Gawker: valleywag, paul buchheit

What You Wear to a $50 Million Deal Closing in Silicon Valley

Ryan Tate — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:44:35 EDT

FriendFeed grew out of Google's casual engineer culture, and the team didn't bother dressing up to sell the social aggregator to Facebook for $50 million, either. This picture does indeed speak volumes.

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 declares instant gratification not fast enough

Owen Thomas — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Faster! In the '90s, people used to reload websites to see if they'd updated. Too slow! Hence the invention of RSS, a protocol for distributing headlines and stories over the Web. Faster! RSS takes too long to update, and requires too much bandwidth to check more frequently. Faster! Visiting multiple social networks takes too long. Paul Buchheit, an ex-Google engineer, cofounded FriendFeed, a site which uses RSS heavily to monitor your friends' activities across multiple websites. Faster! Now Buchheit is working on a replacement for RSS called SUP, or "Simple Update Protocol."

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 SUP will let sites like FriendFeed pick up news quicker, avoiding the risk that you might be even 30 minutes out of date on swift-moving trends like which avatar style people are using on Twitter.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!

Marissa Mayer takes credit for not killing AdSense

Owen Thomas — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:15:45 EDT

Success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan — unless you can somehow spin an adoption tale into the mix. That seems to be what Marissa Mayer is trying to do. In a recent interview, Marissa Mayer tries to take credit for both Google's Gmail email service, as well as AdSense, the immensely profitable system which places Google-sold ads on blogs and other independent websites based on their content. Her claim over AdSense? She didn't kill the product outright, despite her fears that it would be "creepy." But she also reveals that Paul Buchheit, the Googler who burdened the company with "don't be evil" as an unsheddable corporate motto, is the true inventer of a system that matched ads to a Web page's content — whether that content is a blog post, an email message, or anything else.

Mayer's admission also destroys another myth spun by Google PR: That Susan Wojcicki deserves credit for AdSense, the current name for Google's content-matching system. In July, I exposed that as a lie by pointing out that AdSense was a product acquired by Google, not something Wojcicki came up with in a brainstorm. Google ur-spokesman David Krane, at the time, countered that by telling CNBC that Wojcicki "directed and invented" Google's in-house version of AdSense, which launched after the real AdSense but before Google acquired the company that made it.

Now we know the full truth: Paul Buchheit invented what Google now calls AdSense — not Wojcicki, and certainly not Mayer, who can only claim that she didn't try harder to stop it. Of course, it's convenient, politically, for Krane and others to credit Wojcicki. She is, after all, Google cofounder Sergey Brin's sister-in-law.

The man who saddled Google with a saintly motto

Owen Thomas — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 19:23:10 EDT

On Google Blogoscoped, Philipp Lenssen outs former Google developer Paul Buchheit as the man behind Google's "don't be evil" slogan. As Google gets ever larger, ever more complicated, and ever more — oh, let's say it — evil, Buchheit's brainstorm looks ever more unwanted, and ever harder to shed. Which is exactly what Buchheit wanted:

I was sitting there trying to think of something that would be really different and not one of these usual 'strive for excellence' type of statements. I also wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out.

How ironic: Buchheit now says that every action should have an "undo" option. Paul, don't be disingenuous.