If then-President of Facebook Sean Parker had come to you in 2005, asked you to paint his new offices with a bunch of cocks, and then offered to pay you in either a few thousand dollars in cold hard cash or just the equivalent in company stock, you would probably have gone for the cash, right? Particularly if the company seemed on the whole sort of "pointless" to you, as it did to so many of us around then even though we were already becoming addicted to it? Fortunately for the painter, wild child graffiti artist David Choe, he picked the stock, which the New York Times points out is now about to be worth $200 million:

Facebook just released its first-ever official financial numbers as part of its filing to go public, and they're very impressive. One billion dollars in annual profit impressive. Also: Much of humankind is hopelessly addicted to Facebook.

Facebook will file to go public tomorrow, in case you missed the rolling thunder bombardment of news articles this week, or in the months preceding. There won't be the faintest reason for the average person to care about this IPO until shares actually start selling months from now, but in the meantime you should steel yourself for endless breathless hype pandemonium. Oh, it's going to be awful.

It might be built on science, but Silicon Valley can be as fickle and fashion conscious as any Paris couturier. Back in 2004, for example, social networking looked trivial and grubby; truly cool programmers worked on swapping copyrighted music and movies. Even robotic Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was swept up in the trend, planning to sacrifice his now-$75 billion social network for a file-sharing venture, according to newly released instant messages.

"Unfriend Finder" is a browser extension that lets you know when someone has defriended you on Facebook. It's a very useful piece of software, in the sense that if you ever want to install it you know your life has taken a wrong turn somewhere.

While en route to an Illinois hospital after doctors discovered a nail lodged in his brain, one man did what anyone with a smartphone and shocking personal news would do: he uploaded a photo of the X-ray to his Facebook profile.

Today I was playing around on Facebook's advertising interface, and found myself learning a little more than I want to know about Facebook's employees. Facebook is happy to tell prospective advertisers how many of its own workers are into kinky sex stuff. (40, FYI.)

Facebook has issued another exciting edict on how your personal data will be used, announcing a partnership in which your private status messages and comments are mined for political sentiment. The information is then passed in statistical form exclusively to Politico for that site's trademark analysis. Don't worry about opting out, because that's impossible.

You never call, you never write, and Google has had it: If you would like entry into the spiffy new Google search results, and you are a social network, Google would like you to send the company a letter first.

At first, the co-chairs of the Congressional Privacy Caucus said they were "concerned" about Facebook's tracking of users. Then they were "alarmed." Now they're just pissed.

Facebook has finally allowed the residents of the Irish town of Effin to list the place as their hometown, after months of blocking it for being "offensive". You know, 'cause "effin" sounds like the F-word, and Facebook's sensitive servers might blow up if even a hint of coarseness brushes their fiber optics.

When Facebook was only 6 percent as popular as it is today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted to upgrade his personal operating system with leadership features. So Earth's richest cylon decided to shadow his human friend and mentor, Washington Post CEO Donald Graham.

Call it the Facebook Photo Paradox: People are never as good-looking as they appear in their Facebook profile pic. But they're never as ugly as they appear in other people's Facebook pictures of them. Why do other people's Facebook photos of you suck so much?

At work, Mark Zuckerberg is the one trying, and often failing, to meet the demands of his 800 million users. But on vacation in Uruguay for eight days, the Facebook CEO gets to be the one issuing requests. And he's a rather insane customer.

In 2011, we watched as tech villains found creative new ways to violate our privacy. They misappropriated our social networking profiles, stalked us through our phones, and plucked secrets from our wifi networks. To help you better prepare for 2012's inevitable privacy attacks, we enumerate below the most worrisome threats you should monitor in the coming year.

Occupy activists are building their own more flexible and trustworthy Facebook, using of old formats, authentication protocols and open source software. But 2012's hottest login will require an invitation, so you better start attending those interminable General Assembly meetings today.

The Department of Homeland Security makes fake users on Twitter and Facebook with which to follow suspicious people. But what if you're not shifty enough to get your own government e-stalker? No problem: Just tweet "My cow collapsed, and now there's a human to animal infection outbreak among illegal immigrants."

Wondering why everyone unfriended you on Facebook? Most likely it's because you're really offensive. But it might be because you're really depressing!

Mark Zuckerberg, who personally kills all his food, is ominously proud of his escalating slaughters. Here's the bison he recently shot and devoured, mounted at Facebook headquarters as a "prank" on a less predatory executive.

Sean Parker wants to be taken seriously. Facebook's founding president badly wants to convince people he's not an amoral party boy like Justin Timberlake in The Social Network. Which is why it's strange he basically encouraged the New York Times to paint him as a cokehead.