Plaxo, the contact-sharing service trying to reinvent itself as a social network, may have sold itself to Google for something close to $200 million. And if the rumor's true, I think the companies may be doing it out of friendship. One could bloviate endlessly here about industry consolidation, user-data portability, and so on — and I'm sure you'll read plenty of that. I think the real reason is much simpler. Brad Fitzpatrick, the LiveJournal founder now leading Google's social-network strategy, wants to work with Joseph Smarr, Plaxo's chief platform architect. I sat with the two at lunch at the Web 2.0 Summit last year, and they got along famously.

Here's Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and girlfriend Priscilla Chan in all their North Face glamour. TMZ caught the couple leaving L.A. restaurant Mr. Chow. The cameraman accuses Zuckerberg of cheating on his girlfriend. "I think somebody's going to get in trouble," he says. Of course, Chan is Zuck's girlfriend, so the couple seem more amused than worried. But since Zuck's shy, he slips loose of Chan and wanders around a bit until a black car shows up to save the day.

Mark Zuckerberg called an all-hands meeting at Facebook to discuss the company's financials, Kara Swisher reports at AllThingsD. Headcount will swell from 450 to 1,000 this year. (To put that in context, Google adds more employees in a single quarter.) Revenues, at $150 million in 2007, are projected to fall between $300 million and $350 million, with an operating profit of $50 million. But that's before Zuckerberg's spending spree on servers.

We know TechCrunch's Michael Arrington didn't make it onto the Google jet back from Davos, but who did? Arrington claims that Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and tech publisher Tim O'Reilly made it onto the flight but doesn't serve us up with a passenger manifest.

A tipster sends this shot of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg with Mashable's Pete Cashmore. Our tipster says the photo captures Zuck and Cashmore "drunker than skunks." Don't buy it. Zuck's got a straight-edged reputation and he's holding a bottle of Crystal Geyser, not Cristal. A better explanation for Zuckerberg's awkward pose? He's camera-shy. That jibes with what Zuckerberg told egoblogger Robert Scoble during a three-hour walk the pair took around Davos over the weekend.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington tried and failed to score a ride from Davos back to California on the Google plane. No surprise, since the plane — owned by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, not the company they run — only seats 25 people.

"It will forever be one of the highlights of my life," Scoble writes at the beginning of a 1,535-word epic love poem describing a three-hour walk he took around Davos, Switzerland with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Here's a condensed version — though it's a bit long because we included all of Scoble's gratuitous namedrops, which we've bolded.

For months now, Matt Schlicht and Mazyar "Mazy" Kazerooni, who blog as Minds 1 and A, have been keeping me entertained by IM and elsewhere. They're also the media pranksters behind OpenHulu, the website which unlocked Hulu's video library. Schlicht and Kazerooni, barely legal entrepreneurs at the ages of 19 and 18 respectively, took a trip from Orange County to attend the Crunchies, TechCrunch's overblown startupfest. Contrast their enthusiasm to Ted Dziuba's jaded disbelief, and you'll see just how the Valley keeps luring young minds to stoke the startup fires — and just as swiftly burns them out.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will appear Sunday, March 9, at the SXSW Interactive Festival. He'll be interviewed on stage by BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy. [Allfacebook]

One thing that really bugged people about Facebook Beacon is that it would automatically install cookies in your browser, following you around the Internet. Well, here's a cookie you shouldn't worry about downloading. Unless you find yourself wondering why you'd want to consume a picture of Mark Zuckerberg. Sweet, delicious Mark Zuckerberg.

My boss, Nick Denton, may be banned from Facebook, for posting photos of Emily Brill, daughter of entrepreneur Steve Brill. Insiders at the social network tell me that they have considered similar sanctions against me, especially after I posted the story of Facebook PR chief Brandee Barker befriending her Microsoft counterpart, Adam Sohn, shortly before Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook. In solidarity, I'll now take a similar risk by posting this charming photo of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, taken while the two were goofing off during a BusinessWeek photo shoot.

Don't pretend the low ratings for Sunday's 60 Minutes segment about Facebook say anything meaningful. Tech blog Silicon Alley Insider concluded that the world at large doesn't care about Facebook, but that's an unfair assumption. The awkward interview with site founder Mark Zuckerberg and a description of a site mostly geared toward college students may not have been the best material for the show's aging audience, but how many of them were even tuned in after the preceding segment, which explored rape and genocide in the Congo? It feels good to draw an obvious conclusion — Surprise! Old people don't care about Facebook — and I can sympathize with anyone squeezing a blog post out of a fake analysis. But the exercise is utterly useless when there's a more obvious answer.

Is it advertising if no one pays for it? In its rush to criticize Facebook's Beacon in last night's segment on the hot social network, 60 Minutes forgot to ask that question. In dramatic tones, correspondent Lesley Stahl ominously noted how "advertisers pulled out" after controversy erupted over the feature, which reports on users' online activities, including purchases. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended it to Stahl as the future of advertising, a form of sponsorship less crass than banner ads. If it's the future of advertising, though, it's not a very lucrative one.

"You seem to be replacing Larry and Sergey as the people out here who everyone is talking about," 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl told Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his interview last night. In response, Zuckerberg sniffs. Then there's a beat. He blinks. Then Zuckerberg asks: "Is that a question?" He looks off camera and chuckles. Here's to another 100 years of puff pieces turned sour by petulance.

Facebook is the new Google, but not in the way Mark Zuckerberg wished. The 23-year-old founder is facing the same press backlash as his predecessors at the search company. His recent 60 Minutes interview ignored several pressing questions, and most of the show's 12-minute segment (available on CBS News Video) simply explained Facebook for old people and rehashed the usual "baby CEO" profile. But in the clip below from the end of the segment, Lesley Stahl criticizes Zuckerberg for launching Beacon, Facebook's stalkery program that tracks what users do on outside web sites unless they notice and opt out.

No one expects the fannish inquisition. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg can breathe easy; he has nothing to fear from 60 Minutes after all. From the looks of the teaser CBS News is running for his upcoming interview, the hardest question Zuckerberg got asked was if he got in trouble at Harvard for launching Facemash, a predecessor of Facebook built from photos he hacked out of school servers. The venerable news organization even got his net worth wrong — he owns 27 percent of Facebook, making him worth $4 billion on paper, not $3 billion. So much for factchecking. Here are the questions we wish CBS's Lesley Stahl had asked — but doubt she bothered:

Why all the lists heading into 2008? Well, laziness. That, and the urge to reflect on the year gone by. No, mostly laziness. And in that spirit, we present you Valleywag's top 10 list of top 10 lists. Oh yeah — our lazy, it's meta.

The trick to running a gossip blog is to reject most of the rumors you get. Otherwise, no one believes anything. You quickly learn to spot the gullible chatter, the obvious attempts to plant a story, the too good to be true. Well, usually. We blew it big three times this year by trying too hard for the scoops.

They were going to CHANGE EVERYTHING. Whoops. presenting five biggest technology disappointments of the past year. No, not Vista and the Kindle — you didn't expect anything there.

Facebook Beacon touched a nerve when it started ruining people's Christmases. Sure, Zuckerberg has since apologized and Facebook changed Beacon to allow users to opt out entirely, but some users haven't forgotten. Like Dan Provost, an MFA student at Parsons in New York. He's claimed the domain FacebookBusinessSolutions.com. And he's created an insanely brilliant parody of Facebook Beacon. Check out the screenshots.