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 it posted yesterday.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz made the Top Ten this year, clocking in at No. 8.

Other women geek types–many from Silicon Valley–on the list include:

Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox (XRX) at No. 9; IBM (IBM) Global Sales and Distribution SVP Ginni Rometty at No. 11; Oracle (ORCL) President Safra Catz at No. 12; Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) Technology Solutions Group EVP Ann Livermore at No. 13; Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at No. 22; Charlene Begley, president and CEO, GE (GE) Enterprise Solutions at No. 27; Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay (EBAY) Marketplaces at No. 40; HP CFO Cathie Lesjack at No. 42; and, finally, Google (GOOG) Search Products and User Experience VP Marissa Mayer at No. 44.

The conference associated with the Fortune issue, spearheaded by Pattie Sellers, will take place next week, starting Monday, in Carlsbad, Calif.

Fortune is part of Time Inc., which is owned by Time Warner (TWX).

Bartz, Sandberg and others will be interviewed onstage, along with Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) chairman and CEO Warren Buffett.

Will BoomTown be in attendance, with my trusty Flip digital video at the ready? Yes, indeedy, so the lady geeks should beware–and I am talking to you, Sandberg!

Until then, here’s a cable television interview Bartz did today on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” Clocking in at almost 12 minutes, it’s classic Carol, with sassy catchphrases and jokes about being a really tough lady, but with little new news–except for her saying she would have sold to Microsoft (MSFT) when it was offering $33 a share way back when, because she is not “stupid.”

Indeed not.

Here’s the video:

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, who interviewed Stone (the pair are pictured here) posted a poll about that and a few other topics (the audience preferred Facebook to Twitter by about three to one, for example), 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?”

“I think that’s a legitimate concern,” said Stone. “We need to focus on value before we focus on profit.”

But, he added that the San Francisco-based Twitter was ready to show some commitment to revenue this year.

Oh dear, what will BoomTown have to gripe about at Twitter now?

Because–aside from the lack of a business model–I must confess I like Twitter an awful lot and find it extremely useful!

Earlier, Stone made the salient point that Twitter was just in the first innings.

“We have a lot of growing to do,” he said. “In general, we feel we are about one percent into the growing of Twitter.”

One more important issue than money-making, he noted correctly, was that the level of engagement at Twitter is not as high as the level of awareness.

“We just have to position our product better,” said Stone.

Of course, Lashinsky had to ask about the recently stolen documents that a hacker nabbed from some Twitter employees’ personal accounts.

Stone said that there are “unpolished notes,” which only “give you an idea of scope we are thinking of…the idea is that we are thinking big.”

Lashinsky asked if Twitter would sue either TechCrunch, which published some of the stolen documents, or the hacker who stole them.

(My first thought: Let’s all pray that TechCrunch will avoid touting that navel-gazing nonstory into the weekend.)

“I don’t know,” said Stone diplomatically, since TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington was sitting right in the room. “In general, we have a responsibility to look into these things and see what makes sense.”

Then, it was pretty much back to business models, and Stone seemed open to a lot of them, as long as they were not forced on the innovative digital darling.

“We want to develop a revenue model that is baked-in…and is not something that is tacked on,” he said.

Some ideas: Advertising, of course, as well as commercial accounts and verifying brands.

“We spent a lot of 2008 trying to get ahead technically of the unexpected popularity,” said Stone. “The very, very high level [of what Twitter needs to be doing] is to add more value to users.”

That means more focus on adding new features, such as a reputation system, better discovery and more explanation–for David Letterman, for example–of exactly how Twitter can be used.

And yes, making money. Stone noted that Twitter wanted to change the world too, and the best way to do that was to make “tons of money.”

“What we don’t want is to become that child actor that grew up all freaky,” he said, noting a Ron Howard development cycle was Twitter’s goal.

All hail Opie Twitter, oops, Taylor!

[Photo credit: Brad Markel for Fortune]

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 (TWX) online unit was either out of juice or irrelevant.

The event, which is taking place over three days in Pasadena, Calif., is packed full of Web and media luminaries, so BoomTown will be sitting in the front row and liveblogging some of the sessions here, such as this one that I did for the session with Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company (DIS).

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.

“We are still in a very large trade wind,” he said, referring to advertisers spending money online. “If someone asked you if advertising [online] is going to go up, I think you would have to say yes.”

To take advantage of that, Armstrong said AOL would be focused on investing “in content systems that connect with advertising systems–that’s a white space we are going after.”

He noted that AOL needs to have the same “plumbing approach” to content that Google (GOOG)–where Armstrong had been a major advertising exec before taking his new job–has had to search advertising.

“You have to take the Silicon Valley approach to content,” Armstrong declared.

Armstrong also talked a little bit about his recent 100-day trip around the AOL empire worldwide and what he got out of it.

“I got a lot of advice from different people about what to do,” he said.

His takeaway, which he will discuss at an all-hands meeting scheduled for tomorrow with AOL staff: “It’s really about strategy. If we don’t have the right strategy, we’re not going to win.”

Which is kind of stating the obvious, but it sounded good.

Armstrong also touched lightly on the issue of getting rid of various assets AOL has compiled over the last several years, like it pricey purchase of the Bebo social networking site.

But some, as I recently reported–such as the Truveo video search service and the information search company Relegence–are staying.

Armstrong also talked of buying, but judiciously–noting to me later that AOL had 900 possible acquisition deals blocked in its pipeline.

Someone call a plumber stat!

Armstrong said he has put a stop to a lot of those deals, including putting the kibosh on a $400 million check he was supposed to sign right when he got there.

It was, as he told me after his interview, a windfall that supposed to go to a big computer maker for a distribution deal, which he chose to pass on.

“Everything has to make sense from a return-on-investment basis for me,” said Armstrong. “It’s that easy.”

And that hard, although he did move the crowd, which was polled with the same questions about AOL’s chances after Armstrong talked.

He got more people in the audience to vote that AOL would “return to health as a major Internet player,” which is–as legions of the company’s leaders have shown–no easy task.

[Photo credit: Brad Markel for Fortune]

Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company (DIS), was 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.

But let’s set the scene: Iger looks like a very typical old-media mogul you might order from an online catalog–handsome, suave and sophisticated, a perfect mix of Hollywood and New York.

Thank goodness, then, that he never seems to have acquired that other irksome characteristic of some of his peers–a full-bored panic over the Internet.

In fact, Iger–whom I also interviewed onstage at the fourth D: All Things Digital conference in 2006–has been unusually fast-forward among many of the big media companies in facing the digital music and dancing.

Fortune writer Richard Siklos asked him about a mishmash of subjects, from subscription services to authentication to cable providers, all of which center around a basic question:

How the heck is Disney going to be paid for its wares–because someday those agelessly lucrative “kids” from “High School Musical” are not going to agree to yet another reunion?

“This is the beginning of the beginning,” said Iger, who noted that it would be folly to guess what’s coming next in the digital arena.

A most excellent point that he made several times, adding that it was important for companies like Disney to keep trying out all sorts of things digitally, until they got it right.

“This notion of protecting the present is something that I talk a lot about [with employees],” said Iger, who wants them not to do that so much.

He noted that running a modern media company meant you had to have “one hand in the present and one hand in the future.”

Iger forgot about the hand that you might need to protect yourself from partners of the present–like big-box retailers, television affiliates, cable networks–who are going to come at you with a cudgel for giving the stuff you sell them away free on, say, Hulu.

Hulu, of course, is the popular, tiny-money-making premium online video service, which is a joint partnership of News Corp. (NWS), GE’s (GE) NBC Universal and now Disney.

“We believe in Hulu,” said Iger, who thinks its business model–currently just online advertising–might evolve over time.

But, he added, he was “somewhat skeptical” of any one answer to what is ahead.

As in: Iger just does not know, which is probably the best thing a media mogul can say right now.

Except for one thing he said is always mindful of–to follow, “where the consumer is going.”

Consumers are going online, of course, which is certainly going to require all-hands-on-deck at Disney in the years ahead.

[Update: It seems Disney was keeping its hand in the present for today, as it apparently had YouTube take down a trailer for its new "Alice in Wonderland" movie, which was set to debut at Comic-Con International in San Diego tomorrow.]

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 (YHOO) spokeswoman declined to comment about the acquisition. 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, video, links and other files in email so that users can surface and then share them on many sites. It also has other products that essentially enliven email.

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

According to sources, Yahoo was first impressed with its innovative plug-in that works with Gmail from Google (GOOG), and has been looking at the company for a while, previously offering about $10 million for it.

Xoopit also makes a similar photo-sharing application for Yahoo! Mail, which it launched late last year.

The opening up of its popular email product to a variety of third-party applications, in order to make it more robust, has been a goal of Yahoo recently, as it seeks to socialize one of its most popular products.

One source said Xoopit was a good fit for Yahoo because it allowed the company’s email to be the platform that could knit together other social networking services, such as Facebook. This is seen as a core feature, although the Silicon Valley-based company is also opening its email products up to outside developers.

Yahoo has been planning on announcing the acquisition on Thursday at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference, where SVP of Applications Products Bryan Lamkin is appearing on a panel titled, “Dollars & Demographics: Capitalizing on Demographic Trends.”

Lamkin, a former Adobe Systems (ADBE) exec, now runs the Yahoo unit that includes email and other communications and communities products. He was hired in April by CEO Carol Bartz.

That panel topic is a little ironic, several sources joked, since Xoopit is not profitable and has very small revenues thus far.

The Wall Street Journal also reported on the deal, although it said Yahoo and Xoopit were still in late-stage talks and the deal was not complete yet.

But, according to my sources, it is done.

While the pair (pictured here, Schneider on the left and Bradford on the right) would not give specifics about how Bradford was hired, they both noted that they had gotten to know each other over the past year.

And Bradford added that she had met Yahoo (YHOO) President Sue Decker at a poker table several years ago while attending a women’s executive conference run by Fortune magazine.

“I won,” said Bradford proudly. “I beat her and everyone else [at the table].”

How much does BoomTown like a person who insults her uber-boss’s card-playing skills before she even starts?

Very much!

Actually, sharp gambling skills and a little in-your-face style are probably just what Yahoo needs, as the U.S. economy continues to tank and the company tries to recover from the Microsoft (MSFT) takeover debacle.

Combined with management drift and employee turmoil over the last year, Yahoo’s ad business has suffered accordingly.

“I had a laser-like focus on bringing in Joanne,” said Schneider, who said she always asks ad clients who most impacts their online strategy and Bradford’s name kept popping up. “There was a kinetic energy that made it a good fit.”

Bradford is taking over the job of Dave Karnstedt, who is headed to Silicon Valley VC firm Redpoint Ventures as an executive-in-residence. His departure has been long rumored internally.

According to sources, Bradford was unhappy at Spot Runner, the ad-services start-up that has received truckloads of funding, and even more attention when Bradford arrived.

Whatever the case, the former Microsoft exec 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 development at Yahoo.

Bradford will oversee sales, market development for advertisers, small business and HotJobs at Yahoo. She will report to Schneider, who is EVP of Yahoo’s U.S unit.

It will be a very tough gig. Yahoo is facing that soft U.S. economy, a weakened stock price after the takeover attempt by Microsoft and justifiable questions among advertisers about its effectiveness, as other sites like Facebook grow faster and with more attractive demographics.

Yahoo is likely to also have to deal with new regulatory scrutiny of its ad businesses, since it was reported yesterday that the Justice Department might block the deal Yahoo recently struck to outsource some of its ad sales to Google (GOOG).

Bradford insisted that Yahoo was still a major force, underscoring that for all its troubles, the company remains one of the top online ad sellers: “My approach has always been about giving advertisers the product they want. … Yahoo has a lot of assets for me to play with.”

Schneider added that the job Bradford has is larger than Karnstedt’s, in order to be able to offer ad clients as many different kinds of Yahoo ad product as possible in an integrated solution.

“It is a different role in that it aggregates all of ad revenue … and touches teams in all of our ad businesses,” said Schneider, who noted Bradford’s job does not include its overseeing its publishing relationships, including a controversial recent deal with Google. “It’s the whole magillah.”

And Bradford knows from gorillas. Previous to Spot Runner, she was a VP and chief media officer of MSN Media Network and has worked at the software giant for a long time.

At Yahoo, where she will start in two weeks, she will not be the only former Microsoft exec–content head Scott Moore, who also reports to Schneider, was a longtime exec there.

It’s a sneaky kind of Microsoft invasion, if you think about it.

Bradford, who left Microsoft right after it made the now-failed bid for Yahoo, said she looks forward to wrangling with her former company in the ad market, especially now that Yahoo has to carve out new roads following its decision to resist.

“Everyone needs good competition, and it will be fun to compete [with Microsoft],” said Bradford. “I think Yahoo is at an interesting point of changing and growing its businesses … but it is still in a leadership position and there is a story to be told around that.”

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.”

Ah yes, peace in our time via The Wall!

Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have agreed to cooperate, said Kirkpatrick, who has written several pieces in Fortune on the much-hyped start-up that have been largely laudatory.

The book, said Kirkpatrick in a phone chitty-chat with BoomTown (while I froze at Little League practice in the-coldest-winter-I-ever-spent-was-a-summer-in-San Francisco) will also not necessarily be tough, but look at the ways Facebook has been the latest to profoundly impact the online industry.

“This is a company that is changing the way we use the Web, and I want to look at where it is going and what it could become,” said Kirkpatrick.

I like a positive attitude, although my book on Facebook–which I have dinged for a lot of stuff over the last year, from its kooky $15 billion valuation to its still-nascent ad business–would have been titled: “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere.”

Oops! That was actually the title of my second book on AOL, the Facebook of Web 1.0, which chronicled the near-collapse of the company after its disastrous merger with Time Warner (TWX).

That, of course, came like winter follows fall after the first I did, “aol.com,” which told the story of the stunning rise of the online pioneer.

Actually, now that I think about it, it still might work for Facebook!

I kid, David, I kid! Good luck!

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 know about the new COO of the social-networking site, former Google (GOOG) exec Sheryl Sandberg (pictured here).

But if you don’t have time to read them, here’s a quick synopsis of both:

Fortune: “Meet Facebook’s New Number Two” by Jessi Hempel

Details: Just 14 days into new job; Leg-tucking white Eames chair (pictured here); as Google’s VP global online sales and ops, ran everything!; she and Zuckerberg met cute at holiday party; aced Larry Summers’s midterm and final at Harvard public economics course, much to his shock, since he implies she was kind of chatty in class with friends.

Also Harvard MBA; obligatory McKinsey stint; Treasury Department in Clinton administration; picked 300-person Google over investment banking; always 10 steps ahead; Google.org mover and shaker.

Facebook aims: A need for corporate structure pronto; also time for the bigger picture; no more one-off decisions; more international growth; hiring senior managers; oh, yes, also must invent a new ad model for social networks.

But no silver bullets!; kicks ass, talks tough, then hugs all around (we did not make this up!); take out trash from Mark’s all-night Pizza-My-Heart-and-Red-Bull party (OK, we made that one up!).

Money quote: “This feels like Google when I started.“

The Wall Street Journal: “New Face at Facebook Hopes to Map Out a Road to Growth” by Carol Hymowitz

Details: Two weeks into new job; Biz dev guy Dan Rose is already sick of her (”It feels like she’s been here six months already.”); flip-flops endangered?; is able to argue why she is right by arguing how she is wrong; dangles data before engineers like fish before seals; easygoing but intense (when will these opposing dichotomies end?); crashed Harvard computers, but it was worth it.

Taught aerobics and was a stretching fascist; more cute dinner chatter with Zuckerberg before hiring; grew Google team from four to 4,000; a feminist and hangs with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda (see aerobics!) too!; Facebook pix of Argentine waterfall-leaning; went to high school in Miami; small kids, hubby; more 10 steps ahead and shoving people out of comfort zone.

Facebook aims: Employee performance reviews; processes for identifying and recruiting new employees; management-training programs; rally troops; stop the cash burn and up ad sales; close-knit culture must go, but you get hundreds of millions of new friends!

Also must figure out how to save Beacon’s bacon; earn trust of users, while frantically searching for a business model; wants frank feedback from staff and will publicly thank such person who gives it.

Money quote: “Facebook is a different space than Google, with tremendous potential to connect people, but it needs scale, it needs systems and processes to have impact, and I can do that.”

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 online video stars on Forbes and Fortune (one of whom, Fortune Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer is an old classmate of mine, in fact).

The best bit is his take on the “Information Highway Traffic Jam” at the end among all us MSM types, driving like teens gone wild on the digital freeway.

Here’s the video:

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 unproven business underpinnings of the hot social network, the juvenile nature of its much vaunted third-party widgets, the insanity of its $15 billion valuation, its inane legal fights and the problems with its worrisome ad efforts.

We’ve also taken (we think probably unfairly) shots at those flip-flops he wears. And we did call him a toddler CEO, also a low blow, we have to admit.

But now, it seems, a mob is forming, sparked by the issues around Facebook’s controversial Beacon ad program, which can track your purchases on some external sites and send the information back to your Facebook profile’s news feed.

While it made some changes in Beacon last week, Facebook has not given users a global opt-out of the controversial marketing system in which the social network is seeking to link behavior and advertising more tightly for supposedly bigger payoffs.

The mainstream media and blogosphere, which recently were feting him, have now turned and ire has been growing over Beacon, which seems to be focusing everyone on the inexperience of Zuckerberg and the challenges facing Facebook.

That was clear in a very cogent piece by Josh Quittner on his Techland blog for Fortune today, which was titled “RIP Facebook?”

He writes:

A lot of people say that Facebook has jumped the shark. That’s flat out wrong. In fact, Facebook is now being devoured by the shark. There’s so much blood in the water, it’s attracting other sharks. And if Facebook’s not careful, one of them is bound to come along and finish it off. I’ve never seen anything like it in the annals of fast-rising tech companies that fail.”

As Zuckerberg might say: That bites.

And here is a photo that was put on the Fake Steve Jobs blog, which was using the PhotoCrank service, where users can add captions:

Oh my.

As Quittner writes correctly, right now it is the press that has turned on Zuckerberg, which is sure to be followed by much more important advertisers, who shy away from controversy.

We’ll see how it plays out, but it is surely a flash point moment for Facebook.

Or in the immortal words of actress Joan Crawford: “Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.”

Feel the love, Mark.

Actually, after reading it, with all the silly sniping among some of them (now all apparently resolved), it sounded to me more like the infighting of a particularly catty sorority than the back room of the Bada Bing.

But it is an interesting example of how insular Silicon Valley operates, creating new companies out of the carcasses of old ones and how important the roundelay of interconnections can be–in this case, stretching from PayPal to Yelp to Digg to YouTube to Facebook.

But the photos of the former PayPal group (pictured here at San Francisco’s famed Tosca) playing dress-up as nerdy gangsters was a nice touch, as was the shot of investor Peter Thiel as capo di tutti capi and Max Levchin, now running hot widget maker Slide, as his consigliere.

But if you want to see them both in more normal action, here’s a video interview I did recently with Thiel and a three-part one I did with Levchin.

Peter Thiel:

Max Levchin, Part 1:

Max Levchin, Part 2:

Max Levchin, Part 3:

OK, so I looked up the word in the dictionary, and it turns out it means: “readily fluent, often thoughtlessly, superficially, or insincerely.”

Thanks, Dave! Given my long history as someone who has been pretty bullish on the Web, it’s unusual for me to be the irksome tsk-tsk voice of reason about the bubble being blown up here, so I am glad to be thought of as superficial!

Writes Kirkpatrick:

How can you put a price tag on the future? That’s what any investor in Facebook would be doing.

“There’s no way the company is worth that kind of money today, despite the 43 million active users it claims. (The Journal reports that private Facebook this year expects to make $30 million profit on $150 million in revenues.) But that is not the same thing as saying that somebody would be insane to buy a small chunk at such a valuation. (For a glib and contrasting view from Kara Swisher, see AllThingsD.)”

After that, he goes on to call the service the Internet equivalent of the second coming of Google, except with its people-centric, six-degrees-of-separation vision called a “social graph” by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

(Calling AOL! Some kid hijacked your old vision and is about to make bank with it!)

More importantly with all this relevant interconnectedness, posits Kirkpatrick, Facebook is apparently the promised land of advertising of the future, which is all about giving the consumers ads they actually want!

Ads as a service! Ads as a benefit! Ads not as an intrusion!

I don’t mean to be glib, but this kind of ad cheerleading has been trotted out by AOL, by Yahoo, by every dot-com start-up I ever met and its promise has always been more, shall we say, bloated than its delivery.

And even now, with all the advances in online behavior-targeting–which I like to call “consumer-stalking”–it’s mostly still just a lot of marketing blabbery that is good for flimflamming the media buyers at Procter & Gamble and little else.

Other new buzzy phrases in this genre include: claiming consumers want to be “brand ambassadors” for a wide range of products (I suspect that list is quite short); declaring all advertising as needing to be “viral,” which should be enough to make buyers ill; and even claiming that ads are content (so far, only Apple’s Mac/PC commercials seem to rate in this department).

While Facebook is certainly a very good place to test all these theories, perhaps even the best place at the moment, a smarter investor might want to use such money to play all over the Web, testing out all sorts of new ad formats.

And spending hundreds of millions to get a small stake in this game in just one company–which is still No. 2 in the market, lest we forget about rival MySpace–seems like a recipe for disappointment.

That is especially true if what GigaOm’s Om Malik writes about government pressures to make the service safer for young people comes to pass–which could land Facebook into a miasma of controversy.

To Kirkpatrick’s credit, he is quite right when he writes about the drive of Zuckerberg, pictured below, who appears to be very confident, thoughtful and hard-charging, although I am not so sure his comparison of Zuckerberg to Microsoft’s Bill Gates is a good one to make.

Zuckerberg shouldn’t be a wannabe of him, given that company’s history of bullying domination, any more than he should try to pattern himself after the arrogant brainiac style of Google.

If I were him, if he has to be like anyone, I would act more like Steve Jobs, whose iconoclastic style has left a lot of possible market power on the table in the past, but whose single-minded devotion to product excellence has made Apple a brand for the ages.

Steve Jobs even took money from Microsoft, but it was only when he had no other choice. Zuckerberg does have a choice, a lot of them, which is often harder than having none.

So, by all means, dream big. By all means, run as fast as you can to grow what we can all agree is a great platform. By all means, take the money if it means it will help you get there.

But I don’t mean to be insincere when I say too: For all your promise, think hard about what you can actually deliver.

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, you got your Jeff Weiner of Yahoo–and you’ve got yourself a digital partay.

A lot of people were blabbing about the latest bubble rumor that Microsoft was considering offering $6 billion to purchase Facebook. Yes, the No. 2 (by far) social-networking company that could, making the definitive leader MySpace worth, like, a kabillion.

Here is my little video of the event, as I chat with conference organizer David Kirkpatrick and Fortune magazine editor Andy Serwer (with whom I went to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where we both did precisely nothing).

I also play a little word association–$6 billion, being the key one–with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi and the obviously-weary-of-me Facebook PR maven Brandee Barker.