One of those is Cal Henderson, Flickr's longtime director of engineering (left). AllThingsD's Kara Swisher reports that he's left Flickr and is working on a startup with Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield, who quit Yahoo with a bizarre resignation letter last year.

That's not all he's up to: We hear he spoke at some length with a Google recruiter at a party Saturday night. In an IM conversation, Henderson admitted he went to a party "with some folks from Six Apart [the blog-software company] and Flickr," but denied he'd spoken to anyone from Google.

Google's interest in Flickr's people is of long standing. Before Yahoo bought Flickr in 2005, Butterfield and his cofounder, then-wife Caterina Fake, flirted seriously with selling to Google. (In the small-world department: Megan Smith, the Google executive who championed a purchase of Flickr, is married to Swisher, the blogger who broke the news of Henderson and Butterfield's new startup.)

So if Google can't have Flickr, why not have its best people? No surprise that they're talking — and no surprise that Henderson's playing hard to get.

To this day, every history of Flickr has an obligatory mention of the "husband-and-wife team" who started the photo site. Indeed, their relationship was a key part of the winsome story that made Flickr so appealing to reporters and consumers. But we've been hearing for some time that Butterfield and Fake are no longer husband and wife.

They have not worked together in years. After they sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005 for a reported $35 million, Fake almost immediately took an executive role developing new products, while Butterfield stayed at Flickr as the site's often-diffident manager. They did manage one joint launch: the birth of their daughter Sonnet in 2007. Both left Yahoo last year.

Hunch, which we're told is going to be some sort of question-and-answer search engine, could be launching any day. Fake seems to have thrown herself into working at the New York-based as a chief product officer, a demanding job with a bicoastal commute. One of Fake's cofounders recently told an investor not to be concerned with Fake's availability to work, saying she was divorced. If they are, it's not clear if the couple has actually completed the process; a search of public records did not show a divorce agreement, and Fake and Butterfield did not respond to email inquiries. But their friends agree they are no longer together.

Last July, when she announced on her blog that she'd be joining the startup, she noted:

Will you be working with Stewart? No, he's currently weighing various metallurgical opportunities.

And there is this: Fake has posted only one photo to Flickr since last July: a screenshot of the original Flickr homepage. A wave of nostalgia, as she moves on to the new? Butterfield, meanwhile, seems to have no trouble making friends.

(Photo via caterina)

The sacking of designer George Oates and two of her colleagues might seem too minor to note in a week where 1,500 of their colleagues also got pink-slipped. But Flickr has been spared in past rounds of layoffs. And the seemingly political dismissal of Oates, a well-regarded designer and popular figure in the office, has created a stir of more consequence.

Flickr had become the last great hope of Yahoo, the place where talents frustrated with the Web giant's bureaucracy fled. But it was never meant to be a redoubt of cool — rather, it was meant to be the home base of a conquering army which would transform all of Yahoo, infusing its websites with the buzz of user participation.

Didn't happen. For a while, Flickr rode high; last year, Yahoo shut down its bigger Yahoo Photos site in Flickr's favor. But then Flickr founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield left. They put Flickr in the hands of a Yahoo executive, Kakul Srivastava, who made the decision to lay off Oates, I'm told.

I haven't uncovered the specific reason Srivastava and Oates had a tiff, but it seems impossible to argue that the firing had anything to do with performance. Oates had championed a project to post photos from the Library of Congress's collections; Library officials just yesterday declared it a resounding success.

This is how a team falls apart: Remove a key player, and the social bonds that keep their friends on the job weaken. Before you know it, you've got a group of employees collecting paychecks, not a team working for a goal. Bugs go unfixed; servers crash; the design becomes ugly; and users flee. This could well happen to Flickr. Back up your photos now!

If that happens, what it tells us is that the culture of Flickr was always illusory — one built on personal ties rather than more lasting devotion to a cause. If so, the notion of exporting it to Yahoo was a delusion. That's the problem with turning a community into a commodity: Take away the people, and you have nothing left.

(Photo by martinalvarez)

(Photos by Stewart Butterfield, maguisso, doctorow, oreilly, dsifry, heather)

A lot of people buy photos from Flickr users. But people have to know the person, and send them a Flickr mail and they have to negotiate a price. It's a very high-friction process. Taking the friction out of that would be one of things Flickr could do to monetize.

Two years later, the tinnovative Butterfield and his cofounder and wife, Caterina Fake, are out of the company. Maybe now Butterfield's bizarre resignation letter makes more sense? (Photo by ericskiff)

She was recently spotted in New York's startup-laden Flatiron and Chelsea neighborhoods, making the rounds. New York VC Fred Wilsion is an unabashed fan, and the two have already invested alongside his Union Square Ventures in Etsy. Might the pair break hearts in both San Francisco and Vancouver by moving to Manhattan instead? As for New York, all I can say is been there, done that. Head back to Canada for Sonnet's sake, guys. American citizenship ain't what it used to be.

(Photo of Butterfield by heather)

We hear the difference between the two sites is that Yahoo Video will host longer, "professional" videos; Flickr will house shorter clips, three minutes or less — and at least at first, only from those who already have Pro accounts. The skilled visual artists who pay to use Flickr should take this as an affront. When it comes to still images, they're good enough to pay to be deemed pros. When they record moving images, they suddenly become amateurs in Yahoo's eyes. Flickr user riot: film at 11.

One could blame this plan on absentee management. After his paternity leave, Butterfield is not returning to a management role at Flickr. His wife and cofounder, Caterina Fake, didn't even attend the Flickr party. Flickr's de facto commander, Kakul Srivastava, came to Flickr from Yahoo after the acquisition. She previously worked on Yahoo's video products. That Flickr took nearly three years after she joined to roll out video doesn't speak well for her stewardship, either.

(Photo by Dan Farber/News.com)

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.

"Yahoo has Flickr's servers on 24-hour watch," says a source familiar with the site's operations. In other words, something going wrong is practically the default state for Flickr, which has grown beyond its technical capabilities. Flickr was down for four hours over the weekend. With founder Stewart Butterfield on paternity leave, and not expected to return to Flickr when his leave ends — word is he might seek another role within Yahoo instead — Flickr's staff strikes some as dispirited. And other Yahoo employees would rather gripe about Flickr than fix its code.

(Screenshot posted, and then retracted, by jeremyjohnstone)

Google's hardly the first to get caught in this contextual snafu. Ask Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield about the time an animal rights activist uploaded photos depicting the cruelity of seal clubbing. Not a good place for fur-coat ads, it turns out.

Paul Levine, the GM of Yahoo Local, the group in which Upcoming found a home, left earlier this year for AdBrite. Cameron Marlow, a much-respected thinker in Yahoo Research, is also leaving, we hear. And Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield, who played a large role in Upcoming's acquisition, is not leaving Yahoo, as we previously reported. Sources familiar with Butterfield's thinking now say he doesn't plan to go back to running Flickr after his current paternity leave, instead finding another role within Yahoo.

(Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

It appears that Flickr's video efforts have been tied up by Yahoo's slow-moving response to Google's popular YouTube video site. At long last, Yahoo's tying together its video properties, and Flickr's part of the grand plan. One hopes it will happen before the Flickr couple's newborn is old enough to drive.

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)

The contestants: Alaina Browne and Anil Dash, Heather Powazek Champ and Derek Powazek, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield

Jennifer Granick and Brad Stone, Maryam and Robert Scoble, and Ben and Mena Trott

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.