We have to wonder, how can Mahalo boy wonder Jason Calacanis ever be grumpy about anything, anything? Carlson, call him again to find out!

Source:Valleywag

A anonymous tipster tells us Palm will lay off 250 employees, confirming our previous report. “The biggest cuts are from OS development,” our source says. “[SVP Mark] Bercow wants the OS sold by April or worst case scenario — abandoned.” Which seems strange, considering Palm went through some gymnastics just to get is old operating system back from the Japanese company, Access, which had bought it. The rumor, however, jibes with the Wall Street Journal’s report last week on former Apple exec and current Palm executive chairman Jon Rubinstein’s plans for the company.

Sources told the Journal Rubinstein plans to develop a new Linux-based software platform to run apps on all of Palm’s devices before the end of next year. And Rubinstein seems comfortable with addition by subtraction. The Journal says he “cleaned house” within a month of his arrival last summer. Still, the timing is tough for Palm engineers. “What a holiday gift,” our source writes. “We’re supposed to be told about severance tomorrow.”

Here are the dangers of imitation: Google has rolled out a new search results page. When I search for vitamin water, I get video and products results in the right-hand sidebar. This is a variation on AOL’s old FullView search results — a design AOL labored over and then discarded in favor of blindly copying Google. The design is moderately helpful for me, as I was trying to find a online distributor for Vitaminwater. Not all of my colleagues see the new results, so Google may be slowly rolling this out from datacenter to datacenter. As for AOL? Having abandoned the idea of innovation in search, it now finds itself needing to copy Google just to get back to where it started. Full screenshot is below the jump.

Yesterday was a beautiful day in the British Virgin Islands, as you can see from this sunset snap submitted to us. And strangely quiet. That’s because, we hear from a source working the festivities, Larry Page and Lucy Southworth didn’t get married.

Before you panic, know that there were no cold-footed billionaires, no runaway brides. It’s just that the celebrity wedding, widely believed to have taken place yesterday, is actually taking place this afternoon. Hope that tent is solid, as the weather forecast calls for thunderstorms. More as we hear it.

Venture capital’s ancien régime has been overturned. We hear Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, has cashed out — before an IPO, before a sale, and before his investors. In the company’s recent financing round, insiders believe, he sold about $40 million worth of stock. A tiny portion of his $5 billion stake, but in cash rather than on paper, and “enough that he never has to think about money for the rest of his life,” says a person made privy to details of the sale. On the Sand Hill Road of old, this is simply not how things are done.

But Zuckerberg’s most important backer, Peter Thiel, does not work on Sand Hill Road. From his offices in San Francisco’s Presidio, he’s set about changing the rules of how startups get funding and how founders make their fortunes. Through his Founders Fund, he has begun issuing “Series FF” shares to the entrepreneurs he backs, giving them the right to sell shares alongside their companies to new investors. Thiel, who felt unjustly treated as the cofounder of PayPal, wants to let his protégés build companies without worrying about how to make rent.

Old lions like angel investor Ron Conway will probably view this development with outrage. They feel entrepreneurs, with no capital at risk, should not become rich until well after their already wealthy backers get paid, Today’s startup generation begs to differ. The IPO market is still a shadow of its former self, and sales to large companies are an unreliable route to wealth — and a sure way to lose control of one’s company. Meanwhile, vast pools of private money are waiting to be tapped.

Zuckerberg still owns nearly a third of Facebook — and even if Facebook flops, the 23 year old is set for life.

So what do these Facebook ads which have MoveOn.org in an uproar actually look like? The ads, despite all the fuss, are cussedly hard to find. Mark Zuckerberg’s hundred-year media revolution seems to be taking about that long to get underway. But Facebook fanboy Dave McClure has found an example in the wild. By buying a T-shirt on Busted Tees, he was able to capture screenshots of the ads MoveOn claims violate Facebook users’ privacy. What do you think?

Source:Valleywag

Yahoo has launched, in an invitation-only trial, MyM, a “social messaging” service. How many social networks does one company need? Nowhere are Yahoo’s scattershot efforts more evident than in this field. On top of Yahoo Mash, Yahoo 360, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and — if you believe Yahoo president Sue Decker — Yahoo Mail, you can now add MyM to the list.

From what we’ve heard, MyM sounds a lot like Meebo, the website which allows users to access multiple instant-messaging clients at once. MyM will actually hook into Meebo, as well as Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal, AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo’s own IM software. Internally at Yahoo, MyM’s already been dubbed “awkward,” and some are worried that competitors will block it.

I’d say those concerns are typical of Yahoo these days — suggest something new, and people come up with reasons why you can’t do it, rather than fixes for those problems. Awkward or not, it’s to these Yahoos’ credit that they actually managed to launch something against internal opposition. We’re still skeptical that Yahoo needs yet another social service, but we’re intrigued all the same. Anyone got an invite? Send it in.

“My friend got a call from her friend at Facebook, asking why she kept looking at his profile,” says a privacy-conscious source at a major tech company. Turns out Facebook employees can (and do) check out anyone’s profile. Not only that, but they also see which profiles a user has viewed — a major privacy violation. If you’ve been obsessed with a workmate or classmate, Facebook employees know. If Barack Obama’s intern has been using the campaign account to troll for hotties, Facebook employees know. Within the company, it’s considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun.

Facebook has a history of protecting profiles from outsiders. The site once sent cease-and-desist letters to two of Valleywag’s sister blogs for publishing certain student profiles.

The site does not allow regular users to see which profiles other users have seen. While one third-party application lets users voluntarily make their profile-visiting known, no application allows one to “spy” on the activity of an unknowing user.

Checking who’s viewed a profile may be how Facebook found the tipster who violated their terms of service by sending Valleywag Steve Ballmer’s profile. But were they violating their own terms?

Well, Facebook’s privacy policy doesn’t explicitly reserve or waive employees’ right to check out your profile for any reason. Of course, the practice still reeks of skunkery — it’s one thing to check profiles in the course of business, but these people are looking up records for kicks. This is a company with $150 million in projected revenues this year and a gigantic ad deal with Microsoft, not a corner video store. The privacy of millions is at stake. Google clearly promises not to crawl through mail or search records with anything but a computer program, and even AOL apologized for releasing semi-anonymous search data and violating its privacy policy.

We have no idea what else employees can see. Do they look at your messages? Your private gifts? Who knows? (Really, who knows? Email me or the tipline. Unlike some, we’ll protect your identity.)