(Photo: Brooke Hammerling, Instagram)

Last night, gangs of glammed-out New York techies and science enthusiasts trekked uptown to the Rose Center for Earth and Space to take in a stunningly optimistic program presented by Gizmodo and the American Museum of Natural History. The event was planned and hosted by Gawker Media founder Nick Denton (with the help of Brew PR), who appeared so eager about the "celebration of technology and discovery" that he tweeted about it numerous times prior to the event, published a grandiose blog post on Gizmodo reveling in the glorious achievements of science, and sent out an email to attendees: "This evening should be inspiring and fun," he wrote.

"I've never seen Nick so excited for a social event," one colleague remarked.

And who could begrudge Mr. Denton his excitement? The event was everything he claimed it would be--and perhaps more, depending on how many free cocktails you indulged in. Hosted by Ellen V. Futter, the president of the American Museum of Natural History, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley and Mr. Denton himself, the gathering was as swank and inspiring as expected.

Betabeat arrived to the First Comes the Dream event around 7:30 p.m. and immediately checked in on Foursquare, as tech reporters at Foursquare-branded events are wont to do. As residents of Brooklyn, we were happy to discover we'd unlocked the Far Far Away badge--"Welcome to the world above 59th street!" it exclaimed.

In the lobby of the Rose Center, we were checked in via an iPad by a lovely woman from Brew PR, who handed us a program and directed us to the Hayden Planetarium, where the night's first event would take place. The entry hallway to the Planetarium was packed with eager attendees swigging wine and snacking on cheese and grapes. We spotted Reddit general manager Erik Martin collecting drinks for fellow attendees at the bar and stopped to say hi. He escorted us over to his group, which included Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and Gawker head of ops Scott Kidder, who had just gotten back from a trip to Budapest.

"I'm a daily Betabeat reader," admitted Mr. Kidder. "But you guys should post more." (We're working on it--promise.)

Mr. Martin and Mr. Ohanian could only stay for the first half hour of the event, as they had to get to an Internet Defense League party–complete with a stories-sized projection–downtown.

Notable names gathered at the museum included Gilt Groupe founder and CEO Kevin Ryan, NY1 newspaper addict Pat Kiernan and his colleague Jamie Shupak with New York Times media nerd Brian Stelter, and AllThingsD honcho Kara Swisher, in town from San Francisco. We also spotted NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr., father of RSS Dave Winer, Talking Points Memo deputy publisher Callie Schweitzer, and Business Insider startup reporter Alyson Shontell. A sci-fi themed string quartet scored the evening with Star Trek and Star Wars songs, while the crowd bantered and nursed their cocktails.

Soon we were ushered into the Hayden Planetarium, where we found a seat in front of Branch founder Josh Miller and his mentor, former Twitter VP of Product and current COO of the Obvious Corporation, Jason Goldman. Ms. Futter, AMNH's president, began her opening remarks as Scrollkit founder Cody Brown and New York Times media reporter David Carr snuck to their seats.

NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr. said a few words before deputy mayor for economic development Robert K. Steel took the podium, lamenting the fact that Ms. Futter called the astronaut "cool" but not him. Soon, the lights began to dim and the crowd was treated to a stunning walkthrough of current NASA data displayed on the Planetarium's dome by ANMH's director of astrovisualization, the lion-maned Carter Emmart.

(Photo: American Museum of Natural History, Instagram)

We craned our necks back to take in the dizzying site: Data captured just yesterday danced across the screen as Mr. Emmart zoomed in and out. He took us to the international space station, and then out further to the moon, where he focused in on some craters before taking us out further still, to Mars. Next we were viewing our entire galaxy, and then out as far as possible so that the millions of galaxies scientists have documented twinkled like pinpoints of light on the vast darkness of the unknown. There was much oohing and aahing. When Mr. Emmart remarked that his time was up, one person in the audience actually yelped: "Awww!"

The presentation was easily one of the coolest things Betabeat had ever seen. We weren't the only ones. "I don't know what to do about how much I love space," tweeted New York Times reporter Jenna Wortham.

As the lights came back on, the crowd shuffled into elevators and down to the Cullman Hall of the Universe, where drinks and hors d'oeuvres were served and the string quartet cleared from the stage to make room for i09 editor in chief Annalee Newitz and renowned physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Mr. Tyson, who skipped a pre-screening of The Dark Knight Rises to attend, was arguably the biggest attraction of the night. At the mere mention of his name by Ms. Futter earlier, the crowd burst out into spontaneous applause. The director of the Hayden Planetarium since 2000, Mr. Tyson has risen to cult status in recent years, thanks to a combination of blatant genius and a wry brand of humor that lends him a personability untouched by most physicists. To the crowd of science geeks and Redditors on the Internet, Mr. Tyson is basically a god: memes have been carved in his name for years.

The energy in the room was palpable as Mr. Tyson took the stage and the crowd erupted into wild applause. Ms. Newitz proved a deft interviewer, easily matching Mr. Tyson's impressive wit. He spoke of his dream plans for NASA ("I want aliens to be proud of what we've done"), of why we need to rekindle our space-race era love for science, and how much he loves Star Trek. At one point, while answering a question about his ideal space program, he referenced a ship that could be outfitted with various "strap-ons." The audience giggled nervously. "That's... not the right word," he admitted, chuckling, before moving on, while patches of the audience muffled their guffaws.

Soon, program wranglers were giving Ms. Newitz the cue to wrap it up, and Mr. Tyson closed the session with remarks about how to get inspired about science again. Hungry and tired, we ducked out of the event and trotted to the exit, where we were handed a First Comes the Dream-branded moleskin and wished a pleasant evening.

All of this talk about space just made us want to go up to the stars. Luckily, we ran into the one person perhaps best enabled to allow us to reach our goal: tech investor (and former journalist) Esther Dyson. Ms. Dyson is on the board of XCor, a private corporation aiming to bring sub-orbital flight to the general public, or as general a public that can afford a $95,000 per-flight ticket. Ms. Dyson told us that she was recently trying out spacesuits for the company - she's planning to be on the last flight before the company opens it up to the masses. We eagerly asked when we could join in on the zero-gravity fun. "A few years," she told us, reassuring us that, while she would be getting a preview to the experience, she would be going up after they test it thoroughly: "When they get it right."

Though we typically bleed skepticism, we found ourselves uncharacteristically moved by the event as we crossed the park to catch a cab. The air was thick with summer, the musk of trees momentarily eclipsing the normal exhaust fumes that blanket the city. We felt filled with the vastness of space the way we always do after leaving the planetarium (we are embarrassingly regular guests there), aware again of the knowledge of just how tiny our lives, our planet, even our galaxy are.

"First comes the dream," we thought.

It was probably just the wine.

In a recent talk at the 92nd St Y, Ms. Mayer addressed the subjects of women in technology and the threat of burning out while working for startups. “I don’t really believe in burnout,” she stated, elaborating that burnout was more a product of resentment than actual exhaustion. “Know yourself well enough to know what you’re giving up,” she advised. For those people wondering if Ms. Mayer will be able to keep those opinions in light of her new situation, we would like to point out that she made those statements in late March, two months after she had learned of her pregnancy.

Screengrab from the ever-useful downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Twitter, everyone's favorite methadone drip of 140-character news and quips, has been down and unresponsive for the past hour. According to their Status Blog, engineers are aware of the unnamed "issue" and working to get things back up and running. (Hilariously, there's also a notation on the we're-fixing-it post that shows that the post has been tweeted out about 63 times.) As The Verge points out, you can still access Twitter through the mobile interface, though that seems slow to the point of unusable too.

We asked a few notorious Twitterphiles how they were dealing with the disappearance of their main communication mechanism. Joe Wiesenthal (@TheStalwart), Business Insider's resident Twitter addict, responded that he resorted to "Experimenting with Google +," Google's attempt at a relevant social network. New York Times media reporter and suspected Twitter robot Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) fell back on ancient technology: "Making phone calls." Reuters social media guru Anthony DeRosa, better known as @antderosa, seemed poised to rediscover a simpler time before Twitter when asked how he was coping: "I'm learning about this hot new social network called LIFE."

[Update 1:27 pm: There's no official update, but the stream of incoming tweets in TweetDeck seems to indicate that Twitter is back up and running. Phew!]

[Update 1:50pm: Back down! Still no official word, but TweetDeck has gone still and silent and downforeveryoneorjustme.com is confirming that it's everyone, not just me. Callie Schweitzer (@cschweitz) from Talking Points Memo, puts its succinctly: "It's literally like the world freezes."]

[Update 4:31pm: And it looks like we're finally, safely, and steadily back. Twitter engineers blame the outage on a "cascading bug," and seem to have everything under control.]

Thanks to Joyride Coffee, you had your pick of conference coffee cold brewed or pour-over

The F.ounders conference came to New York with its questionable punctuation and reputation for taking VERY good care of startup execs intact. The invite-only conference, first launched in Dublin in 2010, brings together select founders of promising companies to network, mingle, raise a glass, and possibly talk some shop between the revelry. In its relatively short lifespan, it's been massively successful in building itself up as a worthwhile gathering—trumpeting the "Davos for geeks" description bestowed by Bloomberg. It brought its brand of elite-club status to NASDAQ's offices in Times Square today for its first Stateside gathering.

Paddy Cosgrave, a surprisingly young curly-haired Irishman, started F.ounders (along with its more proletariat version, Web Summit) after shuttering a company he cheerfully referred to as "shit" in casual conversation and deciding to focus his talents on the complex world of event planning. The last F.ounders conference, in Dublin last October, included Bono, a visit with the Irish President, and bottles of expensive whiskey personalized with the name of each attendee.

This installment includes dinners hosted by Goldman Sachs and discount rooms at the Mondrian Soho. What both have in common is a carefully constructed list of attendees who look poised to become the next familiar business name. Think of F.ounders as the conference that takes Ramen-eating coders and introduces them to the rarefied world of the stateless New Global Elite, a status these aspirational entrepreneurs can reach if they stay on their current path. A training-wheel-Davos, if you will, for the Online Elite.

Here's the secret of tech conferences: What happens onstage is almost always irrelevant. With the exception of the occasional splash - usually brought about by a person who has reached his (or, rarely, her) fuck-you-money quota - panelists are well-behaved, speakers are on-message, and everything you hear from the uncomfortable chairs in the audience is a careful rehash of over-rehearsed talking points. That is why the hallway of NASDAQ was abuzz with entrepreneurs catching up with potential business partners they met three conferences ago and PR people pitching their clients to recharging journalists camped out near electrical outlets. The real key to power isn't dutifully sitting through the panels of people you want to impress, it's sneaking out with them to a dive bar on 44th to catch the England vs. Sweden game and watching their beer while they run back to the conference to ring the NASDAQ closing bell during halftime.

But even the quote-unquote "global elite" - the actual-Davos ones - still get dragged into the dirty world of inconvenience and petty bureaucracy once in a while. Arianna Huffington was spotted in such a predicament when she accidentally tried to enter through the exit at NASDAQ instead of getting in the line for security. "Excuse me miss, we need to see your ID," barked a gruff security guard. Ms. Huffington was compliant but surprised, like a 40-year-old who had just been carded at a bar, and explained that she didn't have any ID on her person. A F.ounders employee came to rescue the keynote speaker, and a second, pop-culturally-literate security guard steered her through to the right line, where she was X-rayed and surveyed just like the rest of us.

Unfortunately while our community has been incredibly passionate (and often hilarious), it hasn’t grown as much as we’d hoped. In light of this, on June 1st, we will no longer be actively working on Banters. We’re not outright closing the site down any time in the foreseeable future, but, for the sake of prudence, we’re encouraging our users to export their data here.

Leto will become the General Manager at Findings, a Betaworks company that "offers a straightforward, intuitive way to share and discuss quotes from books and the web," as Leto puts it - an appropriate place for someone with a known affinity for the written word. Leto's cofounder Patrick Moberg will also be joining Betaworks as a "Hacker-in-Residence."

Banters started out as a site to help people share their IM, text, and chat conversations with the world, and raised funding from investors like Chris Dixon, High Line Capital, and Khosla Ventures. The service launched in late 2010 as bnter, but upgraded its name to Banters in January of this year. One interesting note: If you're curious about the dynamic between founders and VCs, check out this amazing 2011 TechCrunch story of Spark Capital, Lauren Leto, and the disappearing term sheet.

Domain registrar GoDaddy, previously a supporter of the much-derided SOPA, or Stop Internet Piracy Act, suddenly pulled it support for the bill earlier today, after widespread Internet outcry and calls for a boycott.

In a conversation with Betabeat, brand-new GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman credited "the sum of feedback from various sources," including emails from customers, stories in the technology press, feedback from Internet leaders, and anti-SOPA blog posts, as being the impetus that forced them to take another look at the situation.

"In it's current form, it's not ready," Mr. Adelman said of the bill. Mr. Adelman also cited his short term in the CEO role - he's been there only a week! - for giving him the flexibility to take another look at the bill and GoDaddy's corporate support for it.

But withdrawing its support for the bill doesn't necessarily mean that GoDaddy will put its political muscle towards stopping it, at least right now. "We're going to observe and see what others propose," Mr. Adelman said, noting that GoDaddy was not precluding trying to actively prevent the bill's passage in the future, but, at this time, they were content to let "others" take more of a leadership role around this bill.

So, what was the straw that broke the camel's back? Mr. Adelman insisted that GoDaddy was responding to the outcry in the aggregate, and that there was not one particular person whose feedback was the tipping point. When asked whether support for a boycott from actor-slash-Internet investor Ashton Kutcher had affected the decision, company spokesperson Elizabeth Driscoll remarked "With all due respect to Ashton, we were well underway with creating the news release" by the time he expressed his opinion.

And how effective was that boycott, organized by a user on Reddit to convince people to move their domains from GoDaddy? While Adelman did not know the number of cancelled GoDaddy accounts off the top of his head, he did not that the company "didn't see any statistical change" in the number of accounts.

The full statement from GoDaddy:

Go Daddy No Longer Supports SOPA

Looks to Internet Community & Fellow Tech Leaders to Develop Legislation We All Support

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Dec. 23, 2011) - Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

"Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation - but we can clearly do better," Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, said. "It's very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."

Go Daddy and its General Counsel, Christine Jones, have worked with federal lawmakers for months to help craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago. Jones has fought to express the concerns of the entire Internet community and to improve the bill by proposing changes to key defined terms, limitations on DNS filtering to ensure the integrity of the Internet, more significant consequences for frivolous claims, and specific provisions to protect free speech.

"As a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Go Daddy is rooted in the idea of First Amendment Rights and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy," said Adelman.

In changing its position, Go Daddy remains steadfast in its promise to support security and stability of the Internet. In an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA though, Jones has removed blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill Go Daddy did support.

"Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future," Jones said.

Steve Jobs at MacWorld, New York City, July 17, 2001

After the news about Apple founder Steve Jobs death broke last night, Betabeat reached out to a few members of the New York tech community and asked them to share their thoughts and impressions of the ultimate CEO. Here's what they had to say:

Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures:

Steve Jobs is the iconic entrepreneur of the information age. He impacted everyone and everything. It is a great loss.

Marc Cendella, The Ladders:

We’ve lost our Jobs. Life

swipes by, fingerprints reveal:

He adopted us.

David Tisch, Techstars:

When I sat down with the 60 entrepreneurs in the TechStars program last night, we had a moment of silence… No one even blinked. As I addressed the group, the message was simple: Steve Jobs created things people dream of, he changed the world in ways people can only dream of, he impacted each one of our own dreams. As you embark on your journey to create something, I can only hope each of you strive to impact the world in a profound way.

To know that for the next 100 years, companies will be inspired by what Steve Jobs has created, will care about design and user experience, will focus on the customer… that is an impact. It is an impact that every child growing up will inherently and unknowingly feel, as they use his computers, phones, and what's yet to come. My first computer was an Apple IIGS. My computers today are all built by Apple. Hopefully my last computer will be an Apple, too. Only visionaries can impact the future and leave it a better place; he did. I hope we can also make a "dent in the universe", or at least dream to.

Dina Kaplan, blip.tv:

When I think about Steve Job's legacy for entrepreneurs, I think about two things. First, your product has to be good. So good people are excited to use it and feel happy interacting with it. When you're managing a start-up you're juggling a number of glass and rubber balls--some of which can drop and survive, but others which have to always be in the air.  Thinking about what Steve Jobs accomplished at Apple focuses your mind on the importance of a strong base for your company, which is always product.

Second, I remember hearing him say that the Apple Store was the best marketing the company ever did. I love that. Build a great product and showcase it in a wonderful way, and your hard work is done. It's simple, clean, inspirational and motivating.

Scott Heiferman, Meetup:

A friend I haven't heard from since 1990 just tweeted: "@heif Heard the news. Became teenager again. Heard you preaching the gospel of Jobs."

Obviously, he was a lifelong hero.

Chris Dixon, Hunch:

My entire life has been shaped by computers and from the Apple II to the iPhone it was always computers invented by Steve Jobs.  Every technology entrepreneur looked up to him as the greatest innovator and entrepreneur we'd ever seen - and will likely ever see again.  His passing is just an incredibly sad day for the tech world but most importantly his family and friends.

Bre Pettis, Makerbot:

My family had a software company called "Software Productions" that made children's software for the Apple II+. The programmers that worked on the software were 17 and 18 year old hackers and as a 10 year old, these guys programming software for the Apple II+ were magicians that could make the computer sing. Those programmers were my childhood heroes. I daydreamed that I would be as cool as them when I grew up. I remember being in school and there was an Apple II+ in the classroom and I was so proud that I knew how to make it work and could edit the hex code and hack it to make my characters in the game wizardry have 10 million gold pieces. That computer opened up the world for geeks like me in the 80's and inspired a generation of young people to understand technology and use it creatively.

Those early computer experiences have led me to start a 3D printer company called MakerBot to bring 3D printing to average person and to the classrooms of the world so that young people can have that same rush that I felt with the Apple II+. Every creative project I've ever done was done on hardware that Steve Jobs had a hand in. The beautiful style and the focus on user friendly interfaces changed the face of computing and made it easy to use for people to be creative. His work is an inspiration and he was taken too early and will be missed by everyone who has ever appreciated an Apple product..

Charlie O'Donnell, First Round Capital:

I teach a course called Intro to Tech Ventures at Fordham.  I don't really care too much if they write a winning business plan or build an app that gets a million downloads.  I want them to walk out of the class thinking that they can change the world driven by passion for quality, caring about customers, and being resilient--and that's what Steve Jobs did.  He went from being some kid in a garage to changing the way we live and how we interact with each other.  It's probably the second greatest story ever told.

Avner Ronen, Boxee:

Like many other entrepreneurs I am an Apple fanboy. Standing in lines to get the latest device. Hitting 'refresh' on my browser reading a "live" blog covering their latest product announcement. Jobs have changed the world for the better in numerous ways. He challenged and inspired everyone else to build better products. He made users expect more. He is responsible for spreading joy among millions of people.

His commencement speech from 2005 has been an inspiration on a personal level as well. Like many others I will share it with my kids when they grow up. It is sad he died at such a young age, but it seems he lived a full and great life, true to his principals and leaving behind a legacy that will live on for generations.

Mike Brown, Aol Ventures:

I remember buying my first iPhone and thinking to myself, 'wow, this is a truly unique user experience and what an amazing device.' It was a surprise and delight moment that I'd only experienced once before in my life when interacting with a consumer product [the other being flying on a Virgin Atlantic plane]. He really entrenched my belief that the true winners are those that make beautiful and highly functional experiences for consumers. Overall, his legacy will likely be unmatched and he already serves as an awesome inspiration to me and others who aspire to be the next generation of Jobs, Branson, etc.

Ricky Van Veen, College Humor:

Like many now, the way I tend to hear about notable deaths is via text message. And my reaction is usually "Oh, that's too bad." With Steve Jobs, it was different. I didn't even know how to respond. And that's how I felt when I read it--a full-body visceral reaction to the news. I then realized what a subtle and odd tribute it is to a technology innovator to have the news of his death carried by a product that was his brainchild.

Few things upset me more than unrealized potential. Steve saw industry after industry for what they *could* be, and not for what they are, and then made them better for everyone. He unlocked their potential. And I think about that in terms of Steve's life. Even with all he accomplished in his unfairly short time here, I'll still always wonder what else was bound to come out of that curious and brilliant mind. For people in the technology industry, yesterday we lost more than an innovator. We lost a role model, and a paragon of excellence. An example to the rest of us of how good we could be -- if we could just be Steve Jobs.

Apple Store on 5th Avenue, with a tribute to Steve Jobs spray-painted on a temporary construction barrier. October 5, 2011

Anil Dash, Activate:

The lesson I take from Steve Jobs' life isn't about any products or software, but much more about the channeling of ambition. Many, many people are driven and have lofty goals, but he made clear that you can only really capitalize on grandiose ambitions by channeling the energy of lots of other people towards that vision, and that's an amazingly powerful skill.

It's akin to James Brown; He's enormously influential on even the music we hear on the radio today, but he didn't play the drums or the horns on any of his big hits. He wasn't even that great of a singer. He just knew how to articulate a vision for how things should be in a way that would bring the best out of others.

And Jobs was similar to that, especially in that he recognized he wasn't just making technology, he was shaping _culture_. He acted like that from nearly the beginning of his career, at a time when such a idea seemed ludicrously grandiose. Just as Gates seemed wildly ambitious for imagining everyone would use a computer and use software, Jobs seemed crazy for imagining everyone would use a computer (in perhaps an unrecognizable form) to shape the way that culture is created. But as ever, what seems crazy is often just early.

Lauren Leto, Bnter:

Steve Jobs was a role model for us all in the most true sense of the word, not just a name to repeat as someone you'd like to resemble but an imposing persona to have in mind while we pitch, while we plan, while we provide. The generations before Jobs believed invention came from making objects fancier, adding bells and whistles, Jobs decided innovation was making objects simpler, making them intuitive. It's because of Jobs that our generation is no longer inventing, we're breaking things down.

Cody Brown, Commons Labs:

The first computer I ever owned was an iBook. I was 13, the processor was a blazing 600 Mhz, and my friends and family wanted me to buy a Dell. I could see their points about Apple being too 'niche' but I caved and I bought the iBook and I became a Mac person in the generic way a lot of people become Mac people. I'd spend hours on the MacRumors forums, I'd try to convince everyone I met to switch to Mac, and I repeatedly tried to get my parents to buy Apple stock. They didn't, but my grandma eventually caught wind of this and gave me 50 shares of stock for my birthday. Half those shares were sold this year to keep my company running when it was on the verge of falling apart. I made a long bet on Jobs and he returned the favor.

When I read that he passed last night I got quiet and I wanted to be alone. I never met steve jobs, I never even emailed him but I feel like he's been with with me and he's been a friend since I bought my first mac 10 years ago. There is nothing more anxiety inducing than the constant creation of new technology and Jobs, for so long, has countered this emotion with awe. When Jobs is on stage, Moore's Law and our own potential have always been positively correlated but he's never taken for granted that this happens naturally. I wanted nothing more than to meet him because I, like so many, craved to see what he was like off stage when things are hard and the answers aren't clear. But we don't have that option anymore, we only have recording of his life and his art which we often clutch in the palm of our hands. We've lost our leader in technology and I think we'd be lying to ourselves if we didn't also accept that we lost a moral and religious leader. Jobs spoke with a lucid philosophical clarity that was unmatched by anyone in tech and his endorsement meant everything. Those who had it, no longer can take it for granted and those who tried to get it, now need to think about why. I think we're going to do a lot of wandering now and I think we have a lot of hard questions to ask ourselves that we may have previously ignored. I think he'd say that this is good.

All pictures via Getty Images