With a $240 million dollar investment in new best friend Facebook sealed, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is probably enjoying an afterglow of congratulatory pokes on the social network. We don't know. The chief executive has maintained a profile on Facebook for some time, but strangely, hasn't reciprocated my request to be his friend. So we're left to imagine what that profile might look like. Anyone got a screenshot of the real one? Send it in.

Now that Google has lost to Microsoft in the Great Facebook Battle of 2007, I imagine relations between the search giant and the $15 billion social network are only getting frostier. Facebook is continuing to poach Google's employees, for one. And Google plans to strike back by launching a platform for social applications next month. All that has to make things awkward for Dave Morin, Facebook's developer-platform manager.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini told BusinessWeek he's not that impressed with Facebook. Or at least not $15 billion impressed. "When you hear of a Facebook valuation at $15 billion, you wonder how you monetize that," Otellini said. But don't get too down, Zuck. There's always your $5 billion to cheer you up. (Don't think about monetizing that, either, or you'll just get depressed again.) Plus, Otellini might not really know what he's talking about. His idea for Craigslist? "Why can't you put up a Craigslist for open jobs?" Um, Paul? (Photo by acaben)

"[Microsoft's] $240 million investment in Facebook values the social-networking Web site at 500 times its estimated 2007 earnings of $30 million. To put a valuation like that into perspective, if you slapped it on General Electric, the industrial conglomerate would have a market cap of $11 trillion, just $1 trillion short of the total U.S. GDP." What brilliant analysis! Because we all know GE is growing 2.8 percent a week, just like Facebook. [Deal Journal]

Yesterday, some of you Vista-using, registry-repairing, bug-ignoring Microsoft lovers weren't impressed when I reported Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's secret plans to eat Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's brains. Come on. The guy's a thug, and it's only going to get worse because his psych-out tactics are clearly working elsewhere.

Internal memos offer, if not juicy gossip, telling insight into the character of an organization. Not so with the missive Microsoft lead negotiator Kevin Johnson sent around to explain his Facebook triumph. It's just more "win-win-win" blather that you'd expect from a salesman. Johnson tells coworkers the deal will demonstrate to advertisers that Microsoft is a winner and that for publishers "it is further evidence of Microsoft's commitment to long-term innovation." I'm sure the thousands of geeks in Microsoft's R&D labs are stewing over that line — not that they've come up with anything even vaguely as cool as Facebook. But whatever. We know the real reason Johnson sent the memo. To get this reply from Ballmer — the CEO's actual words: "Great job you really pulled this together unbelievably." Cha-ching!

Maybe Google cofounder Sergey Brin is feeling a little touchy. Yesterday, while Microsoft and Facebook consummated their deal with a very public "win-win-win" lovefest, Brin, an internal champion of the Facebook deal, was stuck with 300 financial analysts and press at Google Analyst Day. His immediate reaction to losing out to Microsoft?

How seriously is the advertising world taking Facebook and MySpace? Yesterday, advertising behemoth WPP Group acquired interactive agency Blast Radius. Terms were not available, but Blast's revenue last year was about $43 million. The significance?

Facebook CFO Gideon Yu never, ever sleeps. He's helping the social network raise another $500 million, on top of Microsoft's $240 million, from two hedge funds, at the same rich $15 billion valuation. Word is that some venture-capital firms were interested in buying into Facebook so they could get some of the buzz, but were priced out of the financing round. I wonder if Sequoia Capital, shut out of earlier Facebook rounds, was still trying this time. [The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs]

One thing has been overlooked in today's Facebook valuation announcement — how much the major players can now claim to be worth. A source tells us that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg owns about 30 percent of the company, meaning that the 23-year-old Harvard dropout is now a paper billionaire, four times over. That's more than Yahoo cofounders Jerry Yang and David Filo, and closing in on Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He is, possibly, now the wealthiest 20something in the world. (I checked on the Forbes Young Billionaire list, and the only one who was close was Albert von Eurosomething.) Other winners?

How fast is Facebook growing? It's hardly an academic question. In a conference call today, Microsoft executive Kevin Johnson cited Facebook's growth rate as a justification for investing $240 million in Facebook at a staggering $15 billion valuation. He talked about projections for Facebook's user base, currently 49 million, and revenue per user that gets you there. The problem? Johnson's math may be based on outdated assumptions.

What the hell is a poke? Facebook's proprietary pestering system, the poke, is about as ambiguous as waking up on the couch of a good friend after a wild night of partying, followed by blacking out. Is it a friendly wave? A solicitation? An accusation? There's a whole social graph of plausible "poke" translations authored by Silicon Valley tool and Facebook fanboy Dave McClure. One little poke could mean everything from "yo" to "let's have sexual relations." Charming, yes? Here's a far better idea.

You can tell that Facebook's Owen Van Natta and Microsoft's Kevin Johnson are sales guys. In a conference call announcing that Microsoft and Facebook had struck a long-expected investment and ads deal, both had the "win-win-win" patter down, along with nonanswers to hard questions. In his live coverage of the call, Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka has a rundown of the dodges Van Natta and Johnson offered. After the jump, the big questions still hovering over Microsoft and Facebook's $240 million deal.

Microsoft is rumored to have completed a deal to acquire a stake in Facebook and expand its current advertising deal. And Facebook PR director Brandee Barker even confirmed the news, if inadvertently. And now, we're already hearing rumors of how exactly Microsoft plans to stir things up on the social network's website.

Facebook debuted a BlackBerry client today, in an effort to bring more investment bankers to its platform. (As if the college girls weren't inducement enough.) Delinquent Valleywag correspondent and haughtily self-important BlackBerry user Paul Boutin sent in a test review between meetings. If you see Paul, point him back to the office — I could tell he was phoning it in. Boutin's off-the-cuff assessement, after the jump.

Is Mark Zuckerberg in charge at Facebook? That's the first question I asked myself when I saw the press release Microsoft and Facebook issued. Sure, he got his $15 billion valuation — but only $240 million in cash, a less than 2 percent stake. Facebook's investors, in other words, asserted control and prevented Microsoft from diluting their stake. On the other hand, Microsoft, crucially, will remain Facebook's exclusive third-party ad network. It's telling, I think, that Zuckerberg didn't put his name on the press release. Instead, recently demoted executive Owen Van Natta got the money quote. Why not Zuck? I don't think this is the deal he wanted.

Oh, Facebook has a deal to announce? Really? Don't rely on rumors. For confirmation of Facebook's as-yet unannounced deal with Microsoft, look no further than ... Facebook. Brandee Barker, the charmingly indiscreet head of Facebook PR, has just added Adam Sohn, who heads up global sales and marketing PR at Microsoft, as a friend. Just buddies? I think not. But I'm sure writing up the press release announcing Microsoft's investment and ad deal will make them fast friends, indeed.

News.com's Beyond Binary blog reports that Microsoft and Facebook are close to a deal that could value Facebook as high as $15 billion. If true, it will be a heartbreaking outcome for the Google team that poured weeks into making a deal happen. But for Google itself? Not so much. We hear CEO Eric Schmidt has been a skeptic of the deal from the beginning, and he can go back to talking up Orkut, Google's big-in-Brazil social network, and Google's ad deal with MySpace. For Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who bowed and scraped in multiple meetings to make a deal happen? Well, he'll get to write a big check, and subsidize Facebook's ever-growing ad network. One outside possibility: What if Facebook got rights to sell targeted ads when Facebook users visit Microsoft-owned websites? That would be the ultimate cherry on top.

So typical for New Yorkers to think that everything comes down to money. The New York Post's late-to-the-game article on Facebook this morning had just one interesting, unreported tidbit among the rehash: The stakes in Microsoft and Google's race to invest have been raised to as high as $1.5 billion — or 10 percent of the company, valuing it at $15 billion. Frankly, I'm skeptical. While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be stupid not to take all the money he can off the table, his outside investors — a list which includes Peter Thiel, Sean Parker, and Accel Partners — don't want their stakes diluted that much. Selling off that large a chunk of Facebook would shrink their collective holdings — as much as 27 percent of the company, we hear — down to less than a quarter. That's just one reason why money doesn't matter as much as the Wall Street set would have you believe.

Wired has a kind-hearted story about original Mac icon designer Susan Kare. Kare's the one behind those cloying Facebook "gifts" cluttering up your News Feed. So far, Facebook members have exchanged more than 20 million of Kare's tiny graphics. And the suckers are paying up to $1 for each. Kare's thrilled to be a con artist, of course. "I can do things in gifts that I never could in UI design," Kare told Wired. "Screen icons have a job to do — they're more like traffic signs than illustrations. But the gifts don't have to be anything other than what they are." Which is, she surely meant to go on, a way to tell your friends that you're thinking of them, but too cheap to get a real present. Also, don't miss the funny tidbit about Kare's attempt to sneak a pot brownie onto Facebook for the 4/20 holiday. That's when I really knew this was a puff piece.