Yesterday, Accel Partners VC Jim Breyer, who sits on Facebook's board with Peter Thiel and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, made an offhand comment about Facebook's unfinished financing round. Microsoft has already put in $240 million, and Facebook's board has authorized sleepless CFO Gideon Yu to go raise another $260 million. Here's what Breyer said to Silicon Alley Insider: "$50 million, $100 million, $200 million." He said it with a shrug, but we think his insouciance was feigned. That's because Facebook already has a firm commitment in hand for that $50 million Breyer mentioned. The board is still deciding whether to take that money.

A company is only worth what somebody is willing to pay for it. So after Microsoft paid $240 million for 1.6 percent of Facebook, the company's value on paper became $15 billion. Funny thing is, Facebook hasn't yet found another investor to agree to that number. The night Facebook signed its Microsoft deal, we reported a rumor that CFO Gideon Yu was close to bringing in another $500 million from private equity or hedge funds. Not true: the board had only authorized raising another $260 million. But even that hasn't come through yet.

Mark Zuckerberg, are you feeling scared? Google isn't just moving in on your turf, it's beating you to the punch. By almost a week. Since hiring Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of LiveJournal and a proponent of open standards, Google has been rumored to be working on tools to let developers build software for multiple social networks. An announcement had been expected next Monday. That would have been a day before Facebook plans to unveil a new ad network to compete with Google's AdSense. Instead of being late, as rumored, Google's early. On Thursday, Google will unveil OpenSocial, a set of common software-development standards that Hi5, Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Ning, Salesforce.com, and Oracle have agreed to use. Call them the Google Gang. The Gang, in turn will allow developers like RockYou and iLike to develop one common widget which will work on any of their sites. The goal? To make it unattractive for developers to lock themselves into the Facebook platform. Boo!

Would someone please shut down the Valley and lock the doors? I don't know if I can take another week like this. Seriously, can you remember another week filled with such drama? Microsoft showers Facebook with cash, making Mark Zuckerberg a paper billionaire — and turning Facebooker Dave Morin's relationship with a Googler into forbidden fruit. Meanwhile, venture capitalist David Hornik attempts to have an off-the-record conference in Hawaii and completely fails — because gossip will out. Gossip like BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy throwing a drink at TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, while his CEO, Heather Harde, stays up suspiciously late with WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg. Yahoo loses a devoted cheerleader and its top marketer. Larry Ellison tries to reel in BEA. Special correspondent Nick Douglas, meanwhile, demands I stop reading all of my favorite sites. I need something. Not a unicorn chaser. How about ....

One curious thing about the Wall Street Journal story reporting that Facebook was looking to raise as much as $260 million — but not the $500 million celebritard blogger Fake Steve Jobs suggested. The Journal's Vauhini Vara cites "a person" or "people familiar with the matter" six times. What does that indecipherable journalism-speak actually mean?

Is 23-year-old Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg worth $3 billion, as ignorant slut Kara Swisher of AllThingsD believes? Or nearly $5 billion, as Valleywag has reported? Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka has absolutely zero fresh reporting to add on this matter, but he says he wants a cage match between us to settle the matter. No way! That mean lesbian would claw my eyes out in three seconds flat. I'm glad she's wasting time in Hawaii right now instead of doing some real work. [Silicon Alley Insider]

One thing has been overlooked in today's Facebook valuation announcement — how much the major players can now claim to be worth. A source tells us that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg owns about 30 percent of the company, meaning that the 23-year-old Harvard dropout is now a paper billionaire, four times over. That's more than Yahoo cofounders Jerry Yang and David Filo, and closing in on Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He is, possibly, now the wealthiest 20something in the world. (I checked on the Forbes Young Billionaire list, and the only one who was close was Albert von Eurosomething.) Other winners?

What the hell is a poke? Facebook's proprietary pestering system, the poke, is about as ambiguous as waking up on the couch of a good friend after a wild night of partying, followed by blacking out. Is it a friendly wave? A solicitation? An accusation? There's a whole social graph of plausible "poke" translations authored by Silicon Valley tool and Facebook fanboy Dave McClure. One little poke could mean everything from "yo" to "let's have sexual relations." Charming, yes? Here's a far better idea.

You can tell that Facebook's Owen Van Natta and Microsoft's Kevin Johnson are sales guys. In a conference call announcing that Microsoft and Facebook had struck a long-expected investment and ads deal, both had the "win-win-win" patter down, along with nonanswers to hard questions. In his live coverage of the call, Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka has a rundown of the dodges Van Natta and Johnson offered. After the jump, the big questions still hovering over Microsoft and Facebook's $240 million deal.

Microsoft is rumored to have completed a deal to acquire a stake in Facebook and expand its current advertising deal. And Facebook PR director Brandee Barker even confirmed the news, if inadvertently. And now, we're already hearing rumors of how exactly Microsoft plans to stir things up on the social network's website.

Is Mark Zuckerberg in charge at Facebook? That's the first question I asked myself when I saw the press release Microsoft and Facebook issued. Sure, he got his $15 billion valuation — but only $240 million in cash, a less than 2 percent stake. Facebook's investors, in other words, asserted control and prevented Microsoft from diluting their stake. On the other hand, Microsoft, crucially, will remain Facebook's exclusive third-party ad network. It's telling, I think, that Zuckerberg didn't put his name on the press release. Instead, recently demoted executive Owen Van Natta got the money quote. Why not Zuck? I don't think this is the deal he wanted.

So typical for New Yorkers to think that everything comes down to money. The New York Post's late-to-the-game article on Facebook this morning had just one interesting, unreported tidbit among the rehash: The stakes in Microsoft and Google's race to invest have been raised to as high as $1.5 billion — or 10 percent of the company, valuing it at $15 billion. Frankly, I'm skeptical. While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be stupid not to take all the money he can off the table, his outside investors — a list which includes Peter Thiel, Sean Parker, and Accel Partners — don't want their stakes diluted that much. Selling off that large a chunk of Facebook would shrink their collective holdings — as much as 27 percent of the company, we hear — down to less than a quarter. That's just one reason why money doesn't matter as much as the Wall Street set would have you believe.

So how are the ad agencies on Madison Avenue reacting to Facebook's invite to a little gabfest on November 6 with Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the Facebook gang? "You mean this black, plastic monolith?" one industry insider said, flicking the giant plastic invite Facebook sent on the other end. "Uh huh. I got one." Oh, Zuck. You are going to grow up so fast in this big city.

Have you ever wanted to tap into the entrepreneurial spirit that generates multibillion-dollar valuations? Do you dream of becoming a Silicon Valley icon? Crave the street cred that lets you get away with wearing Adidas Adissage sandals to formal events, to nicely complement your suit? Well, sirs and madams, you can't. But wouldn't it be awesome if you could pretend to do all that while drinking sugar water laced with caffeine? Telephony company Jajah already has its own energy drink — as do celebrities as shameless as Steven Segal. Obviously there's a market that Web entrepreneurs aren't capitalizing on — and it's too bad for them we're beating them to it.

"i like making things. i stopped going to harvard after i made Facebook." — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his LinkedIn profile. Do we have a Fake Zuck on our hands? Unlikely. The profile links to Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and hardworking PR person Brandee Barker. [LinkedIn]

Facebook, in the midst of a high-stakes negotiation over its future, has just dramatically upped the ante. How? The social network is quietly starting to promote its long-rumored ad-targeting system — under a clever costume. Facebook has disguised the system as a simple upgrade to Flyers, its much-derided system for selling cheap ads on a self-service basis. This new system shares little with Flyers except its name, however — and poses an obvious threat to Google.

Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo — as well as a host of freelance moneybags — continue to press their offers to shower Facebook, the hot social network, with dollars and ads. And last Wednesday at San Francisco's Web 2.0 Summit, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company was close to clinching a deal. When Friday came and went without a deal, though, conference attendees where whispering about what might have gone wrong. The latest rumor, though, is that Facebook will have an announcement to make on Tuesday. How do we know that? The company has scheduled an all-hands meeting for that day.

For example, Greylock VC David Sze, who lead Greylock's $25 million investment round into Facebook last year. Missing from the party? Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg, rumored to be tied up with the funding deal he's so close to closing. Were you there? See anything else interesting? Please share.

Mark Zuckerberg confirms Facebook's online-ad ambitions, hinting in an interview with Web 2.0 Summit cochair John Battelle that the company is considering providing ads both for third-party applications on Facebook and, eventually, ads to run on other sites. [eWeek]