Valleywag is tearing itself apart over this rumor: Did Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg get drunk — embarrassingly so — at a Thrillist SF launch party a couple weeks ago? Megan McCarthy, our party correspondent who stayed at the bash until 1 a.m., says she didn't see Zuck there. Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer says he didn't hear anything about it. But Silicon Alley Insider ran with the story, and a tipster says there were two eyewitnesses placing Zuckerberg at the scene late at night, after McCarthy left.

I should have taken my colleague Paul Boutin's recap of the week as a warning. Normally I take the weekend off, and I shouldn't have made an exception. But that Lucy Southworth is just so geekily adorable in this Stanford-office photo I felt obligated to cover her wedding. If it happened.

I was duped on a scoop. Word had reached me, from multiple sources, that Mark Zuckerberg had sold $40 million worth of shares in Facebook's $300 million financing round. Not so, we hear: All of the $300 million Facebook raised from Microsoft and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing is in the company's bank account, not Zuckerberg's. So why the rumor?

Venture capital's ancien régime is on the verge of being overturned. We hear Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, may have cashed out — before an IPO, before a sale, and before his investors. In the company's recent financing round, insiders believe, he sold about $40 million worth of stock. A tiny portion of his $5 billion stake, but in cash rather than on paper, and "enough that he never has to think about money for the rest of his life," says a person made privy to details of the sale. On the Sand Hill Road of old, this is simply not how things are done.

A month and half after its big deal, Microsoft executive Bruce Jaffe told the audience for his keynote at a conference in Seattle yesterday that, yes, Microsoft "paid a premium" with its $240 million Facebook investment, setting the social network's valuation at a "rich" $15 billion. Does Microsoft already have buyer's remorse?

Facebook's company line is that Mark Zuckerberg only comes across as a brat in his online diary from college only because it's "taken out of context." Also, he's grown older and no longer says, writes or thinks about anything but users and their precious privacy. Zuckerberg was a child then. Now, at 23, he's a grownup. But in this highlighted portion of the diary, you can see Zuck's corporate guardians have nothing to worry about. What's more mature than exposing your classmates to the anonymous ridicule and scorn of their peers? In fact, we're pretty sure Zuckerberg was on to something. See for yourself in our latest Valleywag poll.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg kept an online journal during college. Part of it has become publicly available thanks to 02138's recent reporting on the ConnectU case. In this portion of the diary we witness the moment of Zuckerberg's inspiration for Facebook, the social network with 57 million active users and a bubbly valuation of $15 billion. This is, most likely, the kind of thing Facebook wanted to quash with its ill-thought-out lawsuit:

I remember, distinctly, when former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner's love affair with Facebook began this spring. He couldn't stop talking about it, and I could hardly avoid hearing about it, since my office was next door to his. With all the zeal of a late convert, Quittner evangelized Facebook for most of this year — and now, feeling betrayed by Facebook's Beacon ads, he has attacked them with all the betrayed fury of a new apostate. Facebook is dead — to him, at any rate. Quittner's fickle rage perfectly captures the Silicon Valley hype cycle, and the press's complicity in it. Having built up Facebook, Quittner and his fellow reporters must, inevitably tear it down. But in this latest episode, it's Facebook's critics, not Facebook, who have jumped the shark.

Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for the fiasco over Beacon, Facebook's controversial advertising system which reports users' activities across the Web to their friends. It turns out that, all these years later, he still values the trust of Facebook users. Of course, he has to remind us that trust is Facebook's highest regard every time he oversteps that trust. Maybe someone should remind the youthful CEO of his own views before he introduces a new feature which breaks that trust.

Maybe Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has so far declined to talk to Robert Scoble — real, fake, or otherwise — and other bloggers for a simple reason. He knows the vast majority of Facebook users, still mostly high school and college kids, don't know and don't care about Facebook Beacon. That's what the above poll indicates. It's not the only evidence.

Mark Zuckerberg in his own words:

Add this to the garbage in my Facebook news feed: I logged in this morning to find a "sponsored poll" about the Beacon advertising program. The poll didn't say who sponsored it, but I suspect it was Facebook itself. Freaked out by the reaction to Beacon ads, which report purchases and other actions taken on other websites to your Facebook friends, Facebook is trying to find its way through the fiasco. (Ryann from Facebook customer support writes to say, "Polls can be purchased by third parties, and we cannot give away any information on who purchased the poll. I apologize for any inconvenience that may cause.")

Facebook tracks user activity on sites affiliated with its Beacon advertising program, even when those users have opted-out of the program and logged off Facebook. So say security researchers at Computer Associates, who offers the following screenshots for proof.

A U. S. District Court judge in Massachusettsdenied Facebook's demand that Harvard alumni magazine 02138 remove documents from its website. The collection includes court testimony from the ConnectU case, Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard application, and entries from his online journal. Before editors reversed course and redacted sensitive information, the documents also contained Zuckerberg's social security number, his girlfriend's name, and his parents' home address. They still include testimony which highlights Zuckerberg's affinity for the word "like" and former Facebook executive Sean Parker's trouble with cocaine.

People say the craziest things to New York Times reporters. In an attempt to explain that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wasn't, you know, lying when he implied to NYT staffer Louise Story that Facebook's Beacon ads wouldn't report on users' purchases and other activities unless they opted in to the system, "Matt Hicks, a Facebook spokesman, said Mr. Zuckerberg had meant that users would be given the opportunity to opt out of having information sent out by Beacon, and the company had assumed that anyone who didn't say no meant yes." As Story reports, Coke is having the same "Huh?" reaction, and has withdrawn from early participation in Beacon ads. I confess: I'm biased. I went to MIT, so whenever a Harvard man like Zuckerberg opens his mouth, I start listening for the bullshit. I wish I were wrong more often.

Ahh, that feels good right there. I don't think we'll be talking about this week next week. The Facebook pile-on continued. Amazon's Kindle reader suffered a surprise media backlash. I'd hoped for another bank-employee-in-tutu photo to liven things up. Instead we got Gerstmanngate. At least we still have jobs — oh wait, Valleywag party girl Megan "Leggy" McCarthy is heading to Wired. I think I'll go curl up in the tub with my INVISIBLE PUPPY. (Photo by Jason Calacanis)

For privacy advocates, it's a holiday miracle. Mark Zuckerberg's heart just grew three sizes. Facebook has just released a statement outlining several changes to Beacon, its online-advertising system which reports actions Facebook users take on other websites to their friends. The key takeaway? You can't opt out of Beacon completely, as some critics have asked, but reports on your activity — say, the fact that you just bought your girlfriend a ring on Overstock.com — won't be published without your "proactive consent," says Facebook. After the jump, the full statement.

In a landslide the likes of which we haven't seen since Brew PR's Brooke Hammerling destroyed Ogilvy's Justin O'Neill in a "snacky or flacky" head-to-head, 94.8 percent of readers believe that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stole Christmas. All this because his new ad product might tell your friends which presents you're getting them. And Zuck had stiff competition, too. Scrooge essentially kills poor Tiny Tim and the Grinch, well, he made a right mess out of Who-ville, didn't he?

When I read Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's deposition in one of his pending lawsuits with the founders of ConnectU, who claim he stole the idea for the social network from them, my first thought was, "Did anyone at Microsoft read these before investing $240 million in Facebook?" Zuckerberg is at his worst in these transcripts — by turns arrogant, befuddled, condescending, and obfuscating. And then it hit me.

Hugh Macleod continues to explore the pollution of Mark Zuckerberg's $15 billion Valley wunderkind Facebook with his latest Web cartoon and blog post. But the expression "a picture is worth a thousand words" doesn't apply here.