Allfacebook.com is reporting a rumor that Facebook will take on Apple's dominant iTunes by introducing its own music store. Few details are provided, save that they are actively looking to hire someone to head the project and discussions with studios have been ongoing. Music applications such as iLike are popular on the social network, and digital music is a natural fit with the site's original college-kid demographic. But could Facebook really pull this off? At this point, we don't really know what a Facebook music store would be. We do know, however, what it's not.

I ran into a couple I know but haven't seen for a while last night. "Oh my god, you guys, congratulations!" I gushed. "Thanks but... how did you know we got engaged?" the male half of the couple, who is the one I'm better friends with, asked. And I realized that I had read it in his Facebook profile. Also, that I was going to have to admit that.

Social networking is twice as popular with young women as young men, but adult men are more likely to use social networks than adult women. Young women use Facebook to keep in touch with friends, share pictures and communicate. Adult men tend use it to network and communicate professionally. But what's the end result? Lots of old men and young women. Creepiness ensues! [AdAge]

At 23, Mark Zuckerberg is already a conference-circuit regular — seen at last month's TechCrunch40 and again at this month's Web 2.0 Summit. But even fans ding Zuck's presence as dull, wooden and robotic. Is he shy? Nah, "He just doesn't care," says a coworker. Despite his current heavy rotation in the media, he only takes the stage when he's told it's a boost for the company. Don't believe it? Zuckerberg's not even scheduled to appear at the Facebook-themed Graphing Social Patterns conference on Sunday in San Jose. The kickoff keynote will be delivered by LinkedIn's more entertaining founder, Reid Hoffman. Aw come on, Mark. After the look-at-me antics and vain false modesty of the tech industry's quasi-celebrities, it'd be a soul-cleansing relief to come watch you stare at your shoes Adidas sandals.

"[BusinessWeek media columnist] Jon Fine is thinking he'd be truly impressed by the severity of his headache if he weren't living inside it. It's [his wife, Mediabistro lady] Laurel [Touby]'s fault for throwing such an awesome party." Oh we are sure it was bitchin'! Omg you were like soooo wasted dude!

"Older people being on Facebook is kind of weird." — Tess Lippincott, 16, reacts to her mother and other adults joining the trendy social network. Imagine what the college kids think of a teenager joining. [USA Today]

Shh. Shh. Don't talk. Everything is clear now.

Want to meet a giant of Silicon Valley, but you're stuck in the South? Here's your chance. Former PayPal CEO turned venture capitalist and Facebook board member Peter Thiel will speak at the University of Tennessee at Chatanooga on Monday. [Chattanoogan]

As rumors grow that social network Facebook will introduce its own payment system, News Corp.-owned MySpace, still the leading social network, is teaming up with PayPal, eBay's online payments division. The partnership amounts to an experiment at this point, focusing on donations to political campaigns and nonprofits — not exactly a hotbed of MySpace activity. Wake us when you can buy concert tickets on MySpace. But the move does speak to the partners' fears that Facebook will introduce its own payment system. How to respond? Become frenemies, of course. MySpace instantly has a proven payment system without months or years of development, and PayPal gains access to MySpace's millions of users. Nothing builds partnerships faster than fear of the competition.

We'd hardly blame Meg Whitman if, after this week, she decided to hang up on the phone business altogether. On Monday eBay said they were taking a $1.4 billion charge related to their acquisition of VOIP startup Skype. On Tuesday, we noted that one of Whitman's major goals in buying Skype, bolstering its auction business in China, where rivals were using click-to-call features on their auctions to close sales, has turned into a complete failure. And then, yesterday, things somehow managed to get worse.

Mark Zuckerberg's strategy of holding out for a Facebook valuation as high as $15 billion is contagious. Developers of the most popular Facebook applications have become mini-Zucks, unwilling to part with their astronomically self-valued creations. If Lance Tokuda, the chief executive of RockYou, sees any difference, it's only one of scale. Speaking about his companies popular Super Wall application, Tokuda, says "If you told me you were going to write me a check for $10 million, I'd say, 'Forget it.'" Why?

When you have a restraining order out against you, you need to be careful when playing around on social networks. A 37-year-old British man had been given a no-contact order after harassing his wife with text messages and phone calls. When he joined Facebook, he checked the box that would invite his entire address book to join as well. In Silicon Valley, that's just an annoying social faux pas. But for him, it was a violation of his no-contact rule. He received ten days in jail, but served only seven after his lawyer petitioned the court that he had been "confused" by Facebook's sign-in procedures. Good thing he didn't poke her.

How leaky is Facebook? So leaky that new hires sometimes out themselves right on the company's own website, as tech expert Jonathan Heiliger has done. Heiliger, you see, revealed his new employer by joining the company's private group for Facebook employees, a move that's visible on the site. Heiliger, who, back in the '90s, used to be a 20something rock-star Internet executive like new boss Mark Zuckerberg, will be the company's vice president of technical operations, charged with, oh, say, making sure the site doesn't crash, spew private data, or leak code. By my count, that makes Heiliger the fourth vice president with "operations" in his title. But I think Heiliger, a veteran of bubble-era companies like GlobalCenter and LoudCloud, will spend more time regaling Zuck with war stories about what it was like to run a ridiculously overvalued Internet company. And he'll thereby get to relive his fading youth. What a job!

We just heard an outlandish rumor: That San Francisco-based blogging company Six Apart, whose software powers many of the world's most popular blogs, considered splitting in two earlier this year, under former CEO Barak Berkowitz. But the company recently upgraded its CEO, replacing Berkowitz with executive Chris Alden, and a spinoff or sale is no longer on the table. By shedding its LiveJournal and Vox consumer blogging sites, Six Apart would have left behind enterprise blog service TypePad and the Movable Type software product — exactly the businesses new CEO Chris Alden ran before his promotion, which is likely why this old rumor is gaining fresh circulation.

"There can't be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years. That's for sure." — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Of course! Steve, we eagerly await Microsoft's Facebook killer. [Times Online]

New Jersey's attorney general plays copycat, following New York in sending a subpoena to Facebook over allegations of sex offenders on the site. [Reuters]

When it rains, it pours. And eBay's recent billion-dollar writeoff of Skype, the VOIP startup it bought two years ago, could have an impact on Facebook's negotiations to sell a stake in the social network, at a high valuation, to Microsoft or another large backer. (Both Bernhard Warner and Kara Swisher make this observation, which I'll attribute to great minds thinking alike.) Skype's financial failure is a sobering reminder of the risks of overpaying for a startup. And all of a sudden, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is playing diffident, saying Facebook "might be a fad." But what may be forgotten in this latest skeptical turn to the hype cycle is that underpaying has risks, too.

Well, this is one way to deal with competition. Spotted, today, on one Silicon Valley office worker's iGoogle homepage, a link to the recommended how-to of the day, a detailed step-by-step process explaining how to quit spending time on Facebook. This could, of course, just be a random headline surfacing on the feeds. But we find it more amusing to surmise that Google is taking a preemptive strike against the social network before they lose all their employees to the next big thing. After the jump, the full screenshot.

Facebook might be stronger in a handful of countries than MySpace, but not strong enough for their liking. The company is in the process of translating their entire site into a number of non-English languages. How do you say "poke" in Arabic? [Financial Times]

Some might assume that the Second Life backlash is merely a natural part of the hype cycle, with disproportional skepticism as the natural stage before widespread, mainstream acceptance. But here at Valleywag, we're hoping that the growing doubts actually are the mainstream reaction. Those who look deeply into the virtual world and come away seeing that it's neither "the marketplace of the future" or the "new branding frontier" are, we believe, merely observant. Like, for example, the analysts at Yankee Group, who think there's more than a small problem with Second Life.