The Social

SAN FRANCISCO--John Battelle, CEO of Federated Media, decided to have a little bit of speculative fun onstage Thursday with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit. It's the sort of "speculative fun" that could give tech bloggers a gossip-overload headache for weeks to come: Battelle decided to throw some fuel on the "Facebook might buy Twitter" fire. Which, as far as I can tell, is a relatively new addition to the rumor-roasting pit.

"Is Twitter just a feature of Facebook?" Battelle prodded. Facebook, after all, has its own "status" feature that arguably competes with micro-blogging services like Twitter and FriendFeed.

Zuckerberg answered cryptically. "Oh, that's tough."

Battelle then asked if Facebook's chief financial officer, Gideon Yu (yes, the one who's reportedly hunting for venture capital dollars in Dubai right now, depending on who you ask) has a "build-or-buy spreadsheet" on the wall of his office, jokingly implying that the company could be weighing the option of acquiring Twitter to boost its own "update" service. There wouldn't be a particularly logical way for the two to integrate, but what the heck? It's juicy, unfounded gossip ripe for the mongering! And once these things start, they can get deliciously out of hand.

The young CEO laughed it off, and said he's "really impressed by what they've done" at Twitter, and that it's "a very elegant model." He added that Twitter has signed on to the Facebook Connect data portability initiative.

Zuckerberg himself, unlike contemporaries like Digg's Kevin Rose and WordPress' Matt Mullenweg, does not use Twitter publicly. A handful of blogs have reported that he has a friends-only account with a tightly monitored friends list. But that, like so much else in this industry, appears to still be a rumor.

Yang (left) and Battelle on Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET News)

SAN FRANCISCO--This hasn't been the best year for a lot of people in the tech industry. But nobody can argue that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang hasn't had a particularly rough time.

"Jerry Yang has had a tough nine months," Web 2.0 Summit host John Battelle of Federated Media said as he introduced the CEO for a talk at the conference here on Wednesday, and went on to list some of his company's much-documented woes. Yang, in a blue blazer and white checkered shirt, slouching a bit in his chair, replied, "That's quite an intro."

But it was still an understatement. Yang took the stage at the high-profile industry conference on the same day that Google announced it was walking away from a 10-year search-advertising deal with Yahoo, which would have brought the beleaguered Sunnyvale, Calif.-based dot-com hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, due to antitrust concerns. Battelle said that, due to the situation, before the talk started that he'd gotten calls from multiple reporters wondering if Yang would actually show up.

But he did, and he was defiant. "I don't regret any minute of what happened," Yang said. "Because I've been there the whole time, it's a part of me and some people say that's great and some people say 'well, you're just too close to it.'"

Even though Battelle, moderating the "conversation," brought up just about every ghost from Yahoo's recent past--from the "peanut butter memo" to the Microsoft takeover debacle to corporate raider Carl Icahn's attempt to shake things up--the talk proved less than electrifying. The CEO kept driving home a single point: that Yahoo is a growing company and that he fully expects it to weather the storm regardless of the situation.

"I certainly didn't expect the year to be what it's been, coming into it, but I think that the environment which we are in today is extraordinary," Yang said. "I think what Yahoo's been through in 2008 has been extraordinary."

Video: Jerry Yang at Web 2.0 Summit (courtesy of TechWeb)

The problem with the Microsoft deal, he said, was that it was the wrong deal for the two companies. "To this day, I have to say that the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo. I don't think that is a bad idea at all...at the right price, whatever the price is, we are willing to sell the company," he explained. "We were ready to negotiate, we wanted to negotiate a deal, and we felt that we weren't that far apart. But at the end of the day, they withdrew and they since have been very clear about not wanting to buy the company."

In a joking reference to the fact that Yahoo may not get within striking distance of the share price Microsoft was willing to buy it for any time soon, Battelle exclaimed, "Why didn't you take the $33 a share, Jerry?" Indeed, some pundits think that Microsoft may show a renewed interest now that Yahoo has been (arguably) sufficiently battered to make it bargain-basement cheap. The catalyst, of course, is the disintegration of the Google deal.

"Google clearly decided that they did not want to stay in the deal, and we're disappointed with that," was Yang's take on it.

He encouraged Battelle--and the audience--to focus on the innovation, not the bad press. Namely, he meant the company's restructuring (or "rewiring," as they seem to prefer) into a developer-friendly open platform. When Battelle asked him if Yahoo was just jumping on the "platform" bandwagon kick-started by Facebook a year and a half ago, Yang replied, "It's very different from Facebook because what people go to Facebook for is very different from why they go to Yahoo."

The other light at the end of the tunnel, as detailed by Yang, is APT, the upcoming advertising product that's such a big deal for the company that they enlisted Mad Men star Jon Hamm, who plays a fictional advertising exec on TV, to help them pitch the product.

"I think that advertising is still fairly early in its development on the Internet, and I know it's a $40 billion industry and everyone talks about it as a large mature industry," Yang said. "But our view has been that the real sort of endpoint for advertising, the real vision for advertising is being able to really take advertisers and advertising offers and being able to map them against consumer needs, consumer desires in a way that is seamless, sort of one big marketplace."

Though he remained characteristically quiet and soft-spoken, Yang made it clear that he, along with the rest of Yahoo, wants to be seen as a fighter.

"The Yahoo story that hasn't really been told, and what we've had to execute in order to do it, is we do believe we're innovating, we do believe we're changing, we do believe we're changing the game," Yang said. "My personal belief is if you're not in the game to win, you shouldn't be in the game, and that's the way that I try to encourage the whole company to think about."

A month after announcing his resignation from PC World magazine, tech journalism veteran Harry McCracken has announced a new venture: Technologizer, an online destination for general technology news and analysis.

John Battelle, founder, Federated Media Publishing

(Credit: Courtesy of John Battelle)

The new site will be launched later this summer in conjunction with advertising start-up Federated Media Publishing; founder John Battelle is himself a veteran of the tech press, having co-founded Wired magazine and founded The Industry Standard in the 1990s.

Federated will also work to develop the site, in addition to providing ads, much as it did for Boing Boing Gadgets and Webb Alert. Technologizer will join the company's "Tech Federation" division alongside blog powerhouses such as TechCrunch and GigaOM.

SAN FRANCISCO--"It turns out that the Internet has worked pretty well," industry mainstay Marc Andreessen told an audience at the Web 2.0 Expo here Thursday morning.

Andreessen's keynote interview with Federated Media chief John Battelle was somewhat of a history lesson into the distant past of the Web (you know, 15 years ago) followed by the requisite speculation about an uncertain future.

Marc Andreessen looks back and ahead at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Seth Rosenblatt/CNET Networks)

"It was a very confusing time," Andreessen said of the Net's early days. In the early days of Mosaic, the browser created by Andreessen that eventually evolved into Netscape and then Mozilla and then Firefox, "the conventional wisdom in the business world and in large parts of the press was that interactive television was going to be the future...the Internet, really, at the time, and the Web and Mosaic were really sort of renegade academic research projects."

But Andreessen's current project, Ning, couldn't be less renegade. The slick dot-com, which taps into the social-media craze by letting members build their own social networks without requiring technical expertise, has been fueled not only by Andreessen's Valley cred but also by a sky-high valuation and a recent $60 million funding round that the exec famously said was for an economic "nuclear winter."

"I have no idea what's really going to happen," Andreessen said when Battelle asked him about the "nuclear" comment. "There's this huge irony for our industry...we got blamed for a lot of the last crash. We are the most remote uncorrelated part to this crash that's happening because tech may have lots of issues but we tend to not have a lot of debt and this is all about debt and credit.

Regardless, Andreesen seems to think his own company's well-prepared. He proudly touted some Ning statistics: more than 250,000 individual social networks have been created, 75 percent of which are active. Page views are going up 10 percent week over week; a million new members are joining every month; and 1,500 networks are created every day.

But Ning, like Battelle's Federated Media, could take a big advertising hit in a recession. Once again, Andreessen reminded Battelle and the audience that things tend to be unpredictable. Back in the early days, he said, "everybody told us there was no way to make money on the Internet."

Battelle made sure he touched upon a particularly touchy subject for Andreessen: Microsoft. Gates & Co. famously dealt a fatal blow to Andreessen's Netscape Navigator browser in 1995 when it released Internet Explorer. Anyone hoping for nastiness would've been disappointed, though, as Andreessen's take on Microsoft was quite friendly. "It's hard to even conceive what this industry would be like if Microsoft hadn't standardized the operating system," he said.

"Our view was, we adapt," Andreessen said when asked if he'd freaked out over the debut of Explorer. "The browser turned into Mozilla, which turned into Firefox, which has been a huge success."

Andreessen also addressed Microsoft's ongoing desire to acquire Yahoo. "If the deal goes through I think it will actually be a really good deal. I think they'll get a lot out of it," he said.

But he added that he'd be a bit sad for Yahoo. "It's always a little bit sad, the prospect of an entrepreneurial company, especially one that's had that kind of success over the years, not being independent. But over time these things are part of the natural evolution."

The media business hasn't figured out that direction yet, in his view. "Most of the major media companies are still largely unprepared for the shift, which is ironic considering how long the stuff has been around. If you look at newspapers right now they're just in absolute freefall from a business standpoint."

He kept talking about evolution. But somewhat paradoxically, he repeatedly emphasized that nobody can really tell where it's going. "We're 15 years into it, and yet things are still developing, and a lot of things are still unknown."