Facebook’s 23 year old CTO, Adam D’Angelo, is leaving the company to “take time off” reports Kara Swisher of All Things D. As Mashable points out most of the other top execs at Facebook are of the class of circa-2004 with ex-Googlers Gideon Yo as CFO and Sheryl Sandberg as COO.

The question remains as to whether this strengthens Zuckerberg’s control on the company or weakens it? Currently, Hubdub is forecasting he has a 83% chance of still being CEO of Facebook at the end of this year. That chance dipped at the end of February when rumors emerged of Facebook wanting to make management changes but it quite quickly recovered to its current level.

If Facebook want to IPO in 2009 then they will want to get these management changes through as early this year as possible. Would they seriously want to IPO with Zuckerberg at the helm? Will Zuckerberg still be CEO at the end of 2008?

Also covering the story are Silicon Alley Insider, VentureBeat and Inquisitr (Duncan Riley’s truly excellent new blog).

Popularity: 6% [?]

The Pirate Bay, the web’s premier BitTorrent tracker, is being hit with another suit from the MPAA demanding $15.4 million to cover the damages they suffered from 4 movies and 13 TV-episodes that were made available via TPB.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde (Brokep) was pretty non-plussed by the claim: “They know they are losing, and try to make us look like big criminals by adding some zeros to a claim for a made-up crime.”

“The worst thing is that I lost 100 kronor on a bet on the number they would come up with,” Sunde added. “And, it sucks that they didn’t claim more than for Napster and the other sites. It’s cooler to break the record.”

TorrentSpy, a competing torrent search engine, shuttered earlier this year and has just been hit with a $110 million fine handed down by a LA Federal Court. The Pirate Bay, which on April 1st relocated to the Sinai desert, claims it is protected under Swedish law. However, MPAA isn’t giving up. Could this be the end of Pirate Bay?

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Nigel (Chief News Junkie)

Regular This Week in Tech (TWiT) listeners will know that a race is breaking out between their pundits as to who will become the most followed on Twitter, which is tracked by Twitterholic. What started as friendly rivalry seems to have turned into an all out Derby where every follower counts. Hubdub has a market on who will win in having the most followers by the end of May.

For those of you that don’t closely follow TWiT here is a more detailed form guide:

Kevin Rose - founder of Digg, Revision 3 and Pownce. Kevin is a late convert to Twitter due to Pownce being a competitor. Now he has joined Twitter his number of followers has rocketed in the past couple of months. Kevin stars in the hugely popular Diggnation show which, if he used it to get more followers, could probably leave his rivals for dust. Follow Kevin.

Leo Laporte - founder and host of TWiT. Another late convert to Twitter due to concerns about brand confusion between TWiT and Twitter. He has now fully embraced it and is hugely ramping up his follower base having recently taken the top slot from Obama (who is that guy?). The TWiT show reaches 500,000 monthly unique listeners so he has a lot of firepower to draw on if needed. Follow Leo.

Jason Calacanas - founder of Weblogs and Mahalo. Jason was an early adopter of Twitter and has built up a sizable following. Mahalo is massively ramping up its user base and Jason is a born networker, so while he is behind he shouldn’t be under-estimated. Follow Jason.

Robert Scoble - the Scobleizer, formerly of the Pod Show, now with Fast Company. Robert is an A-list blogger extraordinaire. If you follow him you get the feeling that their is barely a thought that goes through his head that doesn’t get blogged, Twittered, streamed or otherwise blasted out to the blogosphere. Easily the winner on most prolific Tweeter. Follower growth seems to have flattened though. Follow Robert.

John C Dvorak - tech journalist and blogger, star of Cranky Geeks among other shows. John is the cranky uncle who moves seemlessly from the correct way to cook pulled chicken to Microsoft’s web strategy. Despite claiming not to be interested in the race he never misses the chance to pitch his blog (Dvorak.org/blog!) or twitter account (THErealDVORAK!). Follow John.

Wil Harris - British technology blogger and founder of Channel Flip. Wil is the youngest of the crew coming in at a sprightly 25. He is way behind on number of followers but could potentially galvanise the British nation by turning this into a transatlantic fight. You guys dumped our tea in the harbour, we’ll bloody well take your Twitter! Follow Wil.

Personally, my money is on Leo Laporte but I might have a small side bet on Wil Harris, purely out of patriotic duty.

Market: TWiT Twitter Derby: Who will be the most followed by midnight May 25th?

Popularity: 12% [?]

By Nigel (Chief News Junkie)

While losing the Yahoo deal may actually be good for Microsoft (and will most probably give a boost to its stock price) it certainly doesn’t look good for the architect, Steve Ballmer. TechCrunch asks the question “Does Ballmer Need To Go?” stating that after the disaster that was Vista, Ballmer needed to redeem himself in the eyes of board. Now that Yahoo has fallen through his fingers he doesn’t look like he has much of a strategy.

‘Leave to pursue other opportunities’ 

To be honest, I think it is very unlikely that Ballmer will get the boot (sorry, ‘leave to pursue other opportunities’) because of this deal. Yahoo didn’t really put up much of a defense beyond a belief that they are worth more. Nothing that they have done in the last 3 months has given me the impression they are really going to turn the business around never mind seriously compete with Google. So if Yahoo are likely to continue to flounder then Microsoft may as well bide their time and pick them up later at a lower price. Ballmer didn’t make the one mistake that that CEOs always make which is to over-pay.

Prediction time

My prediction is Ballmer is safe until the end of the year at least. The market is currently forecasting an 80% chance that he will be there. Don’t agree, get on here: Will Steve Ballmer still be CEO of Microsoft at the end of 2008?

Popularity: 7% [?]

By Nigel (Chief News Junkie)

According to CNET Twitter has just signed a term sheet for another $15 to $20 million in funding. It is one of those fantastic “huge audience growth now, figure out the business model later” plays. Sometimes they work out (Google), sometimes they don’t (IM) and sometimes it is just to early to say (Digg, Facebook, YouTube).

In commenting on the recent news Business Week columnist Sarah Lacy stated that Twitter was “on the verge of potentially going mainstream in a big way“. That’s a pretty strong prediction from a journalist and I follow a lot of them. However, where is the evidence that Twitter is even on the verge of hitting the mainstream in a small way. TechCrunch report that they have around 200,000 active users per week. Even among early adopter tech community Twitter isn’t that widely used.

One demographic of the population that it has reached almost complete acceptance (and in some instances road to Damascus type conversions) is among bloggers and journalists. The value of Twitter to that community for finding stories, breaking stories and marketing is huge. Definitely worth the effort of downloading the app, building the friend list, un-following the ’social spammers’ and the lost productivity of being distracted all day. For the mainstream it just doesn’t pass the cost/benefit test.

If you check out Twitterholic you will see that 20 of the top 25 Twitterers are part of the tech crowd. There are five who aren’t (Obama (1), HotDogsLadies (7), CNN (8), TastyBlogSnack (12) and Stephen Colbert (24)) although all of them are very popular with the tech crowd. Here is my prediction: In a year’s time the majority of the top 25 Twitterers will still be techies.

The market is here: Will the majority of the top 25 Twitterers be techies on May 2, 2009? Want to bet against?

Popularity: 6% [?]

By Nigel (Chief News Junkie)

TechCrunch is reporting that Twitter is going to abandon Ruby on Rails. Twitter famously has had massive scalability problems which many commentators have put down to their use of Ruby on Rails. Their former Chief Architect Blaine Cook famously claimed that scaling Rails was “easy”.

TechCrunch is saying they are picking this up from multiple but un-named sources so looks to me about 60% likely that it will happen with 3 months. So, will Twitter announce it is abandoning Ruby on Rails by the end of July?

Popularity: 6% [?]

In the future, users will care more about your data than your website. Or at least according to Thursday’s Highland Fling 2008 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. The event was organised by Alan White (who deserved his mid-afternoon snooze for all his efforts!) and chaired by podcast star Paul Boag, who expertly grilled the speakers while keeping the whole event bouncing. It was an outright success. Here are my take home points:

• Talk 1: Mark Norman Francis (Yahoo!), The Browser and Before. Basically, a brief history of the web from ARPANET to AJAX. Take home point: The web has been in a state of flux since it began, it’s the norm, and as web developers it’s our job to embrace that change and keep up with it.
• Talk 2: Chris Heilmann (Yahoo!), Sharing the joy - building badges for distribution. An excellent talk informative at a high level around the merits of distributing your data (better search engine lovin’, lack of single point of failure, exposure to wider audiences - 70% of YouTube traffic is outside its own domain) and low level coding (take a progressive enhancement approach to your widget’s code snippet by including a div, an anchor tag for search engines and a script tag instead of just a script tag). Take home point: a 3-level distribution strategy (badge, widget, API) is the way to go now and for the future, but there are important dos and don’ts at each level. Read around before committing. More on Chris’s blog.
• Talk 3: Gareth Rushgrove (Freelance), A First Class Web Citizen. This was a collection of suggestions for improving the compatibility of web apps. Take home point: APIs and URLs are interfaces just like traditional UIs and should actively be designed as such, with ease of use and speed of understanding being the goals. Blog post here and slides on Slideshare here
• Talk 4: Chris Mills (Opera), The Mobile Perspective. Information and advice on the issues surrounding mobile browsing and the types of mobile browsers. Take home point: multi-handset testing is the key to success (don’t just focus on the iPhone!). Testing effort can be reduced by clustering handsets by browser.
• Talk 5: Aral Balkan (Singularity08), Bare-naked Flash: Dispelling Myths and Building Bridges. A talk by one of the leading members of the Flash community on how Flash has grown up a lot and should be given a second chance by those who’ve written it off in the past. Take home point: Issues such as bookmarking, deep linking, back button problems, accessibilty, integration with other technologies and SEO that have plagued Flash in the past are no longer problems. Blog post here
• Talk 6: Simon Willison (Freelance), Comet: Moving towards a real-time web. An introduction to Ajax’s cousin, Comet: a technology that allows data to be pushed from server to browser (e.g. for chat). Take home point: Comet exists, is more efficient than polling, is used by Gmail and Meebo, and there are libraries to make it easy to use.

All in all, I found the whole event pretty useful and as always (like with the Refresh events) it’s great when the Edinburgh web development community comes together.

As for data being more important than your website, can Hubdub be the web’s repository for predictions?

Popularity: 7% [?]

By Nigel (Technology Editor)

There are tons of rumours that Digg is going to get sold, then Yahoo Buzz launches and now the market is forecasting Google is going to buy them. Do we think Digg will stay independent?

Who will buy Digg by end of June?

Popularity: 8% [?]

By Nigel (Technology Editor)

Techcrunch is reporting that Facebook fatigue is setting in with the number of visitors in the US down; dipping by 800,000 in January. There may be some seasonal effect as MySpace also dipped but not by as much as Facebook despite being larger. The Guardian is reporting an even bigger drop in the UK, with Facebook visitor numbers down 5% on December.

One swallow doesn’t make a summer but one data point is usually more than enough for Robert Scoble to draw a line. In his recent post, Is Facebook Doomed?, he links Facebook’s downturn to it’s limitation of 5,000 friends which seems to affect the sum total of one person, Robert Scoble!

I guess by that twisted form of internet mathematics, Scoble equals 800,000 visitors. I can see a new unit of measurement, a Scoble! With 33.9 million US visitors Facebook is at 42.4 Scobles, which is surely a much easier number to remember.

But what does this mean for Zuckerberg? BoomTown is reporting that senior management changes are happening in Facebook with them looking to hire a seasoned technology veteran (an unZuckerberg) to act as a steady hand to Zuckerberg who would retain the CEO position. But the question has to be asked: Will the right candidate want to report to a 23 year old (even one as visionary and successful as Mark)?

Will Zuckerberg still be CEO by the end of 2008? None of the pundits are making predictions on it but Hubdub users are currently forecasting there is only a 63% chance that he will. And that’s down from 90% just over a month ago.

Will Mark Zuckerberg still be CEO of Facebook by the end of 2008?

What do you think? Click here to make your own prediction.

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