Folksy set was on the highest burner possible at Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women’s conference this morning, as legendary financial investor Warren Buffett took to the stage.

Buffett, who was interviewed by Fortune’s terrific Carol Loomis onstage in Carlsbad, Calif., held forth to the crowd–made up mostly of women–having instructed Loomis previously to “do anything with me…I like your crowd.”

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Time Inc.’s Fortune magazine–which never met a list it did not like to make–had a solid group of women tech types on its “50 Most Powerful Women 2009” roster, the annual survey that it posted yesterday.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz made the Top Ten this year, clocking in at No. 8, along with a lot of other tech-savvy women in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone took the stage at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference late this afternoon and was greeted by that old chestnut:

When is Twitter going to make some simoleons?

Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky posted a poll about that and a few other topics, and then asked a question he said was on the minds of many in Silicon Valley:

“Why the hell aren’t you guys making money?”

Here’s what Stone had to say.

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It did not start out too well for AOL CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong, with a poll on the screen showing most of the attendees in the ballroom at Fortune Brainstorm Tech voting that the Time Warner online unit was either out of juice or irrelevant.

Armstrong did not break any news in the interview with Fortune’s lively interviewer, David Kirkpatrick, relying more on projecting an I’m-in-charge-here attitude and saying confident things like “a challenge is also an opportunity.”

In general, Armstrong tried to be upbeat about the prospects for AOL, which has for too long been the Web’s sad sack of an Internet company.

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Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, is the kickoff interview onstage at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference, which is taking place over the next three days in Pasadena, Calif.

The event is packed full of Web and media luminaries.

So, BoomTown will be sitting in the front row and liveblogging some of the sessions here, including this one, titled, “Digital Kingdom: New Business Models for a Media Giant.”

Translation: When you Twitter upon a star, makes a–big–difference what you earn.

Which, right now, is not a whole lot, as Iger and others in the media business know all too well.

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Yahoo plans on announcing Thursday that it has bought Xoopit for a price in the $20 million range, according to several sources, one of its first acquisitions in a long while.

Reached late this afternoon by BoomTown, a Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment about the purchase. Xoopit did not respond to emails earlier today.

But sources said it was a done deal to buy the San Francisco-based social email start-up that finds photos, videos, links and other files in email so that users can surface and then share them.

Xoopit’s investors–Accel Partners and Foundation Capital, along with several angel investors–have pumped about $6.5 million into the company since 2006.

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After the news broke that former Microsoft exec Joanne Bradford was headed to Yahoo as the head of its U.S. ad sales and more, I got to talk to both her and her new boss, Hilary Schneider, on the phone this morning about the move.

Bradford left her job as national ad sales chief at Spot Runner, where she arrived just six months ago, to take the position of SVP of U.S. revenue and market development at Yahoo.

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While there have been not-so-nice insider books about Facebook, the first major deal to chronicle the rise of the social-networking phenom has been signed by Fortune magazine’s David Kirkpatrick (pictured here).

Titled “The Facebook Effect,” the tome will be (glacially) published in September of 2009 by Simon & Schuster, which noted in a statement that it “will chronicle the amazingly rapid rise of this company as well as the impact it is having on social life, politics, business and even international relations.”

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Mark Zuckerberg? Who’s that? Now, at Facebook, it’s apparently the Season of Sandberg!

Ah, the appeal of a fresh face is just irresistible to the press–OK, including BoomTown, except we posted more than a month ago!–with two major pieces, in Fortune and The Wall Street Journal, rolling out this week alone, with everything you wanted to [...]

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I meant to get this very funny video about the Web sites of financial publications–from Current TV, by Viral Video Film School–posted sooner, as it made me spit up my coffee several times.
The shaggy Brett Erlich perfectly reviews the sites for the Web 2.0 crowd, making fun of WSJ.com’s soothing video intro music, and the [...]

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As inevitable as air, Silicon Valley likes to build them up and then tear them down.
Thus, the bell now tolls for Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg.
We at BoomTown have been consistent and persistent in voicing our various worries about the young entrepreneur, from one of our very first posts, questioning (we think fairly) the [...]

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Fortune had an interesting article by Jeffrey M. O’Brien on the links between and among the various alumni of the PayPal online payment service, focusing on the Mafia-like aspects of their affiliation.
Actually, after reading it, with all the silly sniping among some of them (now all apparently resolved), it sounded to me more like the [...]

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So Fortune writer David Kirkpatrick, in his weigh-in on Facebook’s potential shakedown of Bill Gates’s wallet–as reported, Microsoft is apparently thinking of investing in the hot social-networking site at a ridiculous $10 billion valuation–called my analysis of the company and its possible shortcomings “glib.”
OK, so I looked up the word in the dictionary, and it [...]

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I stopped into the iMeme: The Thinkers of Tech conference, put on by Fortune magazine yesterday and today in San Francisco, and ran into a passel of the Internet regulars, talking about–you guessed it–the Internet.
You got your John Chambers of Cisco, you got your Sheryl Sandberg of Google, you got your Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, [...]

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