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.

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!

In Rolling Stone magazine's continuing efforts to be hip and with it, Claire Hoffman was granted dozens of column inches to detail the rise of Facebook, especially including the allegations that co-founder Mark Zuckerberg essentially stole the idea and reneged on promises of coding help to other Harvard students when he realized that he might have a business success on his hands. The list of aggrieved parties is long, starting with Harvard which punished Zuckerberg for invading other student's privacy by creating Facemash to the ConnectU founders and even Facebook's original co-founder, both of whom have sued Zuckerberg for various improprieties. But what does it all boil down to?

Facebook will hold its second annual F8 developers' conference on Wednesday, July 23 in San Francisco. That means we'll watch Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg take another shot at his reported goal of impersonating Steve Jobs's keynote addresses. Funny thing is, Jobs isn't actually a very stylish public speaker. Check out the end of the 60-second versions of his last two keynotes below. His speeches are stuffed with frilly adjectives. Jobs only does so well because his keynotes are full of highly anticipated announcements. Zuckerberg doesn't — can't — do grand reveals.

A year ago this summer, Priscilla Chan graduated from Harvard and moved to Palo Alto to live near her boyfriend, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. But before she did, Chan and Zuckerberg, pictured, held a series of "negotiations" over how often she would get to see him, according to Sarah Lacy's book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. The final contract, according to Lacy:

Mark Hornick, the lawyer representing ConnectU's Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, on the "smoking gun" chat transcripts that data forensics expert Jeff Parmet may or may not have discovered on hard drives subpoenaed from Facebook implicating Mark Zuckerberg in grand theft source code: "We don't have them. The courts have them, Facebook has them, but ConnectU doesn't have them." [Silicon Alley Insider]

They'll let just about anyone blog these days, won't they? News.com's latest addition: recovering adman Chris Matyszczyk, who writes under the rubric "Technically Incorrect," and reminds me a bit of Dan Lyons's alter ego, Fake Steve Jobs — except that, having met Matyszczyk briefly, I think this is the real thing, not a put-on person. Matyszczyk's fantasy phone call between Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg is hilarious: Clinton blames Zuckerberg for her loss to Obama, and then hits the paper billionaire up for a donation. What's really funny: Matyszczyk is outsidery enough not to mention the fact that Zuckerberg's cofounder, Chris Hughes, left the social network early on to run Obama's Web campaign. Zuckerberg's posse really is at fault, and not in a metaphorical Facebook-generation way.

The ConnectU founders have long argued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used code commissioned by ConnectU, a rival college-based social network, to create Facebook at Harvard. Now, after agreeing to a settlement with Facebook in February, the ConnectU founders want out of the deal. They say instant messaging files found on Facebook's computers offer new "smoking-gun" evidence to make their case.

Darlings, everyone who's anyone is flying to a Caribbean island to get married. Larry Page and Lucy Southworth did the deed on some spit of sand called Necker Island. Randi Zuckerberg? The Facebooker took over something like the entire island of Jamaica to get hitched to venture-capital associate Brent Tworetzky. Or just Runaway Bay — our sources can't get that part entirely straight. But we did get a batch of photos from the wedding. A destination wedding in Jamaica? Expensive. Making your younger brother, who's ostensibly your boss and worth $4 billion on paper, dress in a turquoise vest and an ill-fitting tuxedo shirt? Priceless. The photos:

Linking up social websites, as proponents of "data portability" would have us do, can be hazardous to your privacy. And Paris Hilton's, and Lindsay Lohan's. But even the widgets on a single social network can leave us exposed. SuperPoke, a popular application made by Slide, will show you who's thrown a sheep at anyone, as long as you have their Facebook ID — the unique numeric identifier which shows up in the URL of their Facebook profile. Mark Zuckerberg's SuperPoke feed is here; substitute the number of another Facebook user for Zuckerberg's "4", and you can see every last sheep he or she has been involved with.

Welcome to the Silicon Valley hype cycle: One year, and you're over. That seems to be the consensus on Facebook's vaunted platform, whose one-year anniversary went largely unremarked. The company itself didn't blog about it until today, and sources tell us an open-bar party Facebook held in Palo Alto was low-key to the point of despair. It can't have helped that Google was throwing a massive party in San Francisco the same day to close out its conference for developers. How different a scene from a year ago, when the F8 launch event of Facebook Platform won comparisons of the company to Microsoft and of founder Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Gates.

How did we miss this at D6? Mark Zuckerberg said he'd had Google cofounder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt over for dinner recently; his digs were so Spartan, Zuckerberg said, that Page got a chair, and Schmidt wound up on the floor. Zuckerberg likes to point to his one-bedroom apartment as proof that he hasn't profited from Facebook. But according to Sarah Lacy in Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Zuckerberg cashed out $1 million in Facebook shares in an early financing round. He can afford some nice furniture, in other words; he's just too busy, or lazy, to hire an interior decorator.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the D6 conference crowd that Facebook is about allowing people to "share information and share themselves." British 16-year-old Jodie Hudson took the lesson to heart. The Times of London reports Hudson posted open invitations to her 16th birthday party on social networks Bebo and Facebook, advertising it as the""party of the year" with "a lot of alcohol [and] an amazing DJ." The party's location? Hudson's parents' $8.7 milllion Spanish vacation home. From across Spain's Costa del Sol, the people came. They didn't behave nicely. One partygoer told the Times:

CARLSBAD, CA — Mark Zuckerberg has learned nothing. Taking the stage at D6, he uttered nothing but bromides and nonsequiturs. Examples: "Facebook is a technology company ... a technology company is a company that creates technology"; "Religion, that's a big thing around the world". At his South By Southwest keynote, Zuckerberg benefitted from a crowd obsessed with the friendliness of Sarah Lacy's questions. With Kara Swisher, never a kind locutor, Zuckerberg had the spotlight shone on him, and he came off simply blank. Which is why he hired Sheryl Sandberg from Google, right?

Sequoia Capital never invested in Facebook. But Sequoia partner Mark Kvamme said at an ad conference today that the venture firm did take a meeting with founder Mark Zuckerberg early on. Problem was, according to Kvamme, Zuckerberg had forgotten about the appointment and woke up just before it started. So Zuck showed up at the meeting and made his pitch wearing pajamas. Sequoia passed — perhaps understandably, but definitely unfortunately, Kvamme told the crowd. "You kind of have to look past those things," he said. One could say the same about Kvamme's rewriting of history. We hear it's Facebook that passed on Sequoia — mostly due to a feud between the VC firm and Facebook backer Peter Thiel. (Photo by sunshinecity)

Mark Zuckerberg must be glad he's at the D6 conference in Carlsbad, where he has nothing to fear besides running into my boss. We've heard one of the reasons Zuckerberg left town in the first place was that he didn't want to be around when the company eased out CTO Adam D'Angelo, a high school friend of Zuckerberg's. Another the sensitive CEO skipped town? He may not have wanted to see the disappointment when his employees learned that the company would revoke a cherished $600 housing subsidy for those living near Facebook's downtown Palo Alto headquarters. Since reporting the news yesterday, more tipsters tell us the subsidy slash is real. According to one, new employees will get no housing subsidy and as soon as current employees sign new leases with their landlords or decide to move, they lose theirs too. "Something is going on at Facebook and it isn't good," observed commenter sggrf afer yesterday's news.

CARLSBAD, CA — I wasn't just eighty-sixed, folks. No, I was eight-D6'd. There I was, charming my way through the crowd at the Wall Street Journal's D6 conference — why hello, Sir Howard Stringer of Sony! Oh, was that Steve Case? — when a woman announced herself as "in-house security" and informed me that "the client" had asked that I be shown the door. "The client" being Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, the conference organizers, and "the door" actually just the way to the hotel bar, where I'm having a lovely fruity beverage. And Swisher and Mossberg were too late with the bum rush. I'd already been working my camera for hours. While Bill Gates bores attendees with a preview of Windows Seven, Microsoft's latest attempt to annoy the majority of computer users, you can enjoy the snapshots I took. Among the nerdspotting: Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Max Levchin of Slide.

Valleywag commenter Fidel on the Roof likes to call Facebook "Fadbook." Harvard graduates Greg Atwan and Evan Lushing, authors of the Facebook Book: a Satirical Companion beg to agree. But Atwan and Lushing might disagree with Fidel on the scale of said fad. "Facebook is huge," they write.

Google may have its free food and massage parlors, but Facebook pays its employees a $600 per month housing subsidy as long as they live near the company's headquarters in Palo Alto. At least, for now it does. "Yeah, they're talking about getting rid of the subsidy," a disgruntled Facebook employee told a local gossip who passed word onto us. Our source blames new Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — the ex-Googler picture on the right, who when hired "came and kicked everybody in the ass and said this is going to be hard," according to Facebook HR chief Christopher Cox.

In the latest installment of "Where in the World is Mark Zuckerberg," one stop on his tour to the subcontinent was to the favored ashram of Larry Brilliant, director of Google's entrepreneurial philanthropy project, Google.org. This would presumably be the one run by Neem Karoli Baba which Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs has also visited. Brilliant has said he also brought Google cofounder Larry Page and eBay cofounder Jeff Skoll there.