NICK DOUGLAS — You were qualified, they could afford you, and they needed you. So why didn't they hire you? They didn't want to tell you, but your boss-to-be rejected you because of the best kegger of your senior year. She saw the photo with the sorority girl with — is that a tattoo or a third nipple? — straddling you as you spray Heineken all over her. A new study summarized by CNET says that one in five employers look up job candidates online. In your industry, you'd best bet everyone at the company is not only googling you, but digging up your MySpace and your blog as well. That doesn't mean you have to stop having fun; it just means you have to take the following steps to keep what's none of their business out of their business.

NICK DOUGLAS — Why even bother recapping the Wall Street Journal's latest profile of Mark Zuckerberg? Andy Kessler's profile of the Facebook founder (published with the embarrassingly Matthew-Perry-esque illo shown here) is a parody of itself, really, like a Mad Lib built from all the other silly profiles of him and his site. In fact, the only surprising thing about this profile is the handful of requisite look-how-kooky-he-is details that the paper didn't include. Below, what the Journal caught this time around ("Facebook is big! All the kids! Big!") and what it missed ("I'm CEO, bitch!"):

The Sun and The Washington Post have both reported that Barack Obama is using sinister social-networking and uploading-while-drunk tool Facebook.com to attract young voters. He joins a long line of adults who don't quite get it, like fellow Senator Evan Bayh, a man that includes both "Graeter's Black Raspberry Chip Ice Cream" and "War on Terror" on his list of likes. Of course, the kids aren't entirely okay either—Obama's Facebook profile indicates he's received 185 clip-art-for-charity "gifts." The first one? A bar of soap. Enjoy it, our articulate and clean black friend.

Kristian Laliberte, the fashion publicist of sorts who is now the enemy of Tinsley Mortimer and both a gay-bashing and a fashion victim, has a busy busy Facebook life. In addition to his self-explanation above, he is a member of this insanely oddball mix of Facebook groups: "We are So F***ing Fabulous, We Routinely Have to Beat up Paparazzi outside," "Giuliani '08," "I Look Good In Sweatpants and a Popped Collar" and "Remembering Professor Edward Said." Confuse me? We did not know there was a spot in any known Venn diagram where anti-Orientalism met early, face-bloated mornings at Bungalow.

Formerly secretive social network Facebook is, like everyone else, going the video route. You can almost hear the saturation point filling up and bursting. "Analysts say there is high demand for online video inventory from advertisers," which must be a different crop of analysts who said IAC's Barry Diller was "late to the party" for doing exactly the same thing. Facebook will be partnering with Comcast's Ziddio. What the felk is a "Ziddio," you ask?

NICK DOUGLAS — A Business 2.0 blogger yesterday blew up Google's tweaked Zeitgeist (which tracks gainers, not top searches). He also deconstructed the PR-friendly "top" lists made by AOL and Yahoo (revealed: AOL's real top searchword is "google"). But what are the top searches on sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, and Craigslist?

The New York Times on the Facebook founder's appearance at the suitful FourSquare conference for Important People:

Facebook posted a flyer for NYU users on its web site, reading:

• Chinese Facebook-ripoff Xiaonei.com was purchased yesterday. The college social networking site clone, which blatantly lifted its look and feel from Facebook, was acquired by Oak Pacific Interactive. We wonder why a company would want to purchase a knock-off of a more reputable brand. We can imagine in the not-to-distant future aging Venture Capitalists busing into Canada to purchase generic social networking sites at a mere fraction of the cost of name-brand US ventures.

We here at Valleywag love behind-the-scene tell-all books, so naturally we were intrigued by Karel Baloun's Inside Facebook: Life, Work and Visions of Greatness. Naturally we were disappointed to see GigaOm give it a ho-hum review.

After three months of stalled talks, reports the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo is still nowhere close to buying Facebook. the real question is no longer "when will Yahoo buy Facebook" but "why hasn't Facebook walked away?" And the answer is that Facebook must be more desperate than they pretend.

The New York Times takes a good look at Yahoo's woes today (even throwing in this shot of CEO Terry Semel looking like beleaguered Battlestar Galactica leader Colonel Adama), particularly its struggle to upgrade its advertising system and its inability to land a deal without Google swooping in.

yeahyeahgoogleboughtyoutubeNEXT! It's just about time someone finally picked up Facebook, and now rumors are flying (in tricked-out 767s) that both Google and YouTube are talking to the company about a buyout.

Your personal recollections of New Haven-area douchebag^* Aleksey Veyner continue to come in. Here's our personal favorite of the afternoon:

We're all a little shaky in this scary post-YouTube-acquisition world, so tech site Treadwatch gives another crazy rumor some credence:

Remember UnFaced, the tool that let Facebook users see who checked out their profiles and whether they were romantically compatible? Today in "Hey, can they do that?" news, Facebook not only sent a cease-and-desist letter to site creator John Arrow, but they also disabled his Facebook account until he takes his site down.

You've probably already seen the ridrunkulous Web 2.0 drinking game from Scifi.com that blogger Steve Rubel showed me. You've laughed at "On MySpace, take a drink if you manage to find the person you had a crush on in 2nd grade. Finish your drink if they're still hot." You even saw the added TechCrunch rules on the Supr.c.ilio.us blog. So here's one more section:

"Now serving 1,000,000," says del.icio.us. That user count sounds solid — and Yahoo's social bookmarking service has usage data to back it up — but sketchier companies have wildly inflated their numbers before. User counts, just like page counts, get inflated as companies fight for the PR limelight. Let's take a look at some of the worst offenders.

• Pew Internet releases its second Future of the Internet report. One finding: In the next 15 years, "Humans will remain in charge of technology." Oh good, I was afraid the Machines would take over. [Pew Internet]

Years ago at Harvard, one student worked hard to translate the old world of the college's Face Book into a modern, networked guide to who's doing what. That student was, of course, Aaron Greenspan. Then Mark Zuckerberg signed up for his network (houseSYSTEM), ate dinner with him, took his idea and ran.