Good to know the New York Post reads Valleywag. A story today reports that Facebook will strike a deal within two days. Down the stretch, it's looking like the race is between Google and Microsoft, with Google's Tim Armstrong, as we reported, leading the deal. The Post says Armstrong has been driving up the price to scare off Ballmer & Co., with a stake as high as 10 percent, worth up to $1.5 billion, on the table. (Photo by Jeff Kubina)

So how are the ad agencies on Madison Avenue reacting to Facebook's invite to a little gabfest on November 6 with Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the Facebook gang? "You mean this black, plastic monolith?" one industry insider said, flicking the giant plastic invite Facebook sent on the other end. "Uh huh. I got one." Oh, Zuck. You are going to grow up so fast in this big city.

Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz took some time to rehearse his Wednesday morning keynote at the CTIA Wireless conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center. No surprises are likely: Moskovitz's presentation, of which you're getting a sneak preview, will talk up Facebook's "unprecedented growth." Executives and board members are tiresomely fond of citing the stat that the social network's user base continues to grow a steady 3 percent a week. Expect, too, some figures on usage of the Facebook's iPhone-optimized wireless site. We're just curious what percentage of U.S. text-message traffic is carrying "pokes." (Photo by Brandee Barker)

Have you ever wanted to tap into the entrepreneurial spirit that generates multibillion-dollar valuations? Do you dream of becoming a Silicon Valley icon? Crave the street cred that lets you get away with wearing Adidas Adissage sandals to formal events, to nicely complement your suit? Well, sirs and madams, you can't. But wouldn't it be awesome if you could pretend to do all that while drinking sugar water laced with caffeine? Telephony company Jajah already has its own energy drink — as do celebrities as shameless as Steven Segal. Obviously there's a market that Web entrepreneurs aren't capitalizing on — and it's too bad for them we're beating them to it.

"I think it might be Scoble trying to destroy our server!" — FriendCSV creator Dan Birdwhistell, via email. So popular is his app, which exports Facebook friend data in Excel-compatible format, that nearly 100 exports are queued up on his site. One job has been grinding for 12 minutes. Sure does sound like former Microsoft publicist Robert Scoble saving the stats on his 5,000 closest friends to his hard drive. Show us your charts, Robert!

"i like making things. i stopped going to harvard after i made Facebook." — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his LinkedIn profile. Do we have a Fake Zuck on our hands? Unlikely. The profile links to Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and hardworking PR person Brandee Barker. [LinkedIn]

FriendCSV lets you export all your friends' vital data — user ID, name, sex, birthday, about information, current location, hometown, profile URL, portrait URL, high school, education, work experience, and affiliations — to an Excel file for mass manipulation. Facebook forces you to type in their email addresses yourself, but whatever. FriendCSV is a marketer, promoter or analyst's dream: Take all the info people are typing and clicking into Facebook's irrational interface, and load it into the world's favorite data analysis and manipulation tool. Oh, and when Google launches its Facebook killer, no doubt you'll be able to upload the file into it, saving me the aggravation of reconfirming for the fourth time that yes, John Markoff is my friend. (Image by TechCrunch)

Who kicked up the stir about a possible all-hands meeting today at Facebook? Why, none other than Dave Morin, manager of Facebook's platform for third-party developers. Morin cancelled a keynote speech at the Facebook Developers Garage event in Vancouver scheduled for tonight, telling organizer Gerald Bauer that the reason was "an important internal meeting for the whole team." Now, that could mean just Morin's whole platform team, one supposes, but Morin didn't leave matters very clear. I'd ask someone at Facebook what's really going on. But it's the darnedest thing: I can't find anyone there right now. It seems they're all in a meeting.

Tom Anderson may be old, but the ideas News Corp. is producing for MySpace seem older yet. In a partnership with Oberon, which builds games for other websites, MySpace will add free "casual" games in January. (Casual games, if you're not familiar with them, are the free games like Bejeweled. You know, the ones your mom stays up all night playing.) As of this morning, the Facebook platform features 738 games, including Poker as well as ripoffs of Risk and Scrabble. Google doesn't bother to tell us how many thousands of gaming widgets it's linked to through iGoogle. And does anyone remember a time before Yahoo Games? I hear that might even make money. (Photo by FredoAlvarez)

It's all Facebook platform tonight. If your company is not already developing an application, hurry up, or you'll be a social pariah. But no worries: You can drink away your pain elsewhere. It's all in tonight's Valleywag Calendar.

Need any more proof that Facebook is getting into the ad-network business? Check out its romantic overtures to big advertising agencies: AdAge reports the company has been sending chunks of carved plastic up and down Madison Avenue, inviting ad buyers to an event on November 6. Now, a Lucite brick costs about 30 cents. You can send a virtual gift on Facebook for less money than that. Despite its cheapness, though, the campaign shows that Facebook is serious about getting into advertising, and that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a believer in his company's ad-targeting technology.

Received unwanted text messages because an unknown Facebooker poked you? You might be able to profit. Indiana mom Lindsey Abrams is suing Facebook because of unwanted messages sent to her phone. The problem? The messages were meant for the person who owned the phone number before she did, and she couldn't block the texts without blocking access to messages meant for her account. The suit, filed in federal court in San Jose on Monday, seeks "unspecified damages" and class-action status.

Facebook opened its Application Directory and application "about" pages to the unwashed, unregistered masses on Sunday. You no longer have to be a Facebook member to learn about killer apps such as Top Friends, Zombies, and Food Fight. The directory and about pages will also now get indexed by search engines "like Google, Windows Live, Yahoo, etc.," Facebook said. Wonder how they came up with that short list?

Facebook, in the midst of a high-stakes negotiation over its future, has just dramatically upped the ante. How? The social network is quietly starting to promote its long-rumored ad-targeting system — under a clever costume. Facebook has disguised the system as a simple upgrade to Flyers, its much-derided system for selling cheap ads on a self-service basis. This new system shares little with Flyers except its name, however — and poses an obvious threat to Google.

Want to get rich quick, Facebook developers? Over here at Valleywag Labs, we've concocted an algorithm to identify exactly which ads you should target to your apps. Search the Valley. Search the Alley. You won't find a better CPM, ROI, or CTR than we'll provide. Don't believe us? Check out our demo on five popular Facebook apps below.

Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo — as well as a host of freelance moneybags — continue to press their offers to shower Facebook, the hot social network, with dollars and ads. And last Wednesday at San Francisco's Web 2.0 Summit, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company was close to clinching a deal. When Friday came and went without a deal, though, conference attendees where whispering about what might have gone wrong. The latest rumor, though, is that Facebook will have an announcement to make on Tuesday. How do we know that? The company has scheduled an all-hands meeting for that day.

Don't expect any pokes from Rupert Murdoch. The News Corp. chief says that "as long as they keep talking about $10 billion-$15 billion" for Facebook, he's not interested. [Times Online]

MySpace plans to double its workforce over then next year to add features, expand and compete with Facebook. The company also wants to expand to 30 countries from the 23 it's in. "We'll run out of people in the U.S. Our goal is to be No. 1 in every market and the biggest Web site in the world,'' says MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe. With Google hiring continuing unabated and Facebook wanting to double its workforce as well, where are all the employees going to come from? Sergey, Chris and Zuck: I will blog for options.

Do you hear the people sing? Rupert Murdoch did today, when nearly a quarter of investors spoke up for greater democracy within the oligarchical nonsense that is NewsCorp. At the corporation's annual meeting in New York, 23% of shareholders voted to change the current dual class voting structure to a 'one share, one vote' model. The Murdoch clan's control of 30% of the voting shares makes it unlikely the rebelling shareholders will get their way. The Guardian notes that "Defending the status quo, Mr. Murdoch said protection from takeover bids was beneficial to shareholders because it allowed the management to take more risks." Okaaay.

"Would you rather own Facebook or CBS.com? I'd rather own Facebook." — CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith, explaining at the Web 2.0 Summit why the watercooler buzz has moved from broadcast TV to social networks.