According to this San Jose Mercury News article, Friendster spurns Google, Friendster rejected a $30 million offer to be acquired by Google. Why? Because Benchmark and Kleiner (two big-wig venture capital firms in Silicon Valley) were willing to give them a $53 million valuation during their most recent investment round. The article also points out that, "Just two months ago, Friendster was valued at $12.5 million."

Hello? Did we totally forget what happened just two or three years ago?! Sure, Friendster is cool, but eyeballs and traffic do not a (huge) business model make. Remember? We already learned this! Obviously this is another deal with a valuation based on potential and not actual revenue (or did Friendster's revenue increase from ~$4 million to ~$17 million in the past two months?), and sure, there is potential there. But I hardly think there's $53 million worth. Earth to VCs: cut it out, before you force another crop of companies to grow too big, too fast, all to recoup an investment you shouldn't have done in the first place. [via Cameron]

Related: BusinessWeek opines with A Dud in Cupid's Online Quiver?

And also: Sippey does some math on the whole thing.

I'm not sure why this finally occurred to me, but it did. If only I'd been born two years earlier, I'd have been born on the Unix epoch! And then I'd always know my age, give or take a few hours, in milliseconds. So handy! It's almost enough to make me wish I were two years older. Almost. Being a bit weird, I'm now thinking about the people who were born on the epoch, and wondering how many will die on January 19, 2038 (the end of the 32-bit epoch). Because that would be the ultimate in nerdy, and also sad since you'd only live to be 68 and that's not very long.

Friday evening: I get home from work and I open my trusty iBook. I'm happily doing my computing when the screen goes all Matrix wacko: strange lines start streaming down it, then things get all blocky and pixely, then it freezes. Several reboots later, and it's still happening. iBook is unusable. Panicked and sad, I power it off and go to sleep.

Saturday: I go upstate to see the leaves, and spend the day in denial.

Saturday night: more rebooting confirms the terrible state of affairs: iBook is seriously messed up. 🙁

Sunday AM: in the worst throes of my cold, I trudge to the Apple Store in Soho. I'm there ten minutes before it opens so I can be first to the Genius Bar. After five minutes of fiddling, Christopher confirms my deepest fears, "Something is seriously messed up with your iBook. It needs to go in for repairs. It's probably a hardware problem related to the video. It'll take 7 to 10 days." I trudge home, sleep all afternoon, and spend the evening backing up everything onto another computer.

Monday 11 AM: I drop off the iBook at the Apple Store. "Godspeed little doodle," I say as it disappears into the back. I've never had a hardware problem. Why now? Why me? "Godspeed," I whisper as I exit the store.

Tuesday: I miss my iBook.

Wednesday 10:40 AM: a package arrives at work. It's the iBook, and it's come all the way from Tennessee! It's back! It's back! In less than 48 hours, it's back and it's fixed! Godspeed? More like Super-duper-Allmighty-God-Light-Speed! I am amazed. And relieved. And happy.

The Lafayette Project, having for six months been established on Franklin Street, now has a name: Kinja. Work continues apace, more or less. The FAQ from February still applies, more or less. The logo was created by the lovely and talented Leslie Harpold. If you need great work done with quick turnaround and no fancy-pants designer attitude, Leslie is your woman.

A new site that I'm contributing to called Misbehaving.net has launched today. It's a group blog with lots of smart techy women participating to discuss women's contributions to computing, and also to highlight opportunities and challenges within the field. Though women are making posts, the discussion is open to everyone, and I hope that people who are interested in the topic will join in.

I'm looking for some great example sites of teenage girl bloggers for an article I'm writing. I'd like to highlight a mix of styles and topics, both diary-like sites and linky sites. Know of any? Please add suggestions to the comments. And feel free to mention your own, but only if you happen to be a teenage girl blogger. Thanks for you help.

I'm at MIT today for the Emerging Technologies Conference and a reception for the TR100 award. Afternoon panels are kicking off, I skipped the morning to enjoy breakfast and coffee with my mom. Audience is 85% male, if not more. This panel is on wireless technology, and is all male, but I'm not surprised. Hopefully it will be interesting. Also, it's FREEZING in this auditorium. Why oh why do HVAC systems get set at 60? My nails are turning blue!

There's a great (and by great I mean "made me laugh a lot while I was waiting for something to compile") Slashdot discussion of a Phillip Greenspun article comparing Java to SUVs. Two excellent insights from /. posters. First a funny one:

Java's not an SUV: SUV's start up instantly! Hahahaha!

And then a very sensible one that no one ever seems to consider when they throw themselves into these irrational fervid discussions of programming languages:

Bad programmers write bad programs regardless of the language.

Today, MIT's Technology Review magazine announced the TR100/2003, their, "third class of 100 innovators 35 or younger whose technologies are poised to make a dramatic impact on our world," and I'm honored to be included in the list for my work with Blogger and weblogs. Here's my profile and here's a list of all winners. An account is required to see the pages (lamely) so use the one I set up, username: meg@megnut.com, password: tr100.

Holy cow! Back in August 2000, I linked to three videos that a nice guy named Beto made when he came to visit us at Pyra HQ in San Francisco (in March 2000). Sadly, the links stopped working after some time, the site was gone, and Beto seemed to have disappeared from the web. I kicked myself for not having saved copies of the videos.

But all is not lost, because Beto converted his old analog tape to DV and used iMovie3 to create In the Beginning: A Video on Weblogs History! It's a little hard to hear what we're saying, and we're not really saying anything worth hearing anyway (I sound like an idiot. Is that really my voice? Oh my God, I'm never speaking again! Also, this is when I had blonde hair.) Ego aside, it was magical to watch this and brought back a flood of memories, especially the walk down to our basement offices and the arrival of our first real, rack-mount server.

Watch the video [14 MB, Quicktime 6] and travel back to a time when Blogger had ~50,000 registered users, when the whole application ran on a Dell desktop machine beneath Ev's desk, before Blog*Spot existed, before warblogs, or celebrity bloggers, or MovableType. Travel back to a time when Ev, pb and I dreamt of changing the world with a little app called Blogger.