The author of Bringing Down The House has signed a million-dollar-plus book deal for his memoir about Mark Zuckerberg and the other Facebook founders, according to a tip to Gawker. In the proposal, author Ben Mezrich claims that Zuckerberg and his friend Eduardo Saverin started Facebook to get into a secret society and, of course, to get laid. The book may not be the most rigorously factual account, as Mezrich's Bringing Down The House (the basis for the Kevin Spacey film 21) was debunked by the Boston Globe as "not a work of 'nonfiction' in any meaningful sense of the word." Also, our tipster claims Mezrich's only source was Saverin, whom Zuckerberg is now suing. Here are the juiciest (and previously unreported) details from the proposal.

Facebook will update its profile design in the next couple of weeks, a change rendered momentous if only by the millions who have known no other interface to their obsession. Below, check out the new look. Then compare it to Facebook profile designs from a past as distant as 2005. You remember the time, right? It was before Facebook's spammy apps, before the stalker-friendly News Feed, and before they let in all the jailbait high-schoolers. Come, journey with us into the lost youth of Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook launched its Japanese-language version today and vision-questing, globe-trotting CEO Mark Zuckerberg magically appeared in the land of the rising sun to take reporters' questions. Among the queries: What's the deal with Facebook dropping Google Friend Connect, the search engine's new service that sucks data out of rival social networks? Zuck explained:

What's so bad about Mozilla's Toronto workspace? Besides the fluorescent lighting, the colorless white walls and the folding tables, the worst thing about Mozilla's Toronto workspace is how we're sure management would improve it. With corporate graffiti, company logos and too many colors. That was management's trick at Facebook and look where readers ranked it in our poll on tech's ten worst workspaces — as tech's second-worst workspace, just after Mozilla. Check out the full list, below.

We've never gotten a straight story on why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took off for a trip around the world. Work or pleasure? Our latest tipster says that Zuck's travels are really about about avoiding the unpleasantries of business — specifically, easing out some of Facebook's old guard, like CTO Adam D'Angelo. Here's what he passes on:

After reviewing our post "The 10 worst workspaces in tech," commenter AdmNaismith described Facebook's office, pictured above, as "foggy, dank, dim, and utterly depressing." Commenter mothra1 hated Yahoo's New York offices more: "They suck! Lifeless and impersonal. Kinda like the douchebags who still actually work there." Meanwhile, Adobe apologist BlairHapjo told us we "clearly didn't get past Adobe's lobby," and the rest of the office features "Aeron chairs, real offices (with doors!), big picture windows." For us, the worst offices we found on Office Snapshots and elsewhere were the the ones that try too hard to seem Internet-hip, like Jajah and Google. Now it's time to settle the disputes. Below, vote for your least favorite and help us rank tech's 10 most dismal places to work:

The smack-talk inspiring contest of beer pong — known as beiruit in some quarters — scheduled between Facebook and IAC subsidiary CollegeHumor is off. Why? Because Facebook's PR and legal departments said so, CollegeHumor cofounder Ricky Van Veen told our tipster:

Money isn't everything. Mark Zuckerberg may have the highest net worth among his generation of entrepreneurs, but the Facebook CEO only gets 21 out of 294 pages in Sarah Lacy's new Web 2.0 book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. That's 16 more than his sister, nerd chanteuse Randi Jayne Zuckerberg, which tells us Lacy has her priorities all wrong. The Zuckerbergs' index page:

When Google took on Facebook in ultimate frisbee, Facebook took the series 2-0. Now we hear a contest of beer pong — the drinking game involving ping pong balls, Solo cups and Milwaukee's Best — has been scheduled between Mark Zuckerberg's finest and the New York-based, IAC-backed CollegeHumor. CollegeHumor cofounder Ricky Van Veen began the smack talk early posting the above image to his blog. It reads:

His patron saints are Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley. He wears Robert Marc spectacles his publicist picked out for him, and last summer, when he rented a Villa next to Jade Jagger's, Nicole Richie called him a "dork loser." He's the "Nerdling" from The Official Filthy Rich Handbook by Christopher Tennant, due out in June. An excerpt, below.

The Facebook Prom was prophetic, signaling farewells, graduation, and the ending of teenage ties. As his colleagues were preparing to dance the night away at the Metreon, CTO Adam D'Angelo, a high school buddy of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, was saying his farewells. BoomTown reports that D'Angelo, 23, is leaving the company because "his responsibilities no longer fit well with his skills and interests." Even as the company tries to recreate a high-school environment to keep its employees tightly knit, Zuckerberg's own social network is fraying.

Facebook's formal announcement of Facebook Connect is at once a transparently timed response to MySpace's announcement of partnerships with eBay and Twitter yesterday and the culmination of things the social network has been working on for ages. Facebook Connect, at its simplest, lets websites like Digg and Twitter integrate their users' activity into Facebook users' News Feeds. Those two companies, as well as Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa, have been using Facebook Connect well before it was unveiled under that name. It cements Facebook's role as a central place to keep up with one's friends. Yet I'm not sure how I feel about it.

"According to sources, Zuckerberg is in India and, in fact, all over the world, on a trip that is mostly for pleasure and contemplation, but also mixing in with some business." — Kara Swisher on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's travels [BoomTown] (Photoillustration by Webyantra)

We've toured the top 10 workspaces in tech. Click to viewNow, we've gone back to Office Snapshots to find the 10 worst. What makes them so bad? Some offend with exposed fluorescent lights, gray cubicles and a dystopian corporate sheen. But others, with their pseudo-hip graffiti, kindergarten toys and plastic decorations — all in a desperate attempt to seem "Internet-y" — come off even worse. We'll start with Yahoo's New York digs.

Mark Zuckerberg's in India, we hear. Is he there on holiday, or working to launch Facebook India? The answer's unclear, but Indian gossip website Techgoss.com wants to know the answer pretty badly. So badly that they're offering a 10,000-rupee reward for anyone who turns up photos of Zuckerberg and a detailed story on what he's up to. That translates to $250 — or a week's wages for an Indian computer programmer. (Photoillustration by Jackson West)

New accounts and activity on Facebook's developer forums are down dramatically since January, reports Adonomics founder Jesse Farmer. And as the above chart indicates, Facebook's users no longer add third-party Facebook applications as much as they did at the beginning of the year. Along with increased competition from social network Hi5 and consolidation into larger widgetmaking companies, Farmer blames the slowdown on Facebook for "instituting increasingly demanding and arbitrary rules on platform developers, which they then enforced selectively and for their own benefit." We agree the slowdown is likely the result of the new rules, but we don't so much blame Facebook as praise Facebook for them.

When a Facebook user adds "skiing" to the interests on their profile, it's hard for an advertiser to tell exactly what the user means. A Google search for "Ski rentals in Wolf Creek, Colorado" is much more informative, by contrast. Advertisers know what kind of pitch to deliver, albeit in the form of an AdWords haiku. Inside Facebook's Justin Smith argues advertisers have an easier time targeting users of Facebook apps — for example, one who installs a skiing weather-map application, and looks up conditions in Wolf Creek. It's one reason he says that Facebook applications will prove easier to profit from than Facebook itself.

Netscape cofounder and propagator of porn social networks Marc Andreessen will join Facebook's board of directors, Kara Swisher reports. Andreessen will join current board members Accel Partners Jim Breyer, Clarium Capital's Peter Thiel, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Andreessen is the chairman of Ning, a company which sells tools for rolling your own social network. If your mom has an excellent visual memory, she will probably remembers him for appearing on the cover of Time magazine without shoes on. You can tell her that he dresses better now, but only slightly. Why Andreessen, and not a proxy for new investors Microsoft or Li Ka-Shing?

That was fast. Not only has BoomTown confirmed our earlier report that Elliot Schrage, Google's top flack, had interviewed at Facebook; he's been hired, too, according to an internal memo sent by CEO Mark Zuckerberg from India. Which is odd: At a meeting earlier today, asked about the Valleywag item on Schrage, COO Sheryl Sandberg feigned ignorance about Schrage's interviewing for the job, but talked up what a great fit he'd be with her, given their shared Harvard, D.C., and Google backgrounds. First Sandberg threatens to shoot Valleywag, and now she's agreeing with us? At least one member of the Google PR team concurs with Sandberg on this much: Better that he go to Facebook than stay at Google.

Are Elliot Schrage and Sheryl Sandberg about to stage a policy-wonk reunion in Palo Alto? When she worked at Google, Sandberg, now Facebook's COO, helped recruit Schrage from the Council on Foreign Relations. Having taken charge of Facebook PR, Sandberg is looking to hire a VP of communications with experience in public policy. Since most Valley flacks are weak in knowing the ways of D.C., that job description is tailor-made for Schrage. Sources tell us he has already interviewed at Facebook. And we hear he's more than ready to leave Google, chiefly because of its philanderrific CEO, Eric Schmidt.