After Valleywag broke the news that Google cofounder Sergey Brin had rushed up to San Francisco for an impromptu dinner with a Facebook investor, protestations issued from his tablemates that nothing was afoot. Why, some random Russians — Brin's countrymen — got invited! Tom Rielly, the teddy-bear Ted conference organizer, was there! Absolutely no talk of Facebook all night! Oh, really. Never was an elephant in the room less mentioned, then.

THE PALACE HOTEL, SAN FRANCISCO — Thursday evening, Google cofounder Sergey Brin strode down the main hallway of this historic hotel. Pacing him step for step was Google executive Megan Smith, part of the team negotiating a fraught deal with Facebook. A Valleywag spy camera caught the pair heading into Maxfield's for dinner with an associate from Greylock closely involved in the firm's investment in Facebook. The meeting was hastily arranged only hours after Brin participated in Google's quarterly earnings call, with Brin rushing up to San Francisco. Why the hurry?

Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer dives deep into his firm's traffic data. His theory? A recent decline in Facebook traffic is more likely to be a short-term seasonal dip rather than evidence of a slowdown in growth. [Hitwise Intelligence]

Did I anger the instant-messaging gods? First, Facebook sends IMs asking me to join up when I'm already a member. Today I received three separate IMs from Major League Baseball. All three said the exact same thing. While not yet the scourge that junk faxes, spam, and ads on text messages are, IM spam, also known as "spim," is increasingly a problem. I get two to three spim messages a day, most of them on MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. Most of them tout porn and pump-and-dump stock scams. Have you received any interesting spim? Send it our way. MLB's contribution to the genre comes after the jump.

Josh Kopelman sold Half.com to eBay in 2000. Since then, he founded First Round Capital and sold StumbleUpon for $75 million, again to eBay. BusinessWeek's Kerry Miller got Kopelman to complain about three ideas he tired of seeing from startups.

You heard the Facebook, ladies: Dana Vachon is up for grabs! Get out there and snag yourself a Lit Boy. 34Bs and over, please.

For example, Greylock VC David Sze, who lead Greylock's $25 million investment round into Facebook last year. Missing from the party? Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg, rumored to be tied up with the funding deal he's so close to closing. Were you there? See anything else interesting? Please share.

Mark Zuckerberg confirms Facebook's online-ad ambitions, hinting in an interview with Web 2.0 Summit cochair John Battelle that the company is considering providing ads both for third-party applications on Facebook and, eventually, ads to run on other sites. [eWeek]

Now that PodTech founder John Furrier is without a day job, how will he fill his free time, now that he doesn't have to manage Robert Scoble? Probably with the same hobby he appears to have wiled away his time while still on duty at his online video network: hounding bloggers and Facebook members. In the waning days of his employment at his own company, Furrier treated Tree Shapiro, a near-septuagenarian ex-professional gambler from Boston, to the full treatment on Facebook. Shapiro is relatively new to "this internets kick" but, as he says, he knows his tells. Shapiro ably dispatched the startup entrepreneur and provided this observation:

In a shot across the bow of the S.S LinkedIn, Facebook has added "networking" to its list of "looking for" options on profiles. No word yet on whether Google exec Marissa Mayer has checked the box. [AllFacebook]

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — Does Nokia wish it were Facebook? Or Apple? Anssi Vanjoki, an executive at the Finnish phonemaker, can't seem to make up his mind. Nokia's introducing Ovi, a "context-sensitive" social network. Oh, and the N810, with which Nokia hopes to horn in on the iPhone's computer-in-your-pocket market. This is, surely, the ultimate bitches-just-jealous corporate strategy. We can only think that Motorola CEO Ed Zander is delighted to hear his rival's getting out of the phone business.

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — On stage, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells an audience of hundreds that his company is "happy" with its Microsoft relationship. That, of course, would be the relationship where Microsoft has exclusive control of Facebook's display-ad inventory — the relationship that Facebook, insiders say, is desperate to wriggle out of. There's only one logical reading of this response: Microsoft and Facebook have renegotiated their ad deal, allowing Facebook to sell its own ads in the U.S. — most likely in exchange for letting Microsoft take a stake in the company, shutting out Google and Yahoo. Could this really be the end of Facebook's big-money drama? (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

"We're not a media company." — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "I've heard that somewhere before." — Web 2.0 Summit program chair John Battelle, referring to Google CEO Eric Schmidt's denial, later recanted, that he was running a media company.

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage at John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly's Web conference, and he's proved to be game for questions. Battelle, clearly expecting a nonresponse, asks Zuckerberg about his company's financing — the sale of a small stake that would value the company at as much as $15 billion. Instead, Zuckerberg gamely smiles and says, "Great. It's almost wrapped up." The crowd, a bit shocked, breaks into laughter. Battelle then asks about an IPO. Zuckerberg says, "Definitely years out." (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Harvard and Oxford prof Jonathan Zittrain's Web 2.0 Summit workshop this morning, "Web Two Point No — And You Thought Microsoft Was Bad," hits on something few people think about: All the social-network information and messages flying around Facebook, MySpace and AIM are stored and retrieved through proprietary systems — at the whim of the proprietor, as Zittrain puts it. It's a sharp contrast to the email, Usenet groups and IRC channels of yore, which were generally open networks with many points of access. In this respect, Zittrain sees Facebook as the new Compuserve, a members-only resource. Even its myriad apps are built to the company's programming specs, and Facebook can change the terms of the deal for competitive advantage anytime. Be afraid — be moderately afraid.

Yahoo exceeded expectations with its third-quarter results yesterday. Panama, Yahoo's new search-ad system, is at long last paying off, if not in the grand ways Yahoo execs promised. And, after dipping 4.7 percent in yesterday's trading, Yahoo shares jumped 9 percent after hours. Why? In short, Yahoo investors discounted the quarter as old news, and focused on management's guidance for the future. They're ready to move on, in other words, and grant CEO Jerry Yang and president Sue Decker the "redo" they asked for. If only the actual company were ready to move on, too. But with its new plans, it appears to be repeating old mistakes.

I don't know about you but when I search Facebook for "Neal Pollack," I get two Neal Pollacks, neither of whom are the Neal Pollack that I want to find. (I'm looking for the Alternadad writer and blogger Neal Pollack who writes about his son so much!) But when I search from my friend's account, I get three Neal Pollacks, the last of whom is the Neal Pollack I want to find. How could we tell? Though we couldn't view his profile, we could view his friends. They include Timedouche columnist Joel Stein and his lovely wife, Cassandra Barry; Biblically-living author AJ Jacobs; Defamer editor Mark Lisanti; Gawker's once-upon-a-time editor Elizabeth Spiers; and Sloane Crosley, the indefatigable publicist. Come on, Neal! We want to poke you so hard!

Google's selling radio ads. Print ads. TV ads. Billboards. But so far, it hasn't found a way to put its ads on Facebook. VentureBeat reports that Google is working on a AdSense program designed for the social network's corps of independent application developers. Don't look for complaints from Facebook — at least not out in the open. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's whole hope behind the platform was that third parties would find financial incentives to develop new features for the site. But the program raises a few awkward questions for both companies.

Parents, your kids aren't safe anywhere, at any age. Toddlers put their fingers in outlets. Teens will act on their hormones. Twentysomethings will take jobs at Gawker Media. It's your responsibility to prevent such catastrophes from happening. Politicians will not help. Take New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo, for example. Facebook today agreed to cooperate with Cuomo's office in an investigation targeting online sexual predators. This might make parents feel better about their children's safety. After the jump, why It shouldn't.

So here's the scenario: You're idly perusing the online Rolodex of a new love or "luv" interest —his roster of Facebook friends—and you come across one or more instances of the following: "We hooked up and it was astonishing, obviously." "We hooked up and I'll never be the same again." "We hooked up and I felt connected to my body in a way I never had before. It was like being struck by lightning." What to think? Is your man some kind of slut analog of a Facebook Zombie or Vampire, but instead of "biting chumps" he is spreading whatever he has to spread IRL? Or is he a regular, relatively chaste sort of person whose friends think they are being funny?