Ullyot was a "member of the class of 1989," a Harvard employee told me, but he did not get his degree until 1990. He graduated magna cum laude, but the delay seems curious. Especially since Ullyot's dad, James Ullyot, is a prominent Harvard graduate himself, and is now president of the Harvard Alumni Association. Harvard, like all Ivy League colleges, strives to make room for influential graduates' children.

Even more curious: Ullyot was two classes behind Sandberg, who graduated — on time, as best we can tell — in 1991. But Sandberg's husband, former Yahoo executive Dave Goldberg, was in the class of '89 with Ullyot. Could that be the connection that landed him the job? If so, just more proof that Harvard connections pay off.

FAZ: Can you please describe your cooperation with Sheryl Sandberg?
Mark Zuckerberg: She is an excellent manager. She is very good in building our international organization. I'm focused on the direction of the company, especially of the product development, and the overall strategy. I spend a lot of time working with engineers and product developers. We work together hand in hand.

FAZ: Who is the boss?
Mark Zuckerberg: Me!

That should make things clear — to Sandberg, most of all. Charitably, Silicon Alley Insider wonders if something was lost in translation. Nah. Zuckerberg is this blunt and awkward in English, too.

(Photo by Christian Thiel/FAZ)

Heiliger previously worked for Andreessen at Opsware. One would think the chrome-domed entrepreneur, now chairman of Ning, would prove a powerful ally in the fierce political battles that have roiled Facebook since the appointment of Sheryl Sandberg, a Beltway insider turned Internet executive, as COO. Nothing's certain, and Heiliger may well stay. But for him to be so unhappy as to openly entertain job offers? The social network's executive suite seems to be coming unplugged.

The problem is that Mark [Zuckerberg, Facebook founder,] hired Sheryl Sandberg. She has political aspirations as does the head of PR she hired, Elliot Schrage. It's pitiful really: I'm shocked. It used to be full of young, idealistic cool people.

What's so shocking? Given Sandberg's penchant for sharp-elbows politics, honed in the Clinton White House, hiring a conservative lawyer with a close ties to the outgoing Republican administration constitutes a wise ideological hedge, lest Facebook be perceived as too Democratic-leaning. We think our tipster's friend nailed it: It's pitiful that he's shocked.

Other names who have previously faced the wrath of Facebook's name police include US political blogger Jon Swift, Japanese author Hiroko Yoda, British member of Parliament Steve Webb, Australian graphic designer Beta Yee, New Zealander Rowena Gay and countless others with names including "podcast", "beaver", "jelly", "beer" and "duck."

Judging by Sandberg's panel appearence Monday, Facebook particularly wants to push its new Engagement Ads — the ones which allow users to comment on advertiser's banners. Yesterday, I sat down with a top executive from one of the major interactive agencies and asked him what he made of Facebook's showy efforts. Engagement Ads? "Eh, those aren't what I want," he said. Then he suggested three things Facebook needs to do right now to win Madison Avenue's money faster than a week's worth of sessions, panels and Ziggy Marley parties ever could.

Build a toll booth.
Everyone knows banner ads don't do it for big-budget advertisers anymore— not even ones that allow users to comment on them and share with their friends, like Facebook's new ads. Instead of creating gimmicky features that users don't want, Facebook needs to come up with ways for advertisers to be seen as providing new functionality on Facebook itself. By way of analogy, my source told me to imagine American Express sponsoring a normally congested toll road for a day. Drivers approaching the toll booths would see them empty and maybe billboard that read: "No toll today. Drive on through and see what it's like to be an American Express cardholder." That's the kind of branded experiences Facebook needs to create for users and advertisers, my source told me. Not gimmicky ones like asking users to design Mazda's new cars or come up with new Ben and Jerry's flavors. Facebook should encourage users to feel like a site improvement was brought to them by a brand. Maybe Facebook's Video application should have been sponsored by Sony's CyberShot line, for example. The challenge: Facebook's site developers work separately from the group which comes up with ad products, a divide Facebook needs to erase.

Facebook needs to stop imagining it will ever reach Google's size.
One reason Facebook hasn't come up with these kinds of advertising arrangements already is that they require lots of creativity, planning and customization. They're one-offs, and Mark Zuckerberg can't simply program a computer to sell them over and over. It's a terrifying reality for Facebook because its investors put money into it expecting it would become the next Google, which is an automated moneymaking machine. (Only 3,000 out of its 18,000 employees are required to run its advertising operations.) The sooner Facebook management and its investors realize that the company will not be the next Google — which, let's face it, lucked into a ridiculously simple way of making money — the sooner it can take advantage of its massive, desirable user base.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg need to hire Madison Avenue insiders.
My source says Madison Avenue avoids spending money on MySpace because no one in New York knows its ad salespeople. Facebook needs to put Madison Avenue insiders in positions where they have Mark Zuckerberg's ear. For example: Zuckerberg could have used someone with advertising experience to challenge him with the baby-name test before the company went forward with its Beacon ads. The baby-name test? "You know," he said, "The one where you take the name and think of all the terrible things it rhymes with and then decide if you still like it."

No surprise there: Besides top flack Elliot Schrage, Facebook has hired at least three PR people from Google in recent months — Debbie Frost, Barry Schnitt, and Larry Yu.

Zuckerberg's preprocessed blog post predictably mentions "Facebook's mission," which Zuck tells us "is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." That sounds exactly like the talking points Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — also an ex-Googler, trained in the delivery of political messages from her time in the Clinton White House.

For his investors, an uncontroversial Zuckerberg is a profitable Zuckerberg. If he's to stay CEO through an IPO and beyond, he'll have to practice putting shareholders and analysts to sleep with similar language. We sure will miss the clumsy honesty of Zuck's original post, though. Compare the old versus the new, below.

Mark Zuckerberg before the Googlers came — defensive, condescending and honest:

Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.

We've been getting a lot of feedback about Mini-Feed and News Feed. We think they are great products, but we know that many of you are not immediate fans, and have found them overwhelming and cluttered. Other people are concerned that non-friends can see too much about them. We are listening to all your suggestions about how to improve the product; it's brand new and still evolving.

We're not oblivious of the Facebook groups popping up about this (by the way, Ruchi is not the devil). And we agree, stalking isn't cool; but being able to know what's going on in your friends' lives is. This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely reorganized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about. You don't miss the photo album about your friend's trip to Nepal. Maybe if your friends are all going to a party, you want to know so you can go too. Facebook is about real connections to actual friends, so the stories coming in are of interest to the people receiving them, since they are significant to the person creating them.

We didn't take away any privacy options. [Your privacy options remain the same.] The privacy rules haven't changed. None of your information is visible to anyone who couldn't see it before the changes. If you turned off your wall to non-friends, no one who is not your friend will be able to see a post on your wall. Your friends can still see it; it hasn't changed. Secret groups and secret events remain secret from other people. Pokes and messages remain as private interactions. Nothing you do is being broadcast; rather, it is being shared with people who care about what you do—your friends.

We're going to continue to improve Facebook, and we want you to be part of that process. Test out the products and continue to provide us feedback. Use your privacy settings so you can feel most comfortable using the site.

We hear you, and we appreciate the feedback.

Stay tuned... Mark

Mark Zuckerberg after getting Googled — polite, empathetic and dull:

Thoughts on the Evolution of Facebook

After months of hard work, we're at a point where almost all 100 million people around the world on Facebook are using the new design. As we continue to roll this out, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what we've built and why I think it's an important step for us.

Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. In the last four years, we've built new products that help people share more, such as photos, videos, groups, events, Wall posts, status updates and so on.

As people share more, sometimes we need to change the site to accommodate how much information people are posting. Back in 2006 we launched News Feed, which brought all of the most recent and interesting activity from the people you care about right to your home page. Similarly, the new Facebook design replaces all the big boxes on profiles and brings all of your friends' most recent and interesting activity to front and center.

We realize that change can be difficult though. Many people disliked News Feed at first because it changed their home page and how they shared information. Now it's one of the most important parts of Facebook. We think the new design can have the same effect.

With this release, we've worked harder to get more feedback about what we can improve. Starting in March, we created a Page where we gave updates on the changes we were considering and more than 150,000 people joined and participated. We also wanted to give people a chance to try out the new design before launching it for everyone. More than 40 million people tried it out and 30 million continued using it.

It's tempting to say that we should just support both designs, but this isn't as simple as it sounds. Supporting two versions is a huge amount of work for our small team, and it would mean that going forward we would have to build everything twice. If we did that then neither version would get our full attention.

That said, Facebook is a work in progress. We constantly try to improve things and we understand that our work isn't perfect. We appreciate the thousands of you who have written in to give us feedback. Even if you're joining a group to express things you don't like about the new design, you're giving us important feedback and you're sharing your voice, which is what Facebook is all about.

Thanks for all of your support as we work together to make Facebook better and give everyone around the world a new way to connect and share. The active community on Facebook makes it possible for us to build new things and make them great, and that is why Facebook has been successful so far.

If you need the joke explained, Moskovitz is making fun of a common tactic used by hackers: Sending fake messages which appear to come from an authority, in an effort to get people to give up their passwords. But he's got a backhanded point. If Facebook insists on using its own software to make major announcements, a fake Mark Zuckerberg has a decent chance of fooling a lot of the people, a lot of the time.

Dear Owen Tummy

Clearly I still need to set the record straight on a few issues. 1) Chamath Palihapitiya is a disease you get from a bathhouse in the Phillipines. He is not an executive 'whose portfolio waxed and waned with Zuckerberg's favor'. If Mark Zuckerberg wants to have an opinion about anything I will give it to him once we find him.

2) You have suggested that I'm not a fun person and that my Smith and Wesson break action rifle is somehow inappropriate attire for the office. You can ask anyone that has been granted telephone priviledges, Facebook is a fun place to work. The mandatory fun period is 8:45-8:50 AM. I wish you could see the nerf battles we've had!

3) It's clear from your writing that you have no idea what it was like working with the Ben. If he wasn't standing in front of a mirror admiring himself he was sitting in a meeting, admiring himself. We had to install curtains in the conference rooms because of the distraction that reflective surfaces cause that guy. Sure, he's got a supple chest that slowly dips down to a solid ab formation. But I get to work with Mark Zuckerberg.

In conclusion I hope that even your pot-addled brain can see that I am not lying to people that matter. These are just developers. If I shake a tree around here one plummets to the earth cradling his precious iPhone. I work on the kind of media change that only comes around once every hundred years. I've done the math on this. Do you know the odds against another Olympic rowing team composed of twins handing us a perfectly functioning business model. Twins for God's sake!

Sincerely yours,
Fake Sheryl Sandberg

Valleywag's coverage last week of Sandberg's spinning in response to the departure of a key employee was deemed, in some quarters, a "character attack." Yet Sandberg's character is the very issue here. Her response is very telling: First, she wrangled a long followup story from her frequent dinner guest Kara Swisher that called our story sexist, over-the-top — and factually correct.

Swisher's report is damning for Sandberg. It acknowledges that Facebook executive Matt Cohler, who left to join Benchmark Capital, was unhappy with Sandberg's leadership. It reports that Jonathan Heiliger, the company's infrastructure chief, has also been unhappy with Sandberg — Swisher errs only in saying that the two have patched things up. Swisher's new report also means that the version of Ben Ling's departure fed to her by the company last week was false.

Facebook executives have acknowledged all these facts. But characteristically, Sandberg has steered the discussion away from the real problem — the bad decisions she's made, the poor judgment she's demonstrated — and toward massaging reality. She is, even now, planning a new PR campaign to buff her image.

Did it ever occur to Sandberg to figure out why she rubs so many of Facebook's technical leaders the wrong way? Could it have anything to do with her meddling in matters that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said aren't her job? Facebook has real problems in Sandberg's area of responsibility. Billing, customer service, and other mundane-but-critical aspects of the social network's advertising operations are chaotic, and require fixing. Sandberg's moves to shore up her image suggest the real reason for her unpopularity within Facebook: Her overwhelming concern for style over substance. How ironic that that pointing that out has sent Sandberg spinning.

Zuckerberg tends to fall in love with his latest hire, and give that person more and more responsibility, until there's some obvious failure. Even from the outside, it's crystal clear that's what happened with Oven Van Natta, Sandberg's predecessor as COO; it happened, too, with Chamath Palihapitiya, whose portfolio waxed and waned with Zuckerberg's favor.

So Sandberg's rampage through Facebook's technical ranks is just par for the course. If past experience is any indication, Zuckerberg's hanging back, keeping his fingerprints off her actions, and waiting for her to trip up. Her botched handling of ace product marketer Ben Ling's departure may be what turns Zuckerberg against Sandberg — or not. What's clear: When his disfavor arrives, it will be sharp, cold, and unmovable. Sandberg won't know what hit her. And Zuckerberg will be all smiles — like he was today in San Francisco.

Duhhhhh.

Ask any Googler who has been around for a while about Sheryl and you'll get some STORIES...i'm shocked FB's board disregarded the character aspects in their surely character-reference checkups.

Sheryl has a touch of pathological liar in her in my opinion, and she's a consummate narcissist. I truly think she loved her organization and the people in it, but sadly, the archetype of her love is that of a chess player for his (her) pawns.

Get some lines she gives new hires during their "circle sessions" with Sheryl when she introduces them to Google and what "good customer service" is all about. Sheryl has the tendency to sabotage her good intentions in small pieces via bald-faced, open-faced, smily-faced whoppers and manipulative lines. But I guess thats what you do when you come from D.C....

The reality, which took us too long to grasp: Sheryl Sandberg ran Google's customer service operation, the grunts who reviewed the text of AdWords ads for policy violations and fielded angry calls from Google advertisers with big enough budgets to be granted telephone support. Apocryphally, her boss at Google, Shona Brown, is said to have referred to Sandberg's operation as "a toilet." Sales reported elsewhere, as did the engineers who wrote the code for Google's money-minting ad machine. Hers was a thankless job, for sure, and one that needed doing; Brown's comment may have been unfair. But it was not an experience that qualified Sandberg to run much more than customer support — okay, perhaps HR, too — at Facebook.

We're also hearing that Facebook's board, charmed by Sandberg's polished demeanor and wowed by her Valley connections, didn't do enough reference-checking at Google. If they had done a proper job, we're told, they would have turned up stories of Sandberg's mismanagement and deceptions — stories that would ring very true with Facebookers' experiences.

So, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Sandberg took us in, too. But only a foolish consistency would have us still singing her praises. We've already gotten hints that Sandberg's work at Google was overrated, but our sense is there's much, much more out there. The tips line is open.

So Sandberg asked Ling to lie. The fib she demanded: That he was taking a two-month vacation, not returning to Google. In exchange, she'd let him vest his shares in Facebook — a small fortune for less than a year's work. Ling, it seems, declined. His integrity was worth more than whatever Sandberg had to offer.

Technically, Facebook doesn't owe Ling anything. His shares wouldn't vest until he reached his one-year anniversary. But the reality is that Sandberg, by promoting Schrage above Ling, effectively squeezed him out. And Silicon Valley companies often let departing employees keep some of their shares, even if they've been at a company under one year, to keep good relations (and sometimes, buy silence). Facebook has routinely accelerated departing executives' vesting, a maneuver which lets them keep more shares than the calendar would say they've earned.

Sandberg's high-pressure tactic was a foolish overreach. She was trying to manage perceptions, and combat the idea that her version of Facebook is an inhospitable place for brilliant technical talent like Ling.

Instead, she's created an even worse perception — no, rather, a reality. Joining Facebook, always a chancy venture, is more dangerous than ever. Those who take a job there now bear the risk that the manipulations of a power-grasping executive will make all their work worthless. (Poor Mike Schroepfer, who just joined the company as VP of engineering; did he have any idea what he was getting himself into?)

There's another perception that now exists, as a result of Sandberg's actions: That the COO herself is a glib liar, who expects those around her to glibly lie, too. Less than a month on the job, she had underlings fibbing to Fortune for a puff-piece profile.

It seems obvious in retrospect that the paeans that executives like Matt Cohler and Adam D'Angelo offered on the way out must have been fictional, too, bought by Sandberg with Facebook shares. Sandberg's explanation, tossed off with Clintonian brio: "There is no specific underlying story behind the few execs leaving our company." The key word in that sentence is "underlying," minus the "under."

Silicon Valley's corps of engineers have little tolerance for dishonesty. The implicit bargain they strike with the MBAs who turn their work into money: Keep the lies over on your side. Lie to investors, partners, reporters; just don't lie to us. There's no room for lies in the world of code; software works, or it doesn't. That may be a Pollyannaish belief, but it's a common one in the idealism-choked cubicle farms which sprawl along 101.

Sandberg, with her clumsy cajoling, has broken the pact. She tried to turn one of the geeks into a smiling fake, just like her. He didn't bite. One would think that with Sandberg's political training, she'd at least bring the talents of a skilled prevaricator to the Valley. Instead, the Ling affair has revealed her as the worst of both worlds: a clumsy liar.

Do the math: Ling joined Facebook in October 2007. He's leaving Facebook in a few weeks, months before his one-year anniversary — and it normally takes one year of employment for stock options or restricted stock to vest. However miserable Ling was under Elliot Schrage — Sandberg's personal flack and de facto chief of staff, whom she put in charge of Facebook's development platform, to the utter shock of the entire Valley — can you imagine he walked away from that much money? Far more likely: Sandberg and Schrage asked him to resign in exchange for getting to keep his shares. Ling, who was well-regarded at both Google and Facebook, now gets to walk away from Sandberg's mess.

Cohler, formerly Facebook's product chief, has also made nice noises about Sandberg — and he, too, needed the cash. He's now a general partner at Benchmark Capital, where Sandberg's husband, Dave Goldberg, is employed as an entrepreneur-in-residence. (None of this is coincidence.) General partners at VC firms normally buy into the funds they invest; Benchmark Capital's most recent fund, raised in February, is an eye-popping $500 million.The amount Cohler would have to invest personally comes to roughly $500,000, by my estimates. Selling his Facebook shares seems like the most likely way he'll come up with that money. Isn't it likely that in exchange for making nice noises about Sandberg on the way out, Cohler got an assurance that Facebook won't make trouble about his share sales?

The fundamental problem with Sandberg's take-no-prisoners management style: It's exquisitely tuned for the zero-sum world of Washington, where you're either in power or out. She's treating her appointment as Facebook's COO like a new administration coming into the White House. Her years at Google, which was the only tech-startup game in town for the long years of the bust, reinforced the wrong lesson. Washington's bitter internal rivalries thrive on a scarcity of opportunity. Today's Valley has an abundance. Her employees have options, and not just the kind she can grant.

Which leaves the question: Why is Sandberg so determined to drive talent out of Facebook? My working theory: She wants to remake the company in her image. Here comes the Sandberg Administration! But to do so, she'll need to find skilled accomplices, not servile yes-men like Schrage (who wouldn't know an API if it extended his subclasses). And she'll need to articulate what, exactly, her new vision is.

For all of Mark Zuckerberg's flaws, he's created a website which will soon have 100 million users, and is worth billions of dollars according to a long line of Silicon Valley moneymen who are slavering to buy his employees' shares. What, exactly, has Sheryl Sandberg done, besides buy a lottery ticket by joining Google when it was still private?

Sometimes you have to tear down before you build. But no one knows what, if anything, Sandberg is building — besides fear and doubt. That's hardly the mark of a Silicon Valley leader. It's a tactic that may have worked in Washington, D.C., where Sandberg worked for the viciously political Clinton administration. But she's killing the company's morale with her Beltway tactics. If she has a bright idea, she'd better start talking about it. It will take far more than three days to rebuild this temple — and it's not clear she has time to spare.

Palihapitiya, like Ling, has not fared well under the reign of COO Sheryl Sandberg and her right-hand man, Elliot Schrage. Schrage, as a reward for the puff pieces Sandberg's continued to garner from a mostly pliant press corps, has gotten handed most of Facebook's marketing functions. Palihapitiya has been left with a vague "growth" portfolio.

How frustrating this must be for Palihapitiya, who once complained on film about white-male privilege. His employer at the time, the Mayfield Fund, hastened to clarify that his comments were about the world at large, not meritocratic Silicon Valley. But Elliot Schrage, with his two Harvard degrees, is a creature of New York and Washington, D.C., not the Valley. And he has blocked Palihapitiya's rise at Facebook, despite the latter's vastly more impressive tech résumé. Will Palihapitya rest and vest his Facebook shares in silence? Or will he leave, like Ling?

Facebook has been punishing widgetmakers for some time now on its platform, banning them here and there, for the most opaque of reasons. Widgetmakers should probably glad to hear the favoritism is at least codified now, and comes in the form of a carrot, not just a stick. But they aren't that happy. There is resentment among some widgetmakers over the politicking gaining preference on Facebook's platform will now likely require: "[We are] in the business of satisfying users every day, not lobbying for subsidies." No wonder Facebook put Elliot Schrage, a thoroughly political former think-tanker, in charge of the platform.

Asked whether a recent rash of Facebook executive departures had anything to do with her arrival — they absolutely did, a source tells us — Sandberg tossed the question aside like a K Street pro: "There is no specific underlying story behind the few execs leaving our company."

AdWeek's Brian Morrissey reports that "Microsoft banners will run across the site, but will no longer appear on the homepage and user profiles." Instead, Facebook's largely automated direct-sales operation will sell placements for one large slot or two smaller slots on the right side of each page. These ads might be video ads as well as static text over image ads, Morrissey reports. A source tells us Facebook's ad units are also changing to a more standard size — a move that will make them easier to sell.

One has to think this is why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg as his COO. Up until now, instead of visibly rationalizing Facebook's wild-and-wooly ad operations, Sandberg's been flexing her muscles inside the company by extinguishing all signs of fun, from games of beer pong to all-night hackathons. At last, she's taking out her Machiavellian will to power on a deserving target: Big, bad Microsoft.

No wonder. From a Facebook Developers' blog post

Because we want you to follow a more normal sleep schedule than we Facebook engineers swear by, the Hackathon won't last all night long, and instead will be held from 3pm till 11pm.

According to Sarah Lacy's Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, those hours means this year's F8 hackathon doesn't deserve the name:

The hackathon is a hallowed tradition at Facebook. It starts when someone in the course of any workday calls for a hackathon. This usually happens about once a month. Anyone except Zuck can call for one. They settle on a night, and over junk food, beer, and Red Bull, Facebook's corps of engineers stays up all night coding. A hackathon has only two rules: the project has to be something cool and it couldn't be something they'd normally work on. Once the sun comes up, they all go to breakfast somwhere together and then they crash the entire next day. All meetings on that day are canceled. [Zuckerberg] knows they could get the same production just working a normal day, and it wouldn't screw up everyone's sleep schedules. But he could never replicate this esprit de corps.

The whole point, in other words, is screwing up people's sleep. But how would you expect an aging flack like Schrage to understand such fine points of hacking?

There may be some wisdom here nonetheless. With animosity brewing between third-party Facebook platform developers and the social network, perhaps trying to create "esprit de corps" between the groups with a groggy all-nighter would have just made things worse. Still, we're sure Zuck is sad to see the F8 hackathon go. The early bedtime means he won't have a chance to replicate last year's "John Hughes moment" with girlfriend Priscilla Chan, also documented by Lacy:

Long after the keynote was done and everyone left was hacking away, Zuck and Priscilla were walking hand in hand, amidst a floor of empty chairs, locked in quiet conversation. The scene was more like a moment from a John Hughes move than the pivotal point that would rock Silicon Valley's startup world. As if they were going to start to slow-dance at any moment.

That Facebook would throw this all in Schrage's lap is telling — about both Facebook and Schrage. Schrage, having shrunk his role considerably by following Sandberg from Google to Facebook, is likely desperate for some scrap of increased authority. And Facebook's geeks, getting assailed in the press for their decisions, are eager for someone slicker than they are to take the abuse.

Still, it needs to be said: Facebook's platform is technically immature, and needs a technical manager. Chamath Palihapitiya, whom Schrage is replacing as its head, may be inept at public relations — look at last year's debacle with Facebook's privacy-invading Beacon feature. But that doesn't mean he's bad at running a computing platform.

Schrage may not be a geek, but he'll now need to play the part. This should be fun to watch. And he can take comfort in one precedent: This isn't the first time the owner of an important computing platform has, in desperation, put a gladhanding slickster in charge. Microsoft's Kevin Johnson, who now oversees Windows, previously ran its sales operations. He also negotiated Microsoft's Facebook investment. He would surely approve.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg strikes us as more concerned with her personal PR than with the boring but important operational problems she was hired to solve. Yahoo president Sue Decker can be as Machiavellian as any guy, but her boneheaded reorgs are responsible for much of the company's current straits. Greene was one of the few women leaders in the Valley who seemed worthy of out-and-out admiration. That she was ousted by a jealous man makes the absence of her equals all the more glaring.

We know Zuck was close to Adam D'Angelo. They went to High School together and even built the digital music software that first igniting Zuckerberg's entrepreneurial imagination back in his teens. Cohler was employee number five at Facebook — there when the company was one room big. Zuck recruited Hammerbacher, whom he knew from Harvard, to join the company from a presumably well-paying gig at Bear Stearns. With all his friends leaving, oon Zuckerberg won't have any Woz- or Allen-like buddy at the company.

That's precisely why Facebook hired her as COO — to address similar problems, as Facebook's advertisers have grown more and more noisy in their complaints about the site's broken billing systems. How cleverly devious of Armstrong: He gets to puff his chest out and claim he's solving Google's problems, while quietly casting the blame on an internal rival who departed for the competition.

You know, like maybe a preferential app placement, integration of MS Live Search or MSN Messenger, or at least some stickers.

But no, Facebook asks you to "Please keep it real" and use Firefox, Opera, Safari or Flock — the latter having sub-minuscule market share. Somebody call COO Sheryl Sandberg, because obviously some developer at Facebook is having far too much fun and it needs to be stopped.

What's wrong with fucking around? Likely, not the sex, as the options to go after Whatever I Can Get and the like were age-based from the start:

That sort of age discrimination is typical of the Valley, and Random Play made it real. So perhaps it was just a reflection of Facebook's early ageism to constrain the site's facilitation of Hookup Culture to Generation Reblog (née Gen Y, née The Millennials). Not too shocking, then, when it was a few bloggers who noticed when even the young and pretty were denied the chance of Random Play action back in January:

The only way to get Random Play now is to have once selected it, and never delete it. Just pretending to be under-30 by altering or deleting your age won't bring Random Play back. We tried - it didn't work in Logan's Run, and it doesn't on Facebook, either. So we tried ringing up Brandee Barker, Facebook PR director, to ask when and why Random Play was yanked, but she's off on an out-of-the-country vacation, at least according to her personal voicemail. Brandee, you're over 30, yes? Help us out, here. We know as well as you there's no use running from Carousel.