Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may not have strictly stolen the code he wrote for others but kept for himself to start Facebook. But the company is certainly garnering a reputation for appropriation. FriendFeed has offered comments on items from other services piped into a single update timeline. Now you can do the same with Facebook updates. [VentureBeat]

Visa will launch a microsite for small businesses called Visabusinessnetwork.com. To market the site, Visa purchased $2 million worth of Facebook advertising to give away in $100 chunks for the first 20,000 small businesses joining the site. Visa marketers are telling reporters that Facebook is full of small business, many of which depend on the site for internal communications. But this deal isn't about analytics or numbers. It's about Visa showing its hip enough to market on Facebook and a Facebook ad sales team smart enough to put a big $2 million price tag on the privilege. Put it this way: We're pretty sure somebody bought someone else a steak in order to get this deal done, and frankly, it makes us a little proud. We know moving past do-it-yourself dashboards and one-click purchases isn't easy in a Web world run by Google search advertising.

In China there's a popular consumer practice called tuangou or "team-buying," in which a large group of like-minded shoppers meet online and organize a trip to a local store. On that decided-upon day, they all show up in a huge pack and offer to buy, say, 75 digitial cameras from the store owner, but only if he'll agree to a 25 percent discount. If the owner doesn't agree to the deal, they all walk out. Instead of spending all their time developing better ways for Facebook users to poke each other or play board games online, why don't widgetmakers use the "social graph" to determine which users might have like-minded shopping interests, band them together and send them as a pack to amenable online and offline vendors? People have tried this before, but they didn't have acess to all of Facebook's data. I'm sure nobody would mind such an actually useful service taking a PayPal-esque cut off the top, Mr. Levchin.

One in a while a Web application comes along that's so damn useful, even we'd invest in it. Facebook? Nah. MakeMeBabies, the site that lets you create ruddy-cheeked mashups from any two photos? Its diapers will be filled with nothing but spun gold. Here's what the site came up with from photos of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and girlfriend Priscilla Chan. After the jump, we give a few other notable couples the same treatment. Please do add your own in the comments with our image-upload feature — best and worst fake babies will win an as-yet-undetermined prize of nominal value!

It's not Ning's porn-sharing communities, Facebook's co-ed antics, and MySpace's ninja sex angel users that prevent these social networking sites from making as much money off ads as hoped. It's the issue of getting quality attention with each insertion, writes Bryant Urstadt for the MIT Technology Review. He doesn't blame the "rude content" (you know, what the users do) or the advertisers getting skittish about running a banner adjacent to the list of people you've slept with. It's not users being naughty that's the problem — it's that no one knows how to sell against "bad behavior" yet.

Ad network for widgetmakers SocialMedia plans to serve ads in Facebook widgets and possibly across the Internet that use pictures of the ad-viewers' Facebook friends. Called "social banners," the service can only display a Facebook user's picture if that user already added a widget made by one of SocialMedia's partners, thereby agreeing to share such personal information. But after adding the widget, the "social banners" service is opt-out only — much like Facebook Beacon, the controversial ad program Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called a "mistake" at the AllThingsD conference. The news has Facebook-watcher and SocialTimes blogger Nick O'Neil freaked out. "There are a number of issues at hand and many of them are extremely complex," O'Neill writes. We're not that worried. Facebook users should know that adding a third-party application means you're willing to share your personal information with that third-party. A commenter on O'Neill's post puts its simpler: "If you don’t like it just change settings to block 3rd party cookies. 10 seconds, privacy issues solved."

In the clip embedded below, News.com's Dan Farber asks Facebook's VP of technical operations Jonathan Heiliger how Facebook manages to keep up with adding 50,000 new users per day. Heilliger responds: "We're adding a lot of infrastructure and we're adding a lot of servers." That much we understood. But then Farber probes further, asking Heilliger "what's the basic architecture for delivering information at low latency?" And Heilliger answered, losing us for good:

Known best in the Valley for co-founding PayPal and serving on the board of highly-valued Facebook, on Wall Street Thiel is becoming better known as a hedge-fund wunderkind — Clarium Capital, the fund Thiel manages, is well past $3 billion may have already hit the $6 billion mark. The fund's take for taking care of all that business? $500 million by the end of the year, according to estimates by 1440 Wall Street. But then you need that kind of money for retirement if you plan to live forever on a man-made island. (Photo by David Orban)

Facebook employees losing the $600 monthly rent subsidy aren't the only ones moving out of Palo Alto. With plans to grow by more than 1,000 employees this year, Facebook is planning to move from its cluster of rented offices sources tell BoomTown. Relocation options include the old Hewlett-Packard buildings west of Palo Alto as well as office parks in Mountain View and Sunnyvale. At least one young man at the company isn't happy about it, though.

News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch told an audience at the Cannes ad festival yesterday that Facebook, "done a great job of being the flavor of the month the last six months of last year." Murdoch went on to dismiss the site as a simple "directory" and, comparing it to News Corp's own MySpace, said "they've not monetized as well as us." If that's the case, Murdoch has a low estimation of Facebook's money-making prowess indeed. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose company paid $900 million for the right to sell the ads for MySpace in 2008, said last month it still hasn't figured out a way to profit from the deal.

On the "yellow carpet" at the SpikeTV Guy's Choice Awards, Mahalo Daily host Lon Harris asked Tila Tequila what it would take for Facebook to woo the über-popular MySpace user. "A big fat check," she jokes at first. But after a little prodding, she admits that an appeal to the heart might also work, "if the person or whoever runs it is hot and takes me out on a date." Harris proceeds to explain that 24-year old co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is "pretty hot." He must like guys with long necks and big ears.

Google's mission is to organize all the world's information. It's working. For example, there is apparently no better resource on the Internet than Google Maps for British teenagers trying to decide which houses have the best pools for to sneaking into and hosting bacchanalian parties. Facebook, which is dedicated to "connecting people," helpfully gets in on the action too. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that once the British teenagers decide on a pool, they use Facebook to invite as many as 500 of their closest friends. Comfortable with Facebook's renowned privacy setting, the Herald reports the teenage organizers happily share their cell phone numbers to help coordinate the event. Just another example of how American teens are falling behind in technology thanks to a poor public education system, since this is far more complex than the "fire in the hole" prank.

Facebook now allows advertisers to target users based on their workplace, major, and keywords — which can include a job title. Smart. What's odd is that Microsoft bought a full-page ad in the San Jose Mercury News in order to poach Yahoos, instead of creating a Facebook ad targeting software engineers with computer science degrees living in Sunnyvale and working at Yahoo, ages 30 to 45. What does $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook get you these days, if not a basic tutorial on how to use the company's products?

Developers upset with Facebook's antiviral measures tell us enthusiasm for Facebook's platform is waning. Nonsense, says Steve Cohen, the head of platform engineering at Facebook rival Bebo. Earlier this year, Cohen built a platform for Bebo that was entirely compatible with apps built for Facebook. Cohen told Silicon Alley Insider that Bebo's big worry right now isn't that Facebook's redesign will kill developer enthusiam for the shared platform, but that a new Facebook platform will leave Bebo a step behind. Said Cohen: “Facebook really threw a monkey wrench in the whole compatibility thing. If we’re not compatible with Facebook, no one is going to develop for our platform.”

Originally scheduled for release in April, pushed back to June after developers freaked out, Facebook's site redesign is now delayed until July. "Launching in July gives us more time to make sure we release the best possible profile design to our users and developers," Facebook's Pete Bratach wrote on the company blog. While perhaps clumsily handled, the delay is probably a good idea. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will give a keynote at Facebook's second annual developer conference on July 23. Drumming up anticipation for a big reveal won't turn Zuckerberg into Steve Jobs overnight, but it might help keep the focus on what he says, not how awkwardly he says it.

Facebook's vice president of product management, is reportedly leaving the company to join Benchmark Capital. Two possible interpretations leap to mind: Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook COO recently hired away from Google, is pushing out, one by one, the executives closest to Zuckerberg, leaving him increasingly isolated. Or Zuckerberg, loathe to give up control over Facebook as a product, is doing it himself. Update: Cohler is joining the VC firm as a general partner, not an entrepreneur-in-residence, as we'd first reported — a considerably more prestigious role, where he'll be investing money in startups himself, rather than waiting to get funded. He'll stay tied to Facebook a "special advisor" to Zuckerberg — which suggests that any falling-out was not with the Facebook CEO. Cohler, for his part, tells Swisher he got along well with Sandberg, and helped recruit her to the firm.

"We think we could go public on our numbers," LInkedIn founder Reid Hoffman tells Tech Ticker's Sarah Lacy in a video interview (excerpted below). But the company, which just raised $53 million, won't IPO because it would rather reinvest its profits and because the U.S. public markets are too turbulent right now. Hoffman says LinkedIn will use the money in part to buy "good, small tech teams." In the clip, Hoffman says the race with Facebook toward an IPO isn't much of a race. It's more like, "No, you go first," he explains. Hoffman and his handpicked CEO, Dan Nye, shouldn't grow too cautious. Hoffman himself helped PayPal go public during the last downturn, so he knows a strong company can thrive in a poor market. But more importantly, for a professional's social network like LinkedIn, we can't imagine much better free marketing than the nonstop coverage CNBC would give consumer tech's first major IPO in years.

Who's been left out of the Facebook fad? Not the gentry at Mark Zuckerberg's alma mater Phillips Exeter Academy, but the sorely un-trad being withheld from frighteningly diverse public education programs by home-schooling parents. They're white, anglo-saxon and protestant, too, why the exclusion from the frat-munity? Not to worry — Facebook's Christina Holsberry, a Leland Stanford Junior University graduate has decreed that you kids taught the narrowest of ideological positions have a place on Facebook. So rejoice, ye lambs, who will save us all yet from the sin that is evolutionary theory — may you generate many holy advertising impressions!

Jason Preston, the on-again off-again boyfriend of designer Marc Jacobs, was, the last time we checked, off-again, and seems to be dealing with the resulting depression the way so many of us do: through sad, small gestures on the internet. The cry for help above came in a Facebook status update, but it may as well have been in an instant messenger away message or Twitter post. Preston should take solace in the fact that, while we're all "gradually... dying," we're not all doing so in beautiful $2,000 Dior boots. In case he doesn't, please remember to "poke" him, in the Facebook sense (of course). [Guest of a Guest]