Mark Zuckerberg, Nipon Das wished he could quit you. After he left Facebook, Nipon Das wanted the social network to erase his personal information from its servers. Eventually that happened. But only after two months, a lengthy email exchange and — ultimately — threats from a lawyer. "It's like the Hotel California," Das told the New York Times. "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." Facebook PR flack Amy Sezak claims the company is doing users a favor by making it easy to come back to the site after they quit. 6,000 members of the Facebook group "How to permanently delete your facebook account" don't seem grateful. Sometimes I quit means I quit. Here's a tricky way to do it without laboriously deleting all your wall posts and photos, according to WikiHow.

Facebooker Dave Morin, in this photo snapped at MySpace's San Francisco launch party last week, seems to be gazing longingly at Rupert Murdoch's rival social network. Could he be switching teams? "He seemed to be very friendly with a number of MySpace execs at their god-awful party last week," reports a tipster. "He turned up late and then they all seemed to leave
together to go off somewhere." It might be time for Morin, Facebook's senior platform manager, to make a move. Some developers respect his enthusiasm for Facebook's platform, but one told me, "He's in over his head."

Electronic Arts is learning to ask questions like "What is your sex song?" and "Hottie" requests. That's right, the videogames giant is leaping into the world of Facebook applications. Former EA Los Angeles general manager Neil Young is in charge of a "stealth division" believed to be EA Blueprint, which will develop and publish games to social networks. At least someone who knows what they're doing will be making games for the network. But if these rumors pan out, this at least sheds a bit more light on the threatened shutdown of Scrabulous.

OK, we were wrong. The 1,500 volunteers who translated Facebook from English into Spanish in just four weeks were rewarded with more than just the "impact of their contribution." They got this gift from billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Click to expand the image. And your jealousy.

Gangs are using social networking sites to recruit new members. I wonder if gang recruiters have tried Facebook's new ad platform. It's supposed to be great for that sort of targeted advertising. [CBS 5]

"[Facebook] must be looking to acquire someone. I've thrown together dozens of parties for them over the past few months. Its staff is something like 400 people. A few weeks ago they ordered [a party] for 1,400; the next one will be for 2,000." — overheard on Chairlift No. 4 at Kirkwood.

Here's Mark Zuckerberg speaking at Stanford back in November 2005. The Facebook founder says,

"By the time I was done throwing together the site, I had no idea how successful it would be," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2005. "By day eight or nine I had a different idea I wanted to do. I was going to scrap it." But that wouldn't have shown that "bitch" Jessica Alona, would it have, Zuck?

Yesterday, First Round Capital VC Jeff Kopelman posted to his blog what he thought was clear evidence that Yahoo employees are planning a mass exodus. Through his venture firm, he bought Facebook ads with the message "Leaving Yahoo?" in November and again this week after Microsoft announced its intentions to buy the company. Clickthrough rates on the ads were up 300 percent this time over last, Kopelman said. What Kopelman didn't say was that this time the ads included Facebook profile pictures of current Yahoo employees. The pictures appeared because the Yahoos had joined First Round Capital's Facebook group — not because they'd left the company.

In just four weeks, 1,500 Spanish-speaking Facebook users translated the entire site, which will appear in Spanish to all users from Spanish-speaking countries starting February 11. Right now, that's about 2.8 million active users in Latin America and Spain. What did these users get for all their hard work?

Is Plaxo going to Google, as some rumors have it? Possibly. We hear Joe Kraus, a Google executive knee-deep in its effort to catch up in social networking, skipped the company trip to Disneyland this week so he could finish a deal. But other insiders say Google's not doing a deal with Plaxo. Another plausible bidder: Comcast.

Facebook is plagued with useless, annoying applications. Honestly, how many versions of Vampires, Werewolves, Pirates, or whatever can we tolerate? In an effort to euthanize the feeble, Zuck is rolling out a new feedback system which penalizes pesty applications. Facebook apps currently can send 40 messages per user per day. Apps whose messages generate clicks will earn the right to send more; apps whose messages are ignored will have their message quota cut.

Plaxo, the contact-sharing service trying to reinvent itself as a social network, may have sold itself to Google for something close to $200 million. And if the rumor's true, I think the companies may be doing it out of friendship. One could bloviate endlessly here about industry consolidation, user-data portability, and so on — and I'm sure you'll read plenty of that. I think the real reason is much simpler. Brad Fitzpatrick, the LiveJournal founder now leading Google's social-network strategy, wants to work with Joseph Smarr, Plaxo's chief platform architect. I sat with the two at lunch at the Web 2.0 Summit last year, and they got along famously.

In November, First Round Capital VC and blogger Josh Kopelman bought a pair of ads on Facebook targeted to the Yahoo and Microsoft networks, asking "Leaving Yahoo?" and "Leaving Microsoft?" Clickthrough rates were low. Only 0.3 percent clicked on the Yahoo ads, and the Microsoft ads drew no clicks at all. But after Microsoft's recent $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo, the companies' employees seem more eager to leave. Now, 0.86 percent of Facebook users who saw the Yahoo version of the ad clicked, and 1.19 percent of Microsoft employees targeted clicked on their ad.

The rumor mill is always churning on San Francisco-based Bebo. Now Google may be interested in acquiring the social network for $1 billion to $1.5 billion. That's a lot of cheese for a smallish social network that has almost no presence in the U.S. Why would Google want it?

Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told employees, will spend $200 million on capital expenditures this year. But fear not! That oversized budget, funded by Microsoft's $240 million investment, will not rest in the hands of a 23-year-old college dropout. No, even better! It's up to a 31-year-old graduate of Palo Alto High School to spend Ballmer's bucks. Despite his lack of higher education, Jonathan Heiliger has a lengthy resume and more experience than most racking up servers in datacenters. But the scale of his current project is daunting.

Apple just made a million teenagers ask their parents for $500. "If you love Facebook so much," this new Apple iPhone ad begins, "that you check it every time you're at the computer, just think how great it would be every time you're, well, nowhere near your computer." Which is funny. I guess. But we prefer the classic ending, "then why don't you marry it?"

Google has found a photogenic spokesperson for its election-tracking effort: Brittany Bohnet. Yes, the same Brittany Bohnet who was, last we checked, dating Facebook evangelist Dave Morin. Yes, the same Facebook which is aggressively pushing its own elections coverage. What's that old rule about never talking work or politics on a date?

It seems like it's always the "well known, well-respected" young gentlemen who get in college trouble for getting rapey. In this case, the young man question, a student at the prestigious Lewis & Clark College, was caught and tried by Facebook due to a secret group called "Morgan Shaw-Fox is a Piece of Shit Rapist." Shaw-Fox still doesn't think he did anything wrong, he tells Willamette Week: "With some groups of people, I was sort of becoming a fall guy for a lot of, you know, female anger, which is understandable."