So, Facebook may be raising money at a multibillion-dollar valuation, according to Kara Swisher at AllThingsD. That sounds like it might be a bargain compared to the $10 billion valuation Facebook board member Peter Thiel had bruited about. You want in? Look to the finance and executive team, and start kissing major ass. Specifically, get to know Gideon Yu, Facebook's CFO. You know, the ex-YouTube CFO who was at Sequoia for one hot minute. Odds are, he's in charge of evaluating any potential investors, so make nice with him. Haven't met him yet? No worries! His Facebook profile is protected, from us, at least, but you can still send him a Facebook message to inquire about your potential participation. Or, if you're feeling saucy, give him a poke. It might be a good way to express your creativity and willingness to be flexible when hammering out that term sheet.

Would Cambridge-founded social network Facebook have grown into its current role as tech media darling if it had stayed back east instead of seeking its fortune in California, wonders Boston.com? Answer, as supplied by Facebook investor Jim Breyer from Accel Partners: No. As in N-O. No effing way. Nada, etc. Why? Breyer elaborates: ""So many of the Facebook employees have come from top Internet companies like Yahoo, eBay, and Google that the culture that has been built at Facebook is fundamentally more consumer/Internet savvy than if it would've been built anywhere else on the planet." Sounds plausible to us! But bitterly jealous Battery Ventures partner Scott Tobin—who passed when Zuckerberg came to him for startup money— has a different take. "Folks in the Valley are incredibly ego-centric to a point of snobbery" he blithely claims. True enough. But, he goes on to say, passing on Facebook "may turn out to have been a mistake."

ATHERTON — I'm told I left the party too early, but once Third Eye Blind started playing, Thursday night's iLike bash was pretty much over for me. Don't get me wrong — I like Third Eye Blind. It's right in tune with my utterly bland and more than slightly gay musical tendencies. But this is exactly why I will never, ever use a service like iLike, which makes a Facebook app that allows you to reveal your musical taste, or lack thereof, to your friends by posting songs, and find people with similar tastes by seeing who's going to concerts. Here's the thing: I know my taste in music is egregiously bad. I don't want to advertise the fact to the world, and if anything, I want to meet people who specifically dislike the music I listen to. That's all right, though — what I really wanted to listen to was the buzz in the room.

• Friday: Anyone heading to Facebook board member Peter Thiel's posh VIP gathering Friday night? Let us know how it goes.

"Facebook is unlike anything we have seen to date because its the first megatech company built by the generation that used the web before they had sex." [A VC]

After a 15-11 loss in an ultimate frisbee match against a team of scrappy Facebookers, disc-flinging Googlers swore revenge. But the social network left the search engine, again, unable to find victory, dishing out another 15-12 tromping earlier this week. "All that free food weighing them down," snipes a Facebook-employed spectator of the match. Other Facebookers are more modest, crediting the Googlers for strongly competitive play — though some believe the Googlers may have brought on ringers who don't actually work for the company. Word is the Googlers want another rematch. What, are they trying to go for 3 out of 5? Have they seen what happened to Orkut? (Photo courtesy of the Ultimate Players Association)

Facebook may be the hottest development platform on the Web, but it has yet to answer a very important question: How are companies making money off Food Fight and SuperPoke? After it was revealed that the "Where I've Been" app wasn't sold for $3 million, one has to wonder if these developers are gaining anything more than exposure. Well, a tipster claims that one Facebook app, Free Daily $5,000 Poker Tourney, is making money. Naturally. PurePlay's poker application requires users to download a proprietary poker client, which serves advertisements to anyone who wants to partake in its free, cash-prize tournaments. And it makes some cash off people who pay to remove ads and receive a crappy newsletter. There's a lesson for all you Facebook developers — make "applications" that are just giant advertisements for your company's real moneymaker.

Hi, I am a young person who goes to major web sites! I am "in the know" about technology so I have several good ideas for these sites, and I will list them here. ATTENTION PEOPLE WHO WORK FOR THESE SITES: If you read my idea and you use it, you have to pay me for it with 1% of your company. My first idea will finally make Yahoo a popular web site.

Rapleaf is bragging that founder Auren Hoffman is an early signer of the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. That blustering broadside, authored by Plaxo's Joseph Smarr, Macromedia founder Marc Canter, videoblogger Robert Scoble, and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, wants to set your online profiles and friends lists, trapped on sites like Facebook, free. The central tenet of the Bill? That individual users retain "ownership of their own personal information" and that users have the "freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites." Which could come in handy as people begin to question Rapleaf's scraping of profile data from social networks — data these networks claim to own and have exclusive rights to.

Spook recruiters are no doubt thrilled by the news last week that Facebook would expand its offerings of targeted ads. The Central Intelligence Agency has already employed Facebook as a "peer-to-peer marketing tool" to advertise openings. Facebook's new direct marketing allows advertisers to target specific interest groups and eventually, based on historical trends and the behavior of similar users — think of those Amazon.com or Netflix recommendations — Facebook says it will be able to predict products its users will be interested in. Now the CIA and other government agencies will be able to recruit fresh candidates before they even realize they want to be a spy.

There are two possible side effects to Facebook's decision to let just anyone traipse through its student-union grounds. Since Facebook is easily one of the largest repositories of personal information, it creates a one-stop shop for such data. This means, hopefully, that people-search startups like Spock and the rest will be kicked to the curb, as users pass them up for Facebook's superior interface. Or, in another scenario, Facebook's move could be adding fuel to the fire. Next thing we know, Spock will be rolling our Facebook networks, complete with information about our school, work, and personal interests, into its profiles. And unlike Facebook, there's no control over what gets added to your Spock profile.

It was inevitable the moment Facebook let any old Internet user sign up to stalk friends, acquaintances and strangers. The social network is now opening up its walled garden to the masses — and the Web. Unregistered guests will be able to search through limited profiles from the site's homepage, and soon Google and other search engines will start indexing the site. A sensible ploy by Facebook, of course, to boost traffic by getting your second cousins, great grandmother, and neighborhood bully onto Facebook's site, without the bother of registration. Facebook is giving its users a month to set their privacy settings and limit their ability to be found. You may be able to control what unwelcome visitors see, but that doesn't make them any more welcome.

Despite the protests of literally twos of thousands of Facebook members, Time Inc. has kicked Business 2.0 to the curb. According to an unusually emotive blog post in the Times and its dry print follow-up, editor Josh Quittner and nine staffers will be shuffled over to Fortune. (The rest of 'em will be sending you resumes when the kill teams are done a-killing.) We'd be bitchy about this, but it always sucks for actual real people when a company runs a magazine into the red and then won't let a willing buyer turn it into a competitive product. The only silver lining: Mrs. Quittner, AKA Michelle Slatalla, the Times' Andy Rooney-of-the-internet, will have plenty to columnize about now with these hubby troubles!

Yahoo wants to boost its social network presence with Kickstart, an amalgamation of Facebook, LinkedIn, and alumni mailing lists aimed at college grads. Still in concept stages, Kickstart will usher in Nepotism 2.0 by helping college students hook up with the alums who hold dream jobs. [The Web Services Report]

From the mailbag, a Facebook-loving reader sends this screenshot and writes: "One of these things is not like the others... do you think there's any correlation between #4 and N.Y.U. being back in session?" Yes.

How to lure back social-network users lost to the shiny, pimply new face at school? MySpace could, we suppose, give its user interface a good scrubbing. But no, instead, the aging, News Corp.-owned website is trying to prove it's still hip by hitting the road. MySpace is hosting the eponymous MySpace Music Tour, on which headliners include Hellogoodbye and Say Anything, who both credit (or blame) MySpace for their popularity, and Polysics, which is on MySpace's in-house music label. With sites like YouTube and Facebook crowding in on MySpace , the social network is performing all sorts of stunts to prove it's still a hot property. Anything, that is, but fixing its actual product.

"[Jeff] Chu, who was offered and accepted his new position at Fast Company on Facebook, was most recently a senior associate editor at Portfolio where he created consumer product and travel sections." So maybe everything really is different now. [Romenesko]

Slammed by Valleywag? Join the self-help group on Facebook where you can bitch and moan among sympathetic brethren. Later we'll mock you derisively.

Bad enough that Facebook has stolen Google's buzz, recruited away top engineers, and dashed its hopes of being a player in social networks. Now, Valleywag has learned, a team of scrappy Facebookers has dealt those smug, self-satisfied, arrogant, overfed Googlers a humiliation where it really matters — on the ultimate frisbee field, that is. Ultimate frisbee, a sport mixing soccer and frisbee-tossing, is popular on the college campuses where Facebook first grew popular. Google's team, unwisely, challenged their Facebook counterparts to a game on the Stanford campus. The result? A 15-11 win for Facebook. Carolyn Abram, Facebook's resident blogger and a team member, adds a first-hand report:

It's either News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch's worst nightmare — or his wet dream. Two recent college graduates, Jess Martin and Drew Chen, have launched, as we predicted, SpaceLift, an application on Facebook that takes a chaotic, ugly MySpace profile page and displays it in Facebook's spare, blue-and-white layout. For Murdoch, who's voiced admiration for Facebook, even though News Corp. owns social-networking rival MySpace, this could be disastrous.