<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, john mccrea]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, john mccrea]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/johnmccrea http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/johnmccrea <![CDATA[Facebooker Dave Morin turns 28, but fails to destroy Internet]]> When I got an unauthorized invite, via a tipster, to Dave Morin's birthday party Tuesday night, I knew I had to crash — if only to find out what he and his friends were thinking. Morin, you see, is a Facebook employee and a prime instigator of Camp Cyprus, the gang of Internet instigators whose shockingly fun video scandalized a shaken Silicon Valley. What's with these Web kids? First they go to Cyprus and destroy the entire economy by filming themselves cavorting at a rich friend's dad's vacation house on the Mediterranean. The horror! But then, what's worse, they return to the United States, unashamed, and continue spending money and enjoying themselves! All this economic activity cannot end well!

Can you imagine, kids in their twenties having a good time? This must end! Didn't they get Sequoia's memo? Morin, Facebook's official speaker-to-geeks, turned 28 and rented a downtown art gallery Tuesday night to celebrate. After I tracked down Morin, I gave him a salami I'd picked up at VC firm Alsop Louie's party earlier that night. (It was a heartfelt regifting.) Besides Morin, I identified several other members of Camp Cyprus:

  • Brittany Bohnet, Morin's steady Googler girlfriend and the other half of the Internet's cutest couple
  • "Professor" Meagan Marks, known on Valleywag for her ancient-history stint as a recruiter (she's now working as a program manager)
  • Joe Green, famous for his Causes application, infamous for his squarecut swim trunks
  • Jessica Bigarel, a graphic designer at Apple
  • Scott Marlette, the coder behind Facebook Photos

With Morin, that's almost a third of Camp Cyprus. (Sadly, Wall Street Journal Jessica Vascellaro wasn't there.) You'd think they'd be enough to bring down the Internet, but no.

I caught a brief glimpse of soon-to-depart Facebook founder Dustin Moskovitz, but didn't get to say hello — he left early, which just confirms his reputation as being not much of a party animal.

Things got a tad more surreal when MC Hammer showed up. When I left the party, the former rap star was chatting up angel investor Ron Conway, who has, yes, invested in the Hammer's inevitable startup.

Digg's Matt Van Horn plots with Keith Rabois, Slide's evil-genius mastermind.

Ron Conway invests in a glass of wine.

Working for Comcast sounds pretty good to Plaxo's Joseph Smarr and John McCrea right now.

Really. MC Hammer was there. At Dave Morin's birthday party.

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<![CDATA[Supernova conference interrupted by burger disaster]]> Catering to the whims of the Web 2.0 crowd is tricky — but it usually doesn't bring in firetrucks. The Supernova conference, which wraps up tomorrow, served freshly made sliders, White Castle-style, at a party this evening. The fumes from this fare were enough to alarm San Francisco's fire department, which sent up a ladder crew to investigate. Photos from an eyewitness, after the jump:


The offending burgers.


Plaxo's Joseph Smarr and John McCrea deem the sliders Comcastic.


Here come the firetrucks!


Ladder at the ready!


Firemen converge on the culinary disaster.

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<![CDATA[Comcast acquires Plaxo, after unbearably long courtship]]> Months after rumors of its interest first surfaced, Comcast has officially bought Plaxo. Terms weren't disclosed, but we last heard that the price was rumored to be around $175 million. For now, Comcast is keeping Plaxo and its engineering team in place in Mountain View, giving the cable company a toehold in Silicon Valley. I briefly spoke to Plaxo marketing dude John McCrea, who outlined some possibilities for how Plaxo could apply social networking to Comcast's Web properties. John, sounds great, but I'd be happy if your engineers could just figure out how to connect my Comcast.net Internet ID with my Comcast.com billing account.

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<![CDATA[How Plaxo took advantage of Scoble]]> Did Plaxo exploit blogger Robert Scoble by cajoling him into breaking Facebook's terms of service to test a new feature, temporarily getting his account suspended? Plaxo executive John McCrea would prefer you didn't think so. "Biggest regret? A lot of folks saying/thinking we took advantage of you. Bummer," McCrea Twittered. Note that McCrea didn't say he regretted actually taking advantage of Scoble.

That's because as Plaxo's vice president of marketing, McCrea was surely aware that his company's PR agency was actively pitching reporters on the Facebook beat to cover the story. If that's not taking advantage of Scoble, I don't know what is — and if McCrea weren't taking advantage of Scoble in just this way, he wouldn't be doing his job. Here's the pitch Plaxo's agency sent.

"Alicia Mickelsen" 01/03/2008 02:10 PM
Subject: NEWS: Plaxo Pulse's upcoming feature breaks down the walls of Facebook - causes controversy

Hi REDACTED,

Facebook has one of the few walled gardens left in the ever-growing Open Social Web. And just today the evidence of this walled garden became apparent when a user tried to take their friend's public contact information and take it with them into another service.

Plaxo has been working on a new feature, a Facebook Import that gets the contact information of your Facebook friends - names, emails and birthdays - and pulls them into your Plaxo Pulse account. In very early stages, this feature caused famed blogger Robert Scoble to lose his Facebook account. However, the Facebook Importer behaves quite similar to other address book import that Plaxo already uses including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

This is an interesting time for the walled vs open debate and Plaxo has been leading the way since the beginning with their support for open standards and OpenSocial, and this step is an interesting move for the future. If you would like to learn about how the Facebook Importer works, how it's truly unique and new, and what Facebook's reaction to this first user means for future.

Let me know when you are available today, and I would be happy to put you in touch with Plaxo executives, including the lead engineer of the Facebook Import.

Thanks,
Alicia

Alicia Mickelsen
Breakaway Communications for Plaxo
156 Fifth Avenue, Suite 410, New York, NY 10010

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<![CDATA[OpenSocial turns Plaxo growth chart into a hockey stick]]> http://valleywag.com/assets/resources/2007/11/plaxo_540x417-thumb.jpgCall Google's OpenSocial intiative a PR scam if you want. Executives from social network Plaxo don't care — because for them, it was a successful PR scam. Take a look at the chart they provided CNET. Since Google announced its "open" alternative to Facebook's developer platform and included Plaxo as a launch partner, growth at Pulse, Plaxo's social network/address book hybrid, took on hockey-stick dimensions.

"I've never seen a growth chart with such a sharply pronounced inflection point," Plaxo marketing executive John McCrea told CNET. "Within hours of the Google OpenSocial social network service unfolding, it was surge conditions here. Our service almost buckled."

Of course, OpenSocial is thoroughly half-baked. The fact that you'll soon be able to throw virtual sheep at fellow Plaxo users should not have, by itself, driven usage up. What that tells me is that McCrea hasn't been doing his job. If some wonky API announcement mentioning Plaxo was enought to bring users of Plaxo's Pulse to 1 million, imagine what would happen if McCrea actually started marketing this thing.

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