Dickerson, his successor, was a solid if stolid executive best known for greasing the sticky wheels of Yahoo's bureaucracy. He has been replaced by someone even more unremarkable. Brickhouse was Yahoo's corporate version of an attention whore, an object we pay attention to because it demands we pay attention to it. I wouldn't be surprised if it's shuttered soon. If it is, will we even notice? (Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

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.

Valleywag hears that for this and other projects, engineers have been flown in from around the world to finish the project; people on the verge of walking out have been cajoled to stay; and people who have already quit have been asked to come back as contractors. Which would seem to go against the goal of controlling headcount, trimming costs, and focusing on core projects. But expecting Yahoo to stick to a strategy seems a bit much.

Next time, throw paper. According to the World RPS society, it's got a 3.73 percent advantage over rock or scissors.

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)

Ismail told BusinessWeek that Fire Eagle took three months to develop, "65 percent" faster than similar Yahoo projects. Sweet if it were true. A prototype version of Fire Eagle was already out in June. Which means that if the Fire Eagle team actually meets Ismail's made-up release deadline for the end of November, he'll only have have mislead the magazine by half. In other words, Fire Eagle's engineers won't have to miss that deadline to make a liar out of Ismail. He's already saved them the trouble.

(Photo by Timothy Archibald/BusinessWeek)

"If you write something positive, we'll do you later," said Ismail — the implication being that he'd feed Valleywag scoops on Yahoo Brickhouse projects. "If you write something negative, well ..." He trailed off and his hand gestures suggested that we'd be left in the cold, or worse. Next thing I know, the dude is backing my boss into a flat-screen TV. So I guess he meant it. Not that I think we're going to miss anything. The chance of Ismail telling us something about an upcoming Brickhouse product release is about as likely as ... an upcoming Brickhouse product release.

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.