All Things Digital

Just because it is the holiday season and BoomTown is feeling all holly and jolly and merry, it doesn’t mean we’re going to back down on the fiasco that was, is and will always be Facebook’s Beacon.

In fact, we’re hopping mad all over again after a talk we had last week with a very smart exec at a company that Facebook does a lot of business with, who posited the right way the social-networking phenomenon could have rolled out the now radioactive ad system.

It did not have to be that way, as the exec I was talking to noted, if Facebook had first launched the Beacon service–which can track your purchases on some external sites and send the information back to your Facebook profile’s news feed–as a noncommercial tool for users, focusing on things they had posted on a range of external Web sites that they actually might like being broadcast back to friends at Facebook.

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I had a pleasant outdoor lunch with Yahoo Network division chief Jeff Weiner yesterday in Santa Clara.

That he would have lunch with me and allow me to make a little video interview with him in the midst of all the management turmoil at the company is why I like dealing with the ever-sassy Weiner, who actually seems to enjoy debating a range of Internet issues.

That he was only half-joking when he suggested we play hooky and go see Michael Moore’s new documentary about the U.S. health-care system called “Sicko,” instead of talking about Yahoo, made me like him 15% more.

I have written quite a bit about Weiner: Here about his not taking the big Audience job at Yahoo back in the late spring (and which now does not exist); and here on whether he would leave with departing CEO Terry Semel, with whom Weiner arrived many years ago.

Many speculate that now that the Panama effort to overhaul Yahoo’s lagging search ad-sales system is done (and which Weiner helmed with a large team at Yahoo), and it looks as if it will improve results, he might move along on a high note.

But among the key Semel hires, Weiner is perhaps the best liked within Yahoo, and I doubt he’d do that, given how interesting his job actually is.

Still, Weiner, for one, seemed up for the challenge, as you will see here:

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