After overhearing a woman dis Twitter at a Whole Foods, founder Evan Williams found an ingenious use for the service: Calling people names if they think your company sucks. I think she has a point. [Twitter]

LiveJournal, only months after Six Apart sold the blogging site to Russian Web firm Sup, has resumed its tradition of corporate drama. Jason Shellen, the company's VP of product management, just announced he'd left the company. I asked him if this had anything to do with the ruckus over LiveJournal's elimination of unpaid, advertising-free accounts. "No," said Shellen, who worked at Blogger and then Google after the search giant bought the blog startup. "In social media, you have to have a thick skin." What did Shellen in was the 10-hour time difference between Moscow, where Sup is headquartered, and LiveJournal's San Francisco office.

Google and Twitter have teamed up to create a Super Twitter Tuesday Google Map, a useful enough mashup which shows election-related Twitter messages by location. More exciting? Google bought Jaiku, Twitter's main competitor, last fall.

In a long-overdue move, Chris Sacca, Google's "director head of special initiatives," has left the company. Cleverly, though, he's moving into a new career where he can continue to talk a lot and let others do the work: He's becoming an angel investor, working with Evan Williams's Obvious, the company which spun off Twitter, and Paul Graham, whose Y Combinator specializes in funding companies with utterly adorkable names. We figured Sacca's career at Google might be foreshortened when Google listed an opening for a "director of other," since that pretty much sounded like Sacca's job. Doing anything other than work. Congratulations, Chris: In a Valley that unfairly discounts laziness, you're now the ultimate value stock.

While other startup founders have to stay home and, you know, work, these guys have the time and the spare $3,000 to spend hanging out at a zero-agenda conference in Hawaii. (For the record, we're jealous.) Spotted in Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz's Flickr stream: Benchmark entrepreneur-in-waiting Nirav Tolia; "stepped-up" LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman; FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo, who's rolling in Googlebucks; Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale; Evan Williams from Twitter; Mashery's Oren Michels; and
Kevin Rose (and his new haircut) from Digg with Joshua Schachter from the Yahoo-owned Del.icio.us. One question: Is this really Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg? I don't recognize him looking so unnerdly. (Photo by: bradley23)

Evan Williams, the astute creator of Blogger and Twitter, is acting mesmerized by the unflappable showmanship of AT&T chief executive Randall Stephenson. He Twitters: "I like this Randall chap that runs AT&T, surprisingly. Straight shooter, he seems." Clever. Yes, Ev, I'm sure Stephenson will agree to that text-message revenue-share scheme you have in mind. [Twitter]

When Hollywood meets Silicon Valley, language barriers appear. Twitter founder Evan Williams reports hearing the following angry exchange: "Programming! Writing *programs*. For their website!" [Twitter]

"How about a social network which just limits you to 10 friends?" — Twitter founder Evan Williams, speaking at Web 2.0 Summit on the beauty of designing within constraints.

Earlier today, we reported on Twitter cofounder Evan Williams's plans to make money by charging advertisers for the privilege of spamming users with Twitters. Supposedly, the "microblogging" startup doesn't want to insert ads within Twitters. But it looks like it's testing how receptive Twitter users might be to such a program, by appending helpful "tips" to the end of messages. [This Is Going to Be Big]

The TechCrunch40 attendee who's been brutally parodying the conference on Twitter as "Techcrunch40" says that the service — whose founder, Evan Williams, is a TechCrunch40 panelist — abruptly changed his username to "NotTechcrunch40." [Twitter]

Inc. magazine is digging into the mystery of who's running TheFunded.com, a website which lets entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists. Writer Max Chafkin makes four guesses: Gawker Media publisher and Valleywag emeritus Nick Denton; Digg founder Kevin Rose; Blogger and Twitter founder Evan Williams; and blog blowhard Jason Calacanis. Asked by Chafkin, Calacanis denied being "Ted," the mysterious man behind the site. A curious stance, since until recently, Calacanis was eagerly attempting to take credit for TheFunded.com. Never one for subtlety, he told friends of his plan to leak a rumor to Valleywag that he was behind the site. Alas, no, Jason: You only wish you were clever enough to come up with an idea like TheFunded.com.

The happiest day of your life ought to be free from workaday entanglements. But no one, apparently, has informed attendees at today's wedding of Sara Morishige, a designer and former recruiter at Google, and Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and Twitter. Two guests, at least, have already sent Twitter "tweets" from the event. (The couple is seen here in a pre-Twitter photo from 2004 taken by Williams.)

I hate you, Paul Kedrosky. Why? Because you've said, more perfectly than I ever could, why venture capitalists love profitless companies like Twitter, which has just raised a financing round from Union Square Ventures, the New York-based venture capital firm run by Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham. Companies with real business plans, making real money? It's cheap enough to start a company these days that savvy entrepreneurs don't need venture capital, funding themselves from a few angel investors and reinvested profits. It's only the clueless, the hapless, and the willfully profligate types like Evan Williams of Twitter, who want to fumble around with a fun toy for as long as they can get away with it, on whom VCs can make the tall dollars.

As if he hasn't already made enough money from Google, Blogger founder Evan Williams cashed in from today's sale of presentation software startup Zenter. [evhead]

Odeo, a podcasting site started by Evan Williams, who already made a tidy little fortune selling Blogger to Google, is buying back the share owned by investment firm Charles River Ventures. A source told Valleywag, Evan made the decision to dump investors (the venture capitalist aren't happy), which leads us to believe Williams still greatly cares about the company and has plans for Odeo's future. The source also says Evans never needed the money but was scared not to take it, and Charles River is now shopping around for a new podcast companies to invest in.

Marketer and pro-blogger advocate Curt Hopkins is a good and reasonable man. Good because he's running the Blogswana project, in which students will help those affected by AIDS in Africa tell the world about their plight. Reasonable because when he asked the following Valley people — people known as good souls with a passion for world-changing technology — for financial support, he expected a few yeses and a few nos.