Can you believe that last week's Web 2.0 Summit was the fourth such conference? Its humble beginnings were barely in evidence, as venture capitalists, corporate biz-dev types, and M&A scouts seemed to outnumber the startup founders they were trying to hunt down. Friday afternoon was a return to the old school, however, with Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield and LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick among the presenters. Sadly, John Doerr, the expert inflater of the first dotcom bubble, did not cry. Check the photo gallery for the conference's final, terrifying orgy of schmoozing. Some participants were so exhausted that, by the closing cocktail party, they were making deals with their eyes closed.

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon, the nerdy duo working on programming standards for opening up social networks, are presenting a thoroughly less nerdy version of their usual presentation. I chatted with Fitzpatrick, now an engineer at Google, who said he realized he needed to dumb it down for the audience of people wealthy enough to afford the $3,595 ticket price at this conference. The simple metaphor they came up with to explain the problem of closed social networks? Instant messenger. "If Brad is on Yahoo and I'm on AOL, we still want to talk to each other," explains Recordon, who's now at Six Apart, Fitzpatrick's old company. The social graph? "Who my friends are," Recordon sums up. OAuth, the network-ID standard Recordon and Fitzpatrick are championing? "The valet key for the Web," says Fitzpatrick. I can just hear the rich guys in the audience thinking, "Great, kid. Go park my car already." (Photo by CottonCandy)

We had high hopes when we found out that Leah Culver and Brad Fitzpatrick, pictured above at a party in August, had started dating. Fitzpatrick, the LiveJournal founder turned Google engineer, and Culver, a cofounder with Digg's Kevin Rose of Pownce, the Twitter-and-file-sharing mashup, seemed heaven-sent to the eyes of a tech gossip columnist. Brad 'n' Leah could be our geek Brangelina. Both partners were sufficiently techie, and, thankfully, good-looking enough to get on a year-end hot geeks lists. Also, neither seemed afraid of a bit of drama. For example, Culver's recent staged snit against Rose where she claimed Digg ripped off Pownce, and Fitzpatrick's confrontation of a romantic rival at a party. So it was such a disappointment for us to learn that they had ended their nascent relationship last week.

From the comments, a fresh rumor about Brad Fitzpatrick, the LiveJournal founder widely believed to be working on social networks at Google. The commenter, who claims to work at Google, says Fitzpatrick is actually working on free, ad-supported Wi-Fi. Curious, since Google's Wi-Fi projects have faced trouble recently. A deal with San Francisco for free Wi-Fi fell apart thanks to Google partner EarthLink's straitened finances. Why would a tech star like Fitzpatrick work on such a seemingly doomed project? With that caveat, the report on Fitzpatrick's new project, from googleyes, after the jump.

The notion of social networks like Facebook and Google's Orkut was that they would connect real-world friends, not drive them apart. But a push, driven by technical idealists, to "open" such websites could be driving a wedge between two old friends. David Recordon, right, who recently rejoined blog-software maker Six Apart, has cast aspersions on efforts by Google to make it easier for programmers to hook their software — like Facebook's popular applications — into Orkut and other Google products. So far, it may sound like all business. Companies trash rivals' plans all the time. Here, however, is where things get a bit more personal.

It's either News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch's worst nightmare — or his wet dream. Two recent college graduates, Jess Martin and Drew Chen, have launched, as we predicted, SpaceLift, an application on Facebook that takes a chaotic, ugly MySpace profile page and displays it in Facebook's spare, blue-and-white layout. For Murdoch, who's voiced admiration for Facebook, even though News Corp. owns social-networking rival MySpace, this could be disastrous.

BLACK ROCK CITY — Rumors that the bigwigs of geekery are headed here en masse are rife in the fanciful world of Internet rumor — but proof is spotty on the playa-dust ground. The strongest contender for Big Geek on Campus so far is Brad Fitzpatrick, formerly of Six Apart fame, and now at Google. This tidbit actually transcends rumor, as Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal, has posted his future playa address on his own LiveJournal blog. If he's a very clever boy, he will discover the Wi-Fi-fu that makes updating his LJ from the desert possible, but in the meantime, we are having daydreams of drunkenly invading his camp when he gets here and demanding that he friend us. (Photo by Brad Fitzpatrick)

So Brad Fitzpatrick, Jay Adelson, and Jimmy Wales walk into a bar ... sorry, the only joke here is how the creators of LiveJournal, Digg, and Wikipedia — three top experts on social networks — wasted their weekend. If they walked into a bar, I'd hope it was to drink away their sorrows after discovering they flew out to Austin, Texas for a whole lot of nothing. That's the word I've gotten, anyway, from attendees at last weekend's "We Are All Actors" conference, organized by the League of Technical Voters, a group campaigning to make the Federal budget less obscure. "The meeting sucked, actually (didn't stay on topic, more or less skipped important agenda items, stupid shakespeare/actors theme, etc)," read one passed-along report. Typical, if disappointing. And telling.

A Valleywag spy reports sighting Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of LiveJournal and outgoing Six Apart executive, at Philz Coffee in San Francisco. Fitzpatrick was there with book publisher and geek icon Tim O'Reilly and David Recordon, a former Six Apart engineer who left to join VeriSign last year. The three were working on a presentation on "social network portability." Now, that's no surprise — Fitzpatrick has been openly interested in the idea of swapping personal information between websites for a while, and he and Recordon — who we hear, by the way, may be rejoining Six Apart — helped create the OpenID standard, which helps accomplish just that. No, what makes this geek sighting fascinating is that Fitzpatrick, we hear — though neither he nor Google has confirmed this — is headed to Google. And Google has been trying to get back in the social-network game.

The geeks behind caustic Web 2.0 review site Uncov threw down Friday night at SoMa's Mars Bar. There were no demos, no sponsors, and not a blue shirt in sight. Instead, there was a lot of drinking. My kind of scene. A few months after launching the site, writers Ted Dziuba, Kyle Shank, and Matt Kent decided to venture into the physical world and actually meet some of the people they profiled — the ones who were brave enough to attend, anyway. It was billed as a "Drink the Pain Away" night, and, yes, that description was very, very apt. Uncov, of course, prides itself on being the anti-TechCrunch, and its meet-and-greet reflected that spirit. Unlike the uptight, identically dressed sycophants atTechCrunch9, the crowd at Mars Bar was vibrant, loud, and fun. And drunk. Very very drunk.

Word is that Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal and chief architect of Six Apart, is leaving the troubled blog-software company. And the fact that you're hearing about from a gossip blog rather than the transparency-loving company is itself a sign of how deep the problems run. Fitzpatrick, who sold his company, Danga Interactive, to Six Apart two years ago, has vested his shares, declared his boredom with Six Apart, and after weighing offers from Google and Facebook, has chosen to head to Google, a source close to Fitzpatrick says. The only reason that Six Apart management hasn't announced it, the source adds, is that they can't figure out how to spin it. Here, let me help, guys! It's bad. And Fitzpatrick's departure is just the tip of Six Apart's reality-denying iceberg.

Could this be the world's most awkward photograph? On the left, Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of Livejournal, the online diary site, and still a key exec at the company that bought him out, San Francisco's Six Apart. Also at last night's party in San Francisco's South of Market district, on the right of the snap, Artur Bergman, a colleague who had a widely-known affair with Fitzpatrick's wife. Correction: former colleague, and former wife.

Now that is how to be "brash and outspoken." Last night, LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick asked on his blog, "How should I hack?" and offered a poll.