Marc Canter, who once upon a time founded the multimedia-software company Macromedia, but now largely gets attention mostly for napping through conferences, has blogged an open letter to Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Canter misspells his name as "Zukerberg" and refers to him repeatedly as "dude," because that's apparently Canter's notion of the way these kids talk today. That would be enough reason, in our book, for "Zukerberg" to ignore him. But no, it gets worse. Canter wants "Zukerberg" to "do the right thing." By "do the right thing," Canter means, of course, "give away your business."

Back in July, I speculated that Accel Partners VC Jim Breyer might use his position on the Facebook board to strongarm startups developing Facebook apps into taking its money. And sure enough, he's setting up a new fund to do exactly that. But he's cleverly cutting in Facebook itself, as well as fellow board member Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced at TechCrunch40 that his company and its two main backers are forming fbFund, a $10 million pool of money that will invest between $25,000 and $250,000 in Facebook-app startups. As hard to resist as a solo offer from Breyer might be, a check offered by Breyer, Thiel, and Zuckerberg seems irresistible. And more than a little menacing.

Before the Googleplex there was a garage. Prior to Marck Zuckerberg's hip Facebook HQ, he had a dorm room. Second Life got its start in a small warehouse - now turned Moroccan furniture store — found in Linden Alley. And Craigslist? That's still basically run out of a house. Business 2.0 chief of reporters Yi-Wyn Yen goes on a photographic tour of Web startup birthplaces. If you need motivation to jump on the giant Web 2.0 bubble, check it out. And work on your coding.

Stanford has hopped aboard the Facebook application bandwagon with a new class: noted developer BJ Fogg and Facebook fanboy Dave McClure (who may not be employed by for Facebook but is awfully busy flacking the company) will be teaching "Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook." Although offered through the computer science department, the course appears more geared to business students. Pupils will be graded based on the number of users they can garner rather than quality of code, and there will be an event at the end of the course to pitch the applications to investors. Is it any surprise Facebook moved to the west coast and that Stanford leads Harvard in incubating technology companies? As VentureBeat notes, while Stanford jumps on the latest tech fad and offers students a chance to strike it rich, Harvard ironically had admonished Facebook's creator Mark Zuckerberg and shut down a precursor to the popular Facebook for privacy violations and political correctness concerns while he was a student.

ATHERTON — I'm told I left the party too early, but once Third Eye Blind started playing, Thursday night's iLike bash was pretty much over for me. Don't get me wrong — I like Third Eye Blind. It's right in tune with my utterly bland and more than slightly gay musical tendencies. But this is exactly why I will never, ever use a service like iLike, which makes a Facebook app that allows you to reveal your musical taste, or lack thereof, to your friends by posting songs, and find people with similar tastes by seeing who's going to concerts. Here's the thing: I know my taste in music is egregiously bad. I don't want to advertise the fact to the world, and if anything, I want to meet people who specifically dislike the music I listen to. That's all right, though — what I really wanted to listen to was the buzz in the room.

Readers, you amaze us. And fascinate us. And very occasionally, disappoint us. Our corporate overlords, who are all afroth about search engine optimization these days, sent us a list of the top search terms people use to find posts on Valleywag. Photobucket, whose sale to MySpace we broke exclusively, ranks highly, as does Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Fake Steve Jobs. But "webcam sex"? "Lick it"? "Hot Asians"? Really, people. Behave yourselves. The full list, after the jump.

YouTube founder Steve Chen worked, briefly, at hot social network Facebook, after cofounding YouTube but before the video site took off. His short tenure there made, nevertheless, a lasting impression on the staff. "Steve Chen is notorious for never turning in his laptop," one Facebooker remarked when the YouTube founder's name came up in conversation. Chen, according to Facebook office gossip, never returned his Facebook-issued computer after leaving the company, despite requests for its return. A Google spokesman disputed this account, saying that Chen did return the laptop, and that Facebook CEO "Mark Zuckerberg is aware of it." Asked when the computer was returned, the Google spokesperson replied, "I assume when he left the company." And what do they say about assuming?

Too cheap to spend $150,000 on a sponsored group? For today's savvy ad buyers, Facebook offers the bargain-basement "Flyer.". A mere $5 buys you 2,500 ads, served up to your network of choice. A sweet deal, unless you're a discerning marketer who demands his $5 worth. To know if their online ad dollars are well spent, most people turn to click-through rates. But Facebook, conveniently, doesn't offer such data to Flyer purchasers. "Unfortunately we can't provide you with a click-through-rate for your Flyer. These rates vary drastically from one Flyer to the next because they depend on the interest that is generated by the ad's content." Um. Isn't that the case with all Internet advertising? Anyways, this strengthens the widely held assumption that Facebook has a smug, Mark-Zuckerberg-knows-best attitude — and that Facebook's banner ads are ineffective. Except, perhaps, for tarnishing one's brand.

Poor Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The athletic and very identical twins are suing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg over claims that he stole their idea for a college social network. Now, too, though, they're suffering much the same security woes as their better-known rival, and, if that's possible, not as gracefully. Just as Facebook had its source code leaked, someone has discovered that ConnectU, the comely twins' site, has major security flaws of its own. Flaws so obvious, says the engineer who discovered the flaw, that they beggar the imagination.

Legendary satire publication The Onion presents a faux-magazine cover story with the headline every editor in the Valley wishes he could run about Facebook's CEO — but knows he can't. (Image by The Onion)

Lost productivity due to surfing Mark Zuckerberg's social network is costing Australian companies $4 billion a year, says a report issued by Internet security company SurfControl. However, the study's a bit suspect: The company also sells Web-filter software which ostensibly blocks such time-wasting activity. [Techdirt]

Founders never share power willingly, gracefully, or for very long. That's a lesson that Facebook's Owen Van Natta should have learned at the knee of Jeff Bezos, when Van Natta was an executive at Amazon.com. Instead, though, he's been schooled in it by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who just demoted Van Natta from COO to chief revenue officer and VP of operations, Kara Swisher reports on AllThingsD. Zuckerberg's former No. 2, once trusted to attend the Sun Valley media-mogul conference in his stead, now shares key duties with a host of other executives. Here's a rundown on Van Natta's new rivals.

You'd think Mark Zuckerberg would be thrilled to make the cover of Newsweek. But secretly, we bet, the CEO and founder of Facebook is fuming. Why? Because the venerable weekly made a newbie mistake on the cover, one that Facebookers find grating. The cover invites readers to "add" Mark as a friend. Yes, the site does have an "Add Friend" dialog, so it's technically correct — but insiders hate the "add" usage, since it's easily confused with MySpace's lingo. Mark's own sister, Randi Jayne, chewed me out a couple weeks ago for that very mistake. And anyone who's used the site — clearly, not Newsweek's editors — knows that the proper terminology is to "request" or "confirm" someone as a friend. The basic gaffe tells us that the rest of the story — a predictable rehash by writer Steven Levy, assisted by eight (eight!) colleagues — can mostly be dismissed with the "Ignore" button. A few interesting status updates, after the jump:

Facebook has suffered another software bug this weekend — one that displays the site's source code on users' screens. How ironic: Instead of violating its users' privacy, as it did last time when a bug let people see other users' personal data, Facebook has now violated its own. The Facebook Secrets blog has posted the code for the curious, as have others. Facebook lawyers have already started sending cease-and-desist letters asking that the code be taken down, and spokesperson Brandee Barker has requested that people not post it. Which raises the question: What's in the code that Facebook doesn't want you to see?

First came Facebook's marketplace feature, a challenger to Craigslist's for-sale listings. Now the social network is taking on filthy-rich Craig Newmark in another key attractor: the couch-surfing market. Travel search-engine SideStep has signed up on Mark Zuckerberg's team by building a Facebook app, CouchSwap, to target the broke college-student traveler. You can search for a couch by location or send out special requests — a much more efficient way to go about locating crash space than trawling Craigslist listings. And after a successful crash, users can rate their stay. If you want to participate, though, you'll have to be willing to share your living room, too — a requirement Craigslist doesn't impose. The dark horse in this race: The established CouchSurfing.com community. (Photo by Erik Abderhalden)

What is it about the women Facebook hires? I'm sure they're all brilliant, but it needs to be said: The hot social network has equally hot personnel. Randi Jayne, sister of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, finally outs herself on video as a Facebook employee in this clip. But the video doesn't do her justice — as you might have noticed in her "Dontcha" iPhone video, she's distressingly cute. Her colleague, Meagan Marks, gives a sales pitch for working at Facebook that's best appreciated with the mute button on. And spokesperson Brandee Barker? Alas, she's not captured in this video, but you can check her out in this AllThingsD.com video. Or just take our word for it: Total babe.

Facebook appears to be having a privacy crisis. Earlier this morning, The Register reported that some people were able to see other Facebook users' private message inboxes. Blogger and IBM employee Matt Dibb reported Facebook exposing other people's email addresses on its login page. VentureBeat speculates that a bad update to Facebook's codebase got rolled out — and today's supposed "upgrade" was actually Facebook's panicked attempt to fix the problem. Since Facebook's fine-tuned privacy controls are a big selling point, this mucked-up code episode is especially embarrassing. Mark Zuckerberg, if you can take a break from counting your fictional billions of dollars, care to take a look at your site's code? Update: Facebook says it has fixed the problem. The statement, after the jump.

Mark Pincus, Tribe cofounder, notes that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is becoming a fashion influencer. "At fb app dev meeting. Can't help noticing 4 guys in the room in flip flops." [Mark Pincus Blog]

FROM THE DESK OF MEGAN MCCARTHY — A note to Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the inhumanly hunky main plaintiffs in the ConnectU-Facebook lawsuit. Yes, we are aware that you are identical twins. Smolderingly hot identical twins. Yes, we are aware that, in your quest to be Olympic rowers — lean, athletic, sweaty Olympic rowers, we might add — you are used to wearing team uniforms, cut and colored to make you look like clones. This does not excuse the fact that you wore the exact same navy-blue pinstripe suits to your court hearing yesterday. And the same belts. And the same shoes. Good lord, have you no taste?

I listened in live to a conference call with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two of the plaintiffs in ConnectU's lawsuit against Facebook. "You may wonder why ConnectU is holding its first press conference now," says Tyler Winklevoss in a set of prepared remarks. "This dispute with Thefacebook is over three years old." Winklevoss cites his and brother Cameron's schedules as "Olympic hopefuls" training for the 2008 Beijing games. He says that ConnectU is not trying to shut down Facebook. (Oddly, he keeps calling it "Thefacebook," even though Mark Zuckerberg's company hasn't used that name in almost two years.) Cameron Winklevoss then joins in, largely reciting the facts stated in his lawsuit, but also emphasizing that he challenged Mark Zuckerberg shortly after he launched Facebook, not, as some press reports had it, only recently as Facebook became successful.