Benchmark Capital partner Bill Gurley warned that ISPs will soon lead the way in behavioral targeting, not Google or Facebook::

Just in case the rest of the world isn't paying attention to the Valley's throbbing hard-on for Facebook, Merriam-Webster has stacked the deck in favor of facebook for Word of the Year. Last year the honor went to Stephen Colbert's truthiness. While not as catchy, timely, or funny as truthiness, there is less doubt about facebook's value as Word of the Year than Facebook's valuation of $15 billion.

By publishing the names of customers and the videos they rented, Facebook and Blockbuster may have violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988, New York law professor James Grimmelmann explains on his blog. Don't worry Zuck, it's only $2,500 per violation.

Valleywag is tearing itself apart over this rumor: Did Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg get drunk — embarrassingly so — at a Thrillist SF launch party a couple weeks ago? Megan McCarthy, our party correspondent who stayed at the bash until 1 a.m., says she didn't see Zuck there. Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer says he didn't hear anything about it. But Silicon Alley Insider ran with the story, and a tipster says there were two eyewitnesses placing Zuckerberg at the scene late at night, after McCarthy left.

People in Damascus say Facebook, the popular social network, has been inaccessible for at least two weeks. Media reports quote residents speculating that the Syrian government blocked Facebook due to Israeli "infiltration" of Syrian society. Meh. We're guessing Syria's Christians, about 10 percent of the population, just didn't want Zuck to ruin their Christmas.

At the start of this video on the newly launched Big Think blog, Facebook investor Peter Thiel is utterly adorkable as he muses on the future. And then, all of a sudden, he gets heavy on us, predicting two or three decades of turmoil before we enter an age of incredible prosperity. Peter, dude, haven't you read "The Long Boom"? Prosperity now, turmoil later, please!

Have you noticed how straight dudes of a certain age always have a child with them in their Facebook profile photos? They probably think it mitigates against the creepiness of their being on Facebook in the first place but somehow it does not.

Coined by R. Stevens in his webcomic Diesel Sweeties, "social nerdwanking" means lording your social-network superiority over others, which is secretly the only reason you bother with Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Orkut, and every other social network. Except your legitimate if fruitless use of Adult FriendFinder.

This clip about Facebook's controversial Beacon ads from the MTV-wannabe Fuse network doesn't tell you much new — but there's a great line at the end. The fact that it's become news on music-video channels tells you this: The bad buzz about Beacon has traveled much, much farther than the actual ads have.

I should have taken my colleague Paul Boutin's recap of the week as a warning. Normally I take the weekend off, and I shouldn't have made an exception. But that Lucy Southworth is just so geekily adorable in this Stanford-office photo I felt obligated to cover her wedding. If it happened.

I was duped on a scoop. Word had reached me, from multiple sources, that Mark Zuckerberg had sold $40 million worth of shares in Facebook's $300 million financing round. Not so, we hear: All of the $300 million Facebook raised from Microsoft and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing is in the company's bank account, not Zuckerberg's. So why the rumor?

Venture capital's ancien régime is on the verge of being overturned. We hear Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, may have cashed out — before an IPO, before a sale, and before his investors. In the company's recent financing round, insiders believe, he sold about $40 million worth of stock. A tiny portion of his $5 billion stake, but in cash rather than on paper, and "enough that he never has to think about money for the rest of his life," says a person made privy to details of the sale. On the Sand Hill Road of old, this is simply not how things are done.

Sandra Soroka, the New York videoblogger who dumped her boyfriend through her Facebook status message may not have had her Flickr account hacked by outraged Digg users, as we previously reported. Some now suggest she staged the hack, hoping it would stem the tide of invective flooding her Facebook inbox, according to Underwire. "You can't write anything because I'm not saying anything," Soroka told fellow videoblogger Sarah Meyers, who reported Soroka was closing all her online accounts. Doesn't look like that worked, hmm?

I'm sure TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington was joshing when he threatened "war" on Facebook for hiring away one of his technical staffers. After all, the amount of damage a full-on TechCrunch assault of negative articles about Facebook would inflict on the site's business rounds off close to zero. Still, even jokingly warning another employer to stay away from "my" employees is a Valley faux pas. Such posturing is seen as a sign of weakness. If you want your tech workers to stay, you just offer them a better deal. Right, boss?

"Syrian authorities have blocked Facebook, the popular Internet hangout, over what seems to be fears of Israeli 'infiltration' of Syrian social networks on the Net, according to residents and media reports. Residents of Damascus said that they have not been able to enter Facebook for more than two weeks." Whoa! That's way way way worse than being detained, tortured and disappeared by your own government. [AP]

Why has Facebook gotten into so much trouble over Beacon, its online-advertising program which alerts friends to your online purchases and other Web activity? Until CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized, its response was largely tone-deaf. And that, we suspect, is because its youthful, well-paid employees don't see what the big deal is about telling everyone what you've bought.

The store of Googlers worth poaching must be running out. Facebook has turned to taking geeks from TechCrunch — specifically CrunchBase product manager Ben Meyer. Michael Arrington groped for the appropriate words to express his outrage.

A month and half after its big deal, Microsoft executive Bruce Jaffe told the audience for his keynote at a conference in Seattle yesterday that, yes, Microsoft "paid a premium" with its $240 million Facebook investment, setting the social network's valuation at a "rich" $15 billion. Does Microsoft already have buyer's remorse?

Facebook's company line is that Mark Zuckerberg only comes across as a brat in his online diary from college only because it's "taken out of context." Also, he's grown older and no longer says, writes or thinks about anything but users and their precious privacy. Zuckerberg was a child then. Now, at 23, he's a grownup. But in this highlighted portion of the diary, you can see Zuck's corporate guardians have nothing to worry about. What's more mature than exposing your classmates to the anonymous ridicule and scorn of their peers? In fact, we're pretty sure Zuckerberg was on to something. See for yourself in our latest Valleywag poll.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg kept an online journal during college. Part of it has become publicly available thanks to 02138's recent reporting on the ConnectU case. In this portion of the diary we witness the moment of Zuckerberg's inspiration for Facebook, the social network with 57 million active users and a bubbly valuation of $15 billion. This is, most likely, the kind of thing Facebook wanted to quash with its ill-thought-out lawsuit: