Last week, eBay announced a few me-too social-network features allowing users to blog and share photos. Too bad it's not 2004. Meanwhile, Facebook is getting more serious about invading eBay's turf. Today, Facebook announced that developers can now write apps to search Facebook's Marketplace classifieds and create listings for users. Expect to see apps that, for a small commission, help users sell their stuff; eBay already has a ton of such apps, and they account for a large share of eBay's listings. Will this make Facebook's marketplace actually useful, though? The site's classifieds are already filled with offers for free iPhones and guides to telling if your man is cheating. If Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg can solve the spam problem, perhaps he'll add eBay CEO Meg Whitman to the list of prominent visitors calling on him with offers to buy a stake in his company.

There's been a tofu-load of articles out there about "vegansexuals," uptight eco-kids who ostensibly do not copulate (or whatever) with those who don't share their strict dietary standards—prompting a world of possible double entendres that we're just not going to go into here.

The Internet is not an excuse to be boring, stupid, or cruel. Well, cruel's fine. So join me in taking the Pledge to Not Suck at the Internet. Those who pledge get no actual privilege or prize, and the false sense of superiority is a redundant prize for you, but you can maybe make a newsletter for yourselves.

Has Facebook already cut a deal with Google? A French blog notes that Facebook, locked in negotiations with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo for an investment combined with an international-advertising deal, is already carrying Google's AdSense ads. It could be a test to see if Google's ads are lucrative enough to be worth the terms the search giant is offering — or just a stopgap measure to make money before a formal deal is struck. [Adscriptor]

Facebook has a severe flaw besides the ease with which it lets you befriend wannabe stalkers: There's no way to flaunt your equally long list of enemies. What to do with those annoying, despicable jackanapes who demand a wholly undeserved friending? Better than ignoring the request is using MIT student Kevin Matulef's temporary fix. His Facebook app Enemybook allows you to publicly rank and humiliate your sworn enemies. Inevitably, Facebook will turn this into a site feature, but until then, Matulef's app is the way to go.

By all rights, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ought to be feeling drunk with power right now. He has, I'm told, term sheets in his hands from the three giants bidding for a small piece of his startup: Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. All three, I understand, meet his demands for a staggeringly high valuation on the company — $10 billion or more. Piled up behind them are countless offers from venture capitalists and private-equity players who would be content merely to have their funds' names attached to the untouchably hot social network. So who will Zuckerberg choose?

From yesterday's "Over 40 is Facebook creepy" article in the Times: "It's no secret that Facebook, which started as a networking playground for college kids, is graying, and that the percentage of active members who are over 25 years old and out of school has risen to some 40 percent of the overall population of about 45 million. The influx raises questions. Will the loss of the campus sensibility and the youthful gestalt dilute the Facebook experience? And will the newcomers use the site — and change it? Or is it just another example of the fact that Americans age, but never seem to mature?" On the other hand, some Facebook users mature but never seem to age! [NYT]

Less than three months after Robert Scoble declared, "Facebook is the modern day rolodex," the blogger is lamenting the social network's contact limitations. "Damn I wish I hadn't locked my rolodex in this trunk." [Scobleizer.com]

Alas, poor Marissa Mayer, the Google executive who used to date company cofounder Larry Page. Her long workdays, documented in endless magazine profiles, have taken a toll on her love life. She broke up with former boyfriend Dave Jeske, another Googler, more than a year ago. No dating on the horizon, though: Her Facebook profile lists her as "single" and interested only in "friendship" and "random play." The latter, according to a quick poll of our friends, is Facebook code for one-night stands or makeout sessions. Maybe she'll get some of that at this weekend's Stanford reunion, which her profile says she's planning to attend. All of this, of course, is way more information than is listed in her profile on Orkut, Google's also-ran social network. And, perhaps, more information than anyone wanted to know.

MENLO PARK, CA. — It's hardly a secret that Microsoft and Facebook are negotiating over the purchase of a high-valued stake in the hot social network. But why would Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer be so foolish as to pick the Stanford Park Hotel as their meeting place for a final round of negotiations? The hotel, practically at the intersection of El Camino Real, the Main Street of Silicon Valley, and Sand Hill Road, the center of venture capital, is as public a spot as one could choose. And hotel-staff gossip, according to a Valleywag informant, has it that Ballmer and Zuckerberg were set to meet there this afternoon. A manager, when asked, said "important people" were meeting in the hotel's boardroom. Another source says that Ballmer was so eager to clinch the deal that he offered to head straight from the airport to Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters — an option dismissed for the more-private hotel. Oops.

OutCast PR held an AfterHours party at Frisson, the restaurant co-owned by Facebook board member Peter Thiel. So cozy, since Facebook is OutCast's biggest new client! The place was overrun with hacks and flacks. No surprise, since OutCast wants to show off its chummy press relationships, and other flacks are drawn to journalists like moths to flames. And, of course, OutCast wanted to keep things well-staffed to watch over reporters chatting up executives from Facebook and Yahoo, another big OutCast client. No need, it turned out.

Google is racing with Yahoo and Microsoft to take a stake in Facebook, and win some of its advertising business. As with YouTube, Google was late to get in on the Facebook deal — but again, it's making a full-court press, with some of its top people. Negotiating the deal: Tim Armstrong, Google's chief of ad sales; Susan Wojcicki, Google's VP in charge of product management for advertising; Joan Braddi, a Google VP involved with search; and Megan Smith, a veteran Google dealmaker. Armstong is leading Google's approach, but we hear Smith is playing a crucial behind-the-scenes role. She was also, coincidentally, spotted by many chatting up Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a recent party thrown by Facebook app-developer iLike.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang was spotted leaving Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters, according to Fake Steve Jobs. FSJ's blog, written by Forbes editor Dan Lyons is highly satirical, but from what we hear, a meeting between Yang and Zuckerberg right now makes all the sense in the world. [The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs]

If you're not drunk yet, you'll have plenty of opportunity to fix that this weekend. Start early, we say! Find your occasion on these top events from the Valleywag calendar:

LinkedIn is opening its site to developers — kind of. "We have no interest in doing it like Facebook with an open API letting people do whatever they want," says LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye. "We're not going to have people sending electronic hamburgers to each other." Party pooper. Will they at least have the greatest app ever? (Photo by Life On The Edge)

Facebook has an AIM screenname. It's not being used for much yet, just sending out invites to join the service from folks who upload their buddy list, but we see potential. Whether or not Facebook will take advantage is something very different. You can already poke and get messages via your cell phone with Facebook Mobile, but very little appears on the site about the new IM interface. At the moment, sending an IM to "Facebook" gets you a boring "if you are not on Facebook, please sign up now" message. Come on Zuckerberg, get it together. This could be a great new way to poke your friends, and we doubt Facebook cares much about a few lost pageviews. Going to my browser to poke Jason McCabe Calacanis is just too much work.

ComScore says Facebook traffic dropped in September. We didn't think that was accurate. It turns out that traffic was only "down" because ComScore's measurement panel (along with Nielsen and others) only measures traffic from home. As students return to school, they are removed from the panel and traffic "drops." Facebook says that active monthly users is still rising at 3 percent a week, as it has since January 2007. [GigaOm]

"Social networking is second only to chat rooms as the worst place to advertise. The content there from your friends and your family is more compelling than any advertisement. Google has the greatest advertising in media history — search advertising. When you type a word into the box, we know what you're looking for. When you're on Facebook, we know you're looking to meet a girl or talk to your friends. It's a terrible platform for advertising. The holy grail of e-commerce forever has been that people are going to buy something online because their friends did, or that everybody here is into skiing so we're going to sell a bunch of skiing stuff. It hasn't happened. Plus, e-commerce is a low-margin business. It's nowhere near search inventory."

Earlier, we scoffed at the idea that Facebook's traffic could have dropped in September. Compete.com — the poor man's ComScore, which makes its traffic data publicly available — just released September data that shows a similar drop. Maybe Facebook has peaked. More likely: since the kids returned to college, the free time they had to screw around on Facebook this summer has disappeared in favor of schoolwork and frat parties. MySpace, Orkut and Bebo were all down in September too. Amid the hysteria about Facebook's traffic dropping, everyone seems to have forgotten that Facebook traffic was down last September as well.

The hype around Facebook's application platform has created a mad rush to grab potential riches, but like many a Forty-Niner, developers are bound to find mountains barren of gold. In the case of MediaMouth, formerly Digital Kiosk Technologies, they are staking their claim to the "First Music Store Inside Facebook." The only problem? MediaMouth's store is not what you would think.