OutCast PR held an AfterHours party at Frisson, the restaurant co-owned by Facebook board member Peter Thiel. So cozy, since Facebook is OutCast’s biggest new client! The place was overrun with hacks and flacks. No surprise, since OutCast wants to show off its chummy press relationships, and other flacks are drawn to journalists like moths to flames. And, of course, OutCast wanted to keep things well-staffed to watch over reporters chatting up executives from Facebook and Yahoo, another big OutCast client. No need, it turned out.

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Why was the event heavy on the storytellers and light on subjects? “All these fucking PR people!” one friend. “It’s like walking through a pig trough.”

The biggest Yahoo personality was “peanut butter manifesto” author Brad Garlinghouse, who was spotted deep in a long conversation with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher in a corner by the bar. The biggest name on the Facebook side? Spokeswoman Brandee Barker, who was quite a fan of the photo booth (and, apparently, Swisher, whom she pried away from Garlinghouse for some close contact).

No surprise, really. Yahoo and Facebook executives were likely distracted by negotiations over taking a stake in Facebook. And really, OutCast couldn’t have planned it better: The Valley’s press corps was drinking and eating instead of staking out restaurants and hotels in Palo Alto. Brilliant!

Indeed, the number and cailber of the journalists who appeared says something about the spell they’ve cast over the tech media. Spotted in the crowd: author and BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy, GigaOm’s Om Malik, USA Today’s Janet Kornbluth, Michael Bazeley of the San Jose Mercury News, Jessica Guynn of the LA Times, Bloomberg’s Ed Robinson and Wall Street Journal reporters Vauhini Vara and Don Clark. On the less-prestigious side, Red Herring editor Joel Dreyfuss was there, and upon meeting me, instantly began harangued me for our coverage of his publication’s death spiral. “Why didn’t you cover Business 2.0?” he asked, alluding to that magazine’s recent disintegration. Um, I thought we had?

Ubiquitous videoblogger Robert Scoble showed up. I asked after his newborn son and inquired about how online-video startup PodTech, his ostensible employer, was faring. “Much better than last month,” he replied. “Wait, what happened last month?” I asked. “John got fired!” he shot back, shocked that I had forgotten such a momentous occasion. Wait, fired? Didn’t John Furrier, PodTech’s founder and former CEO, “step down”? You learn something new at these parties every day.

Internet users are up in arms on Digg over a months-old report, mistakenly rehashed as news by Gizmodo, that Google’s YouTube site was considering adding 30-second ads to run at the beginning of its online videos. The problem? The report, from April, has been overtaken by events. YouTube’s current plans, unveiled last month, are to add “overlay” ads, like the teasers you see on TV for upcoming programming, to the bottom of some videos. In a statement, YouTube group product manager Shashi Seth says that testing found that users didn’t like the ads. Consider the outrage, however mistakenly founded, as further confirmation of Google’s testing.

Source:Valleywag

Investors in Parakey, a hot startup founded by Firefox creators Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, were paid in cash, not shares, when Facebook bought the company. While they doubled their money in the $4 million sale, the cash payout means they were shut out of Facebook’s future growth, which has left some of them quietly grumbling. [TechCrunch]

Source:Valleywag

“lame you took my song dedication off ;” — the urgent message Facebook spokesprofile Brandee Barker left for CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook profile, at 1:16 in the morning Monday, shortly before kicking off a week filled with Facebook news and rumors. [Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile]

“Second Life is like a giant porno. All people do there is have sex.” — Baris Karadogan, a partner at VC firm ComVentures, speaking after a panel on digital goods. What, pray tell, are visitors to the ComVentures-backed, nightclub-themed vSideworld going to be doing? [Orrick}

Source:Valleywag
Owner of Russian music pirating site allofmp3.com acquitted of copyright violations in Russian court. [Reuters]

Source:Valleywag

Long-suffering Facebook spokesprofile Brandee Barker, besieged by a string of PR disasters, has hired some much-needed professional help. Personnel from OutCast Communications, the PR firm that helped launch Salesforce.com, are now listed as “officers” of Facebook’s official group for journalists. [Facebook]

With Facebook friends like these, who needs enemies? Noah Kagan, who left his job at the social network abruptly in mid-2006, now has a Facebook group in his honor: “Boycott Facebook until Noah Kagan is re-hired!” Valley prankster and Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams created the group. We pinged Kagan, who’s now working happily at online personal-finance startup Mint.com and blogging at Okdork.com. Kagan, when pinged on IM, was as bemused as we were to hear about the group, but had no idea why Abrams was starting it a year after his departure. The Facebook group, however, might not be telling the whole story about the Facebooker’s departure: A well-placed tipster says Kagan was fired for leaking company secrets to TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington.

Source:Valleywag

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What is it about the women Facebook hires? I’m sure they’re all brilliant, but it needs to be said: The hot social network has equally hot personnel. Randi Jayne, sister of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, finally outs herself on video as a Facebook employee in this clip. But the video doesn’t do her justice — as you might have noticed in her “Dontcha” iPhone video, she’s distressingly cute. Her colleague, Meagan Marks, gives a sales pitch for working at Facebook that’s best appreciated with the mute button on. And spokesperson Brandee Barker? Alas, she’s not captured in this video, but you can check her out in this AllThingsD.com video. Or just take our word for it: Total babe.

If you’re young, straight, male, and in need of a reason other than pre-IPO shares to work at Facebook, consider checking out its fine, fine collection of genuine Valley foxes. And whoever’s in charge of recruiting at Facebook? I want to meet you. You fascinate me.

(VIdeo by Sarah Meyers and Enric for Valleywag)

Forget Facebook fatigue: The new symptom sweeping the Valley is Facebook addiction. A brief outage this morning made most Valley workers more productive — but left some, like strung-out addicts, completely unable to function. One particularly sad case expressed his relief that Facebook was back up. “I’ve already forgotten the cold panic, the unbearable neediness,” he wrote. Also left unable to function: Facebook’s PR apparatus, which promised a statement about the outage that has yet to materialize. Perhaps spokeswoman Brandee Barker was hoping to send it out through the Facebook group she normally favors, instead of boring old email, for press releases?