My profiles:
"Senior Manager of Platform Evangelism (developer relations) at eBay, Jeffrey McManus, is leaving the auction site. He's headed to Yahoo as Director of Product Management working with new developer initiatives."
Joi Ito is an investor in both, as well as in Six Apart. Loic le Meur and Reid Hoffman (of LinkedIn fame) also have a stake in Socialtext and Six Apart. I have a hard time thinking that some if not all of those four companies won't somehow be merged within the next two years, since they're all facets of the same thing.
Following its Craig's List investment, I also believe eBay is the most likely acquirer of that social web editing and identity conglomerate in the making, which should be a piece of cake to set up through the Hoffman and Omidyar connections. Identity and trust are central to eBay, so this could make sense in several ways.
It's also interesting to see Hoffman and Mark Pincus (Tribe.net) invest in the same company, as the social networking space will of course need to go through a lot of consolidation probably starting next year if not sooner.
Update: Pierre Omidyar: What I've been up to.
09/30/04 update: Esther Dyson, Reid Hoffman and Joi Ito invest in Flickr. These people hunt in packs!
12/15/04 update: Feedster Becomes Omidyar Network Partner.
01/17/05 update: omidyar.net FAQ.
Erik leaves Amazon.com (but doesn't tell where to go/what to do) and Brad joins Six Apart to work on PHP dynamic rendering in MT 3.1, a welcome development I and others have been harping about for a while. There are some things you want to do at rendering time while near-static performance can be achieved using templating and caching systems such as Smarty (which Brad showed how to integrate with MT a while ago -- this is what I'm using here though I'm far from making full use of it).
While we're at it, I see Michael McDaniel leaves Amazon.com's personalization team too for MSN to work on... personalization. Seems it's transfer season! Update: Alex Edelman too leaves Amazon.