Twitter provided a steady IV drip of attention, so vital for soothing the damaged ego of a geek who never got over his awkward youth. But Scoble's paid work suffered while he volunteered to provide obsessive entertainment for his fellow Internet addicts.

He and Fast Company are saving face by continuing his column (heavily rewritten or wholly composed, no doubt, by an editor there). And he is, naturally, promising that he's meeting with a lot of companies to plan some exciting new startup. This is what one says in Silicon Valley when one is facing unemployment — the equivalent of talking up one's burgeoning freelance career in New York, or waxing enthusiastic about a script in Hollywood.

What really happened here: Scoble got invited by the pretty girl to the old-media prom. And he just got dumped. How will his ego ever recover?

Followcost, a website which quantifies just how annoying a particular Twitter user is, has adopted the "milliscoble" as a metric. One-thousandth of Scoble's average daily output on the 140-character-update service equals one milliscoble. By his own standard, Scoble has been falling behind; in the past 100 days, he's been running 32 percent below the 1,000-milliscoble mark. If it falls to zero, will he suddenly be three times as productive in real life? Nah. It will just mean he's shifted his timewasting entirely to FriendFeed.

Aaron Brazell
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Alex Albrecht
Alex Williams
Allen Stern
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Woody Pewitt
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zefrank
Zoli Erdos
~C4Chaos

(Photo by Brian Solis)

The play on "whassup" seems almost too obvious to mention — but keeping users ultracurrent on their friends' doing is very much the intention. SUP will let sites like FriendFeed pick up news quicker, avoiding the risk that you might be even 30 minutes out of date on swift-moving trends like which avatar style people are using on Twitter. Faster! Faster! Faster!

Sitting through the Search SIG panel last night I kept worrying the speakers were going to pants Wikia Search’s Jeremie Miller Nick Sullivan. Such a delicate little man, yet so much holier than thou. At one point Jason Calacanis said outright that Wikia Search would fail and that it's goal was simply to make Jimmy Wales rich. I think I actually heard Jeremie's Nick's heart break in response.

The problem with Jeremie Miller Nick Sullivan (and by association Wikia Search) is that he believes by using open source he can do no evil. He was adamant that since Google makes decisions about what you see in your search results the world needs an open source search site. For freedom! But even Wikia Search has to create a system to rank results. There are many that bemoan the politics of the Wikipedia system, so why should Wiki Search be any better?

Jeremie would like you to think that Wiki Search is a tool created by the common man, but even he knows the truth. He let slip that 99.5% of his users never add any content to the site. I'm not sure how one could call a site built by the top 1/2 of 1% of all users 'open'. I think even the Bush tax cuts were more inclusive than that.

I was hoping to report on some wild accusation made by Jason Calacanis, but he turned out to be the most level-headed one on the panel. Even FriendFeed's cofounder and CEO Bret Taylor admitted to his site's deficiencies. But I will take the smarmy look of Jeremie Miller with me to the grave. Although if Jason has it right, at least I won't have to look at his site for much longer.

Update: Nick Sullivan writes to point out that he was the lamb despatched to the slaughter, filling in for Wikia's Jeremie Miller. Sullivan disputes his delicacy — after all, he did gamely step in front of the Calacanis bus.

According to new stats from Hitwise, Plurk, the least cool microblogging startup around, might have the last laugh. Its Web traffic far exceeds FriendFeed's and Pownce's. And yet Twitter, while growing very fast, itself isn't very large. Its imitators are all so small, really, as to barely deserve mention, let alone magazine covers. Microblogging isn't just about very short updates. It's about very small businesses. If I wrote about them in line with their actual worth, this post would have been far shorter than 140 characters.

It's not that amazing. As CenterNetwork's Allen Stern first pointed out, each time a new user signs up for FriendFeed, the site suggests the new user becomes friends with "Popular FriendFeeders." On the list: Bret Taylor, Fred Wilson, Scott Beale, Michael Arrington, Loic Le Meur, Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and Leo Laporte — despite, as Stern notes, the fact that many of these "popular" users don't actually use FriendFeed very often. Why? We haven't asked anybody at FriendFeed because the answer is obvious: So that the whole bunch of easily ego-fluffed blog blowhards will blog about how amazing FriendFeed is, without bothering to figure out why, exactly, it seems to be growing so much faster for them than everybody else.