Back in 2001-2002, it was a nuclear winter in Silicon Valley. Thousands of dot-com startups closed shop. The IPO market dried up as well as venture funding. Oh, and it was tough for software engineers to find jobs.

Interestingly enough, it was a boon for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) as it underwent an aggressive hiring spree, taking advantage of the situation in the market and picking up talent.

Yahoo! Chief Executive Terry Semel is probably at his wits end with Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg and who can blame him.

The Internet wunderkind is in talks to sell his company for, as the Wall Street Journal calls it, "an amount approaching $1 billion.'' That's a lot of money even for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo!.

To make matters worse, Zuckerberg doesn't seem to play by the "rules'' of high-powered business. Facebook couldn't do an 8 a.m. conference call with Microsoft, another potential buyer, because Zuckerberg wouldn't be awake at that ungodly hour, the paper says. A weekend meeting was out of the question because Zuckerberg wanted to spend time with his girlfriend who was visiting him, according to the Journal. I admire Zuckerberg for having the foresight to build one of the most recognizable brands on the Internet in less than three years, but I bet that many Yahoo! investors will wonder whether Facebook is worth such a hefty price tag.

The Journal says that Facebook will top $100 million in annual ad sales. That's nice but I wonder how deep the company is in the red. Zuckerberg told the paper that he isn't focused on making money. That's the thing that CEOs of tech startups like to say. The difference is, of course, that most young companies aren't looking for such a huge pay day. Having a good brand is great, but investors want companies to "show them the money'' pretty quickly. Some on Wall Street still aren't sold on eBay's acquisition of the unprofitable Internet phone company Skype. Holders of Yahoo!, which warned of slowing ad sales earlier this week, may not take kindly to a Facebook acquisition if it's really dilutive.

Yahoo! has already made some smart moves into the hot area of social networks, such as the acquisition of the photo sharing site Flickr. It's My Yahoo! feed reader is a great way to keep tabs on blogs. Still, it's not gaining users at nearly the rate of Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace. These days, Yahoo!'s growth rates is something that concerns Wall Street.

Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) is already penalized for not being as strong as Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) in search, though it's working to improve its technology. Still, Semel does have some things in his favor. Facebook users are now "mad'' at the site for not putting sufficient privacy controls into its new News Feed and Mini-Feed features. Facebook also is opening up its membership to non-college students as it faces some pretty stiff competition from MySpace, which Rupert Murdoch is turning into the focal point of News Corp.'s Web strategy.

Facebook calls itself a "Mark Zuckerberg production.'' I will be interested to see if the credit line gets longer or whether the show turns into an IPO.