• NY Times Tech Headline: "H.P. Investigators Sought Meeting With Top Leaders." We knew all along at H.P. Chairwoman Patricia Dunn was apart of some government conspiracy gone wrong. Is it really that far-fetched that the UN might be involved in the leaks as well? [NY Times]

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• The new McDonald's advertisements in China are downright sexy. Funny how'd they'd encourage any sort of sexuality in a country where the female seeds get killed. [WSJ]
• Frat boys, mount up: tonight's the launch party for Times Square's latest horror, the Hawaiian Tropic Zone Restaurant and Lounge. It's the 700 cubic tons of sand you've always dreamed of. [The Real Estate]
• The 22-year-old founder of Facebook wants to sell for $1.5 billion, and the twit just might get away with it. You ready to kill yourself yet? Here, use our knife and be sure to cut vertically. [WSJ]
• Fox News partially sponsored the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association convention in Miami Beach. Don't tell Rupert. [New Times BPB]
• Wow: Weird Al is back. We didn't realize he was gone, but hey. [YouTube]
• You can do a lot in NYC in a single day and spend less than $100. You just might have to go to Luke and Leroy's. Sacrifices, people. [Gridskipper]
• You still have a chance to have your dirty secrets immortalized in print — the forthcoming Gawker book is still taking submissions, and it's about time you told someone about how your refusal to do anal with your boss ultimately cost you that promotion.

In a Wall Street Journal story on that quirky lil' Facebook founder (OMG he wears sandals! OMG he turns his phone off when he's with his girlfriend!), Mark Zuckerberg lets it drop that he often gets a full night's sleep.

Looks like 22-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is shopping his company again (for less than the $2 billion he wanted before). The Wall Street Journal says:

Online branding is more sophisticated than the old dot-com days (when, for example, fishing company Zapata moved into Internet media just because it owned zap.com), thanks to Google rank and word-of-mouth marketing. It's still brave to launch a site using any address other than "sitename.com," but several popular sites do just fine without.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Reuters (a week before the site opened up to the uneducated and unemployed):

We should have known that Facebook was going to suffer for its facelift. The news feed/mini-feed nonsense did feel stalker-ish in a Charlie Manson sorta way, but we're certain no one expected the heightened caliber of backlash Mark Zuckerberg, FaceBook's founder, was hit with this week.

Seriously, who let the hyperbole out? In a classic Wired-Magazine-esque move, the Wall Street Journal opened a story about protests over Facebook's new friend-tracking feature thusly:

Oh cool, Facebook redesigned the user home page with a feed of nearly every action taken by friends. Maybe you like it, maybe you don't, but the new feature brings us one step closer to a gossipy paradise (known in gossiper lore as "The Big Stalk Candy Mountain"). From this page, not only can I see what my friends are doing at this moment:

• Sony bought video site Grouper (pictured) for $65 million; analysts say it's for the technology, not for the traffic. [NYT]

The game is over, and Friendster lost.

Just like Christmas in July, New Year predictions deserve a mid-year refresher — especially since Valleywag wasn't here for New Year's. Valleywag predicts that by the end of 2006:

Facebook, the plain vanilla version of MySpace that recently rejected a $1.4 billion offer from Yahoo, convinced another schmuck that it's worth $2 billion. Ad and marketing company Interpublic (owner of PR firms DeVries and Weber Shandwick, Donny Deustch's Deustch Advertising, and scads of other firms) just agreed to sink $10 million into Facebook at a $2 billion valuation.

It's a situation every girl finds herself in: you're tooling around on your Facebook, staring at the self-portraits of your 56 "friends," when you get a message from an old girlfriend looking to reconnect. You begin emailing each other, and your bond is quickly solidified through the intimacy of instant messages. Suddenly, your friend has a problem. She's in deep shit with her art professor, and if she doesn't turn in some tasteful nude portraits, she'll lose her $2,000 scholarship. You care about your friend — after all, she is on your Buddy List — so you help her out by sending some naked pictures of yourself. It's in the name of higher education, after all.

In the booming Silicon Valley economy, everyone's looking to buy or be bought. But not all offers are equal. How do you politely turn down a lowball without burning your bridge? Let's take a look at three turn-downs — none of which were publicly reported.

Yahoo recently offered Facebook a $1.4 billion buyout, according to a crazy rumor heard at SloshCon. Tipster says Facebook rejected Yahoo (they're waiting for a $2 billion offer, remember?). Now that takes balls bigger than Stephen Colbert's.

Aaron Greenspan, Harvard student who worked on a Facebook-like independent Harvard student database, about dealing with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) when he asked Aaron for database advice:

Somewhere between the stalker-abetting "Where are you now" option and pushing every corporate flunky to tell the whole company their romantic status, religion, and sexual orientation (it's true!), America's hottest social network decided it loves privacy.

Futurist Esther Dyson catches Yahoo senior veep Toby Coppel chatting with Facebook veep and general counsel Chris Kelly. "What are they cooking up now," she asks. Oh Esther, you mischevious darling, why must you tease us so?