PALO ALTO — How was Facebook's toga party, held to celebrate the company's 100 millionth user? We couldn't sit back and just read the status updates. So we sent a Valleywag spy deep inside the social network's headquarters. At last, the answer to the question, "What do you get when you mix 5 kegs of beer and a case of champagne with hundreds of geeks?" Alas, we just missed Zuckerberg — he's not known as a big drinker. But even COO Sheryl Sandberg, known for quashing every sign of fun at the company, showed, and grudgingly allowed herself to be wrapped up in a toga. The photos:

From a tipster: Omnipresent Facebook evangelist Dave Morin shows up at his company's impromptu toga party to celebrate the social networks' 100 millionth user. To the left, CEO Mark Zuckerberg; on the right, togaless Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz. Can you think of a better caption? Leave your suggestion in the comments; the best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: "Bathroom line turns ugly at Gnomedex," by WagCurious.

To celebrate the company reaching 100 million users, Facebook employees are holding an impromptu toga party at a park near the company's office on Waverly in downtown Palo Alto, a tipster reports. (Dave Morin, Facebook's ubiquitous evangelist, also Twittered about the party, so it must be true!) Is this the last hurrah for the collegiate youth culture 24-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg created, before COO Sheryl "No Fun" Sandberg moves the company to an anonymous office complex next year? It's hard to imagine Facebookers donning sheets and running around the manicured lawns of the bland former Hewlett-Packard building. Here, Sheryl — somehow we can't picture you taking part in toga parties even when you were in college. For you, from eHow, some step-by-step instructions for holding a toga party. Bonus points to any reader who sends in a photo of Zuckerberg in a toga. (Photo by andyfitz)

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg announced that the site had reached a nice, round 100 million active users by way of a status update on his profile. Though he may have been scooped by Dave Morin, a senior manager in Facebook's platform group — on Twitter. Which should make for an awkward meeting. Marketing at least used the right tools to trumpet Facebook's reach, but they might also expect a grumpy young master soon, too. Why?

The best thing Valleywag ever did for Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was to call her a liar. That's just not done in the genteel office parks of Silicon Valley. It garnered the embattled executive a much-needed wave of sympathy within her company, on which she's now planning to capitalize.Valleywag's coverage last week of Sandberg's spinning in response to the departure of a key employee was deemed, in some quarters, a "character attack." Yet Sandberg's character is the very issue here. Her response is very telling: First, she wrangled a long followup story from her frequent dinner guest Kara Swisher that called our story sexist, over-the-top — and factually correct. Swisher's report is damning for Sandberg. It acknowledges that Facebook executive Matt Cohler, who left to join Benchmark Capital, was unhappy with Sandberg's leadership. It reports that Jonathan Heiliger, the company's infrastructure chief, has also been unhappy with Sandberg — Swisher errs only in saying that the two have patched things up. Swisher's new report also means that the version of Ben Ling's departure fed to her by the company last week was false. Facebook executives have acknowledged all these facts. But characteristically, Sandberg has steered the discussion away from the real problem — the bad decisions she's made, the poor judgment she's demonstrated — and toward massaging reality. She is, even now, planning a new PR campaign to buff her image. Did it ever occur to Sandberg to figure out why she rubs so many of Facebook's technical leaders the wrong way? Could it have anything to do with her meddling in matters that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said aren't her job? Facebook has real problems in Sandberg's area of responsibility. Billing, customer service, and other mundane-but-critical aspects of the social network's advertising operations are chaotic, and require fixing. Sandberg's moves to shore up her image suggest the real reason for her unpopularity within Facebook: Her overwhelming concern for style over substance. How ironic that that pointing that out has sent Sandberg spinning.

When he moved Facebook to the Bay Area, Mark Zuckerberg deliberately set up shop in Palo Alto, not the self-involved hipstersphere of San Francisco. But he's been spending a lot of time in the City lately. Friday, a tipster spotted him in SoMa, near Twitter's headquarters. Kevin Rose, founder of Digg and lover of beer and women, met with Zuckerberg yesterday at the Samovar Tea Lounge. And Zuckerberg just added Twitter cofounder Evan Williams as a friend on Facebook.

ConnectU cofounders and identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss finished sixth out of six in Saturday's Olympic rowing finals. As you can tell from NBC's clip above, it wasn't close. It was an anticlimactic end to a rousing — for some, arousing — Olympic run for the beefy Harvard-grad dreamboats. The pair only made the finals after a stirring upset last week. Australians Drew Ginn and Duncan Free finished first. Sure, they have a gold medal, but did they create a college social network good enough for Mark Zuckerberg to copy? (Photo by Getty Images)

A tipster reports spotting Mark Zuckerberg in San Francisco today, outside 21st Amendment in San Francisco. He was "having a conversation (all smiles) with two other guys," our tipster tells us. The restaurant and bar is near San Francisco's South-of-Market startup epicenter, so there's any number of reasons Zuckerberg might have been in town. But I can think of one reason why he'd be all smiles: He's not in Palo Alto, where Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is busily wrecking his company. When Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg as Facebook's COO, he said she would not be in "overall charge" of the company, but would stick to running business operations. As she's repeatedly meddled in technology and product, Facebookers have asked Zuckerberg what's going on — and he's kept repeating his "overall charge" promise, even as Sandberg pulls an Al Haig — "I'm in control here" — down in Palo Alto. Zuckerberg's misdirection is entirely intentional — and very revealing of his management style.Zuckerberg tends to fall in love with his latest hire, and give that person more and more responsibility, until there's some obvious failure. Even from the outside, it's crystal clear that's what happened with Oven Van Natta, Sandberg's predecessor as COO; it happened, too, with Chamath Palihapitiya, whose portfolio waxed and waned with Zuckerberg's favor. So Sandberg's rampage through Facebook's technical ranks is just par for the course. If past experience is any indication, Zuckerberg's hanging back, keeping his fingerprints off her actions, and waiting for her to trip up. Her botched handling of ace product marketer Ben Ling's departure may be what turns Zuckerberg against Sandberg — or not. What's clear: When his disfavor arrives, it will be sharp, cold, and unmovable. Sandberg won't know what hit her. And Zuckerberg will be all smiles — like he was today in San Francisco.

ConnectU may be the college social network that isn't Facebook, but then Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is also the social network founder who isn't an Olympic finalist. Row2K interviewed the pair who are, ConnectU founders and dreamboats Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. From the interviews, giddy fangirls and boys will be excited to learn that Cameron is the one who likes to play guitar, read books and watch movies. He's also very excited to seeing Beijing because he's never been to China before. Tyler doesn't say as much, but we do learn from the interview, excerpted above, that he was very tall in his youth. In an early 1960s rock band, we think he'd be the one who wore sunglasses on stage. The pair — who, along with third cofounder Divya Narendra, handed over all ConnectU shares to Facebook this week after months of legal wrangling — compete for gold this Saturday.

Facebook's COO is tearing down the temple. That's the only conclusion I can reach after witnessing the Sheryl Sandberg's management of the Palo Alto-based social network. What I hear from inside Facebook: She demands total loyalty, and brooks no dissent — even the healthy, boisterous debate that's common to startups. You're either with Sheryl, or you're against Sheryl. And if you're against Sheryl, you're not long for Facebook. What's really frightening is how she effortlessly cajoles lies from her underlings. Note how Matt Cohler and Ben Ling exited the company singing her praises — despite what the talented executives were telling confidants in private about Sandberg. There's a simple explanation for that: She bought them off, with still-valuable Facebook stock.Do the math: Ling joined Facebook in October 2007. He's leaving Facebook in a few weeks, months before his one-year anniversary — and it normally takes one year of employment for stock options or restricted stock to vest. However miserable Ling was under Elliot Schrage — Sandberg's personal flack and de facto chief of staff, whom she put in charge of Facebook's development platform, to the utter shock of the entire Valley — can you imagine he walked away from that much money? Far more likely: Sandberg and Schrage asked him to resign in exchange for getting to keep his shares. Ling, who was well-regarded at both Google and Facebook, now gets to walk away from Sandberg's mess. Cohler, formerly Facebook's product chief, has also made nice noises about Sandberg — and he, too, needed the cash. He's now a general partner at Benchmark Capital, where Sandberg's husband, Dave Goldberg, is employed as an entrepreneur-in-residence. (None of this is coincidence.) General partners at VC firms normally buy into the funds they invest; Benchmark Capital's most recent fund, raised in February, is an eye-popping $500 million.The amount Cohler would have to invest personally comes to roughly $500,000, by my estimates. Selling his Facebook shares seems like the most likely way he'll come up with that money. Isn't it likely that in exchange for making nice noises about Sandberg on the way out, Cohler got an assurance that Facebook won't make trouble about his share sales? The fundamental problem with Sandberg's take-no-prisoners management style: It's exquisitely tuned for the zero-sum world of Washington, where you're either in power or out. She's treating her appointment as Facebook's COO like a new administration coming into the White House. Her years at Google, which was the only tech-startup game in town for the long years of the bust, reinforced the wrong lesson. Washington's bitter internal rivalries thrive on a scarcity of opportunity. Today's Valley has an abundance. Her employees have options, and not just the kind she can grant. Which leaves the question: Why is Sandberg so determined to drive talent out of Facebook? My working theory: She wants to remake the company in her image. Here comes the Sandberg Administration! But to do so, she'll need to find skilled accomplices, not servile yes-men like Schrage (who wouldn't know an API if it extended his subclasses). And she'll need to articulate what, exactly, her new vision is. For all of Mark Zuckerberg's flaws, he's created a website which will soon have 100 million users, and is worth billions of dollars according to a long line of Silicon Valley moneymen who are slavering to buy his employees' shares. What, exactly, has Sheryl Sandberg done, besides buy a lottery ticket by joining Google when it was still private? Sometimes you have to tear down before you build. But no one knows what, if anything, Sandberg is building — besides fear and doubt. That's hardly the mark of a Silicon Valley leader. It's a tactic that may have worked in Washington, D.C., where Sandberg worked for the viciously political Clinton administration. But she's killing the company's morale with her Beltway tactics. If she has a bright idea, she'd better start talking about it. It will take far more than three days to rebuild this temple — and it's not clear she has time to spare.

Click to viewCameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin cofounders of a college social network which is not Facebook, finished second in today's Olympic rowing semifinals, just behind the Aussies, and will compete in the finals on Saturday. It was quite the upset. Previewing today's race, Row2k.com wrote that "the Aussie pair is a lock," that "Serbia, Germany, Italy are the like contenders for the final two qualifying spots," and that the ConnectU cofounders "have their work cut out for them if they want to win a spot in the A final." While they were winning in Beijing, they lost a battle in court.The pair alleged that Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea in creating Facebook, ended up settling, and then appealed over the terms of the settlement; a judge denied their request. But if their long-fought legal battle with Facebook proved anything, it's that the JFK Jr.-lite Winklevoss brothers never quit, even when everyone — including judges — thinks they should. Take that, Serbia! (Photo by Getty Images)

Mark Penn, the CEO of Burson-Marsteller, will likely never work in politics again. He's in hot water over his advice to Hillary Clinton. A series of memos obtained by The Atlantic show Penn offering Clinton unsavory advice. (For example: highlighting Barack Obama's childhood abroad as a way of suggesting he was too foreign to be president.) But the fallen flack has a promising career as consigliere to tech CEOs, based on his advice to Bill Gates: "Being human is overrated."

ConnectU cofounders and Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss beat out Croatia to win their second heat yesterday, advancing to Wednesday's semifinals. Meanwhile, back on the home front, U.S. District Judge James Ware said Monday that ConnectU has until Tuesday to transfer all its stock to Facebook and comply with a settlement to the ConnectU founders' suit alleging that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea.The news is hardly bad news for the Winklevoss brothers and ConnectU's third cofounder, Divya Narendra. Court papers say the three will get "millions" of dollars in cash as well as stock in a startup too popular with mainstream America's millennial generation to fail. (The Winklevosses were fighting the settlement after they discovered that the Facebook common stock they would receive was worth less than they supposed.) Plus, there's still that shot at gold.

In late 2006, Facebook was rumored to be looking to acquire StudiVZ — the German social network that's 10 times the size of Facebook's German edition. In the middle of the sales talks, StudiVZ sold to Holtzbrinck Group, a Germany publishing giant, for up to $134 million. Holtzbrinck then offered the site back to Facebook for a hefty markup. Facebook balked filed suit instead, claiming that StudiVZ's site was a nearly indistinguishable doppelgänger. [PaidContent]

The prospect of Facebook minting new Valley millionaires is too delicious a story to check the facts. For example: Has Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, actually sold shares? Sarah Lacy wrote that Zuckerberg sold $1 million in shares early in the company's history. BusinessWeek repeated the notion. Too bad it's not true, as Zuckerberg himself told the company in an email last Friday announcing a plan to let employees sell some of their Facebook shares.This much is true: Zuckerberg came close to selling his shares. But at the last minute, he backed out, and instead accepted a cash bonus of $900,000 from the company. Technically true that that wasn't a stock sale; but it did amount to a liquidity event for Zuckerberg — one that didn't quite make him a millionaire. Hence the seemingly arbitrary limit on employee's stock sales. In November, employees will be allowed to sell either 20 percent of their shares, or $900,000 worth of stock — whichever is less. (The $900,000 limit, seemingly arbitrary, was based directly on the size of Zuckerberg's cash bonus.) Those shares must be sold at the common-stock valuation of $4 billion, not the $15 billion valuation Microsoft paid for in preferred shares. (Preferred stock, because it allows owners to be paid first in the case of a sale, among other rights, is more valuable than common stock, which carries no such privileges.) Those are the rules, at any rate. Facebook will have a tough time enforcing them. There's nothing under the law preventing employees from selling more than $900,000 or more than 20 percent of their holdings, and there are plenty of willing buyers, some of whom may be glad to buy the shares at a valuation higher than the sanctioned $4 billion. (Facebook hopes to prevent sales at a higher valuation to avoid a revaluation of the company that could make it harder to recruit new employees.) What's likely to happen is that employees who break Facebook's rules will see promotions disappear and future stock grants dwindle — which will matter little to the company's earliest employees. How much money is at stake? A startup typically allocates 20 percent of its shares to employee options. Even at the lower $4 billion common-stock valuation, that's $800 million waiting to bust loose from Facebook's coffers. Will Facebook's earliest employees be satisfied with a six-digit payout, knowing that some wealthy investor would be glad to make them multimillionaires? (Photo by AP/Ruttle)

ConnectU cofounders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, even as they're trying to wrestle a chunk of Facebook from former Harvard school chum Mark Zuckerberg, are training for the double-shell rowing event at the Olympics. Maureen O'Connor, an editor at Julia Allison's entertainment startup, NonSociety, hoped the privileged pair would send the site updates from Beijing. So O'Connor emailed Guest of a Guest editor Rachelle Hruska — who apparently knows the fair-haired Harvard-grad twins — to ask for an introduction. One small problem.Hruska noted that O'Connor's other blog, Ivygate, had called the twins "spoiled bitches that tried to lay one on the invincible Mark Zuckerberg and failed." We don't see the problem with hiring "spoiled bitches" to work at NonSociety — they'll fit right in with Allison! Had Hruska really been cutting, she'd have asked how Julia Allison's latest BFF, Randi Zuckerberg — older sister of the man the Winklevosses accused of stealing ConnectU's code for Facebook — would feel about the hire.

Stock options are meant to encourage employees to stay. But Facebook's skyrocketing valuation has created a perverse incentive: It actually encourages employees to quit. That's because ex-employees can sell their shares at any time, while employees have had to seek permission directly from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who frowns on insiders cashing out. (Never mind that he sold $1 million in shares early in the company's history.) Facebook has created a program that lets employees sell up to 20 percent of their vested shares. A Twitter by Facebook employee Eston Bond asking for advice on selling restricted shares suggests it's already in effect.

The not-so-subtle thesis of a Boston Globe profile of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins who claim Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea from Facebook from them: They're not just dumb jocks. The Twinklevosses, as they're known in Silicon Valley, lost in their legal effort, but are hoping to win at the Beijing Olympics, where they are competing in rowing. They and fellow cofounder Divya Narendra settled with Facebook, agreeing to sell ConnectU for shares in the company — but are now trying to overturn that agreement, saying Facebook isn't worth as much as they thought. That argues strongly against the piece's attempt to bust stereotypes.One would think they would have gotten a proper valuation on the shares before agreeing to take them as payment. That in itself suggests that the twins, who majored in economics at Harvard, weren't paying attention in class. And if they have some other evidence of brains, it wasn't on display for the Globe. Their coash, Ted Nash, tries to argue that they're just strong, silent types: "Inside, everything's working all the time with them. What you see isn't what you get." What you see, according to the Globe:

Why did I let Jackson West take a vacation? While our associate editor was away, we actually wrote something nice about Gavin Newsom — and he only had to save San Francisco from a rogue IT guy to do it! Microsoft's Windows chief, Kevin Johnson, ended up in Sunnyvale, Calif. — but not, as he'd hoped, in the corner office at Yahoo HQ. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg flubbed more media interviews this week, prompting us to suggest he get help. Maybe he could take tips from the Internet-famous Julia Allison, who crashed his developers' conference?Allison's sort-of ex, Digg cofounder Kevin Rose, said he was buying Google. Surely not for Knol, Google's weak attempt at taking on Wikipedia — at launch, its search engine didn't even work. Jackson, come back and help us make sense of this crazy business! (Photo by Jason Calacanis)

After Mark Zuckerberg's awkward Lesley Stahl interview on 60 Minutes, after his infamous SXSW keynote with Sarah Lacy and, finally, after yesterday's halting CNBC interview, it's time the poor suffering Facebook CEO got some help. Getting a copy of Marc Segar's "Coping: A Survival Guide for People with Asperger Syndrome and pointing out the relevant bits might do the trick. Even brassy Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg isn't gutsy enough for the job, we're betting, so we will. To be sure, we're not doctors. We don't know if Zuckerberg has Asperger's. But experts would agree, his obvious brilliance is as much a symptom as his inability to hold a conversation. And the advice below would seem to apply whether or not the diagnosis does.