Accel Partners, Breyer Capital and Polaris Venture Partners became the newest partners in the seed-stage venture fund aimed at entrepreneurs in the Boston area.

The Experiment Fund, which already includes New Enterprise Associates, is “anchored” and was launched at Harvard University, although the famed school is not one of its funders.

New advisers were also added to the Experiment Fund, including former Harvard Law School professor and former director of the Berkman Center John Palfrey, Facebook co-founder Andrew McCollum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Hugo Liu, as well as an ex-officio post created for the current president of Harvard Student Agencies.

The fund, which AllThingsD wrote about previously, was created earlier this year by the dean of the Harvard School of Engineering.

The early-stage incubator planned then to award funding to four to six start-ups, in amounts from $250,000 to $500,000, focused on the Cambridge, Mass., area around Harvard, which includes many other schools such as MIT.

The point has been to foster innovation around the Boston area, rather than watch those start-ups head west to seek funding. In other words, to keep the next Facebook — which was born there — from moving away to Silicon Valley.

In other words: Stay east, next young Mark Zuckerberg!

The new partners are contributing more funds, although they declined to specify the amount. Breyer Capital is the personal investment company of Accel’s Jim Breyer.

As part of adding the new partners, Breyer and Polaris’ Alan Crane will become “experts-in-residence” at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Breyer and Crane, by the way, both got their MBAs from Harvard.

Persistence — even if it is the whiny, likely undeserved, lunkheaded legal version of it — certainly pays off.

But you have to marvel at the bizarre karma going on, given that my favorite matching pair of digital ottomans, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, are poised to collect up to $300 million from the shares they got in a settlement with Facebook and its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of the social networking giant.

That’s right, folks, the rich do get richer, especially if they pursue their case well past the point of shame.

It’s not clear how many of the 1.2 million shares the Winklevii still have from the settlement they got in 2008, since they wrangled with their own lawyers over it, and the stock has also split.

But let’s assume the Olympic rowers kept a chunk, which will be worth a lot of gold-plated oars if Facebook reaches the upward of $80 billion valuation it is expected to in its upcoming initial public offering.

Facebook filed its long-expected IPO earlier this week.

And here’s a lovely tweet about the IPO from Cameron Winklevoss, who is looking very fetching on his Twitter page, even if it is perhaps about time to lose the rower meme image thing, given he’s on the closer side of 30 years old.

We r excited 4the #FacebookIPO + wish the company + all involved the very best,an amazing accomplishment! cc @tylerwinklevoss @DivyaNarendra

— Cameron Winklevoss (@winklevoss) February 2, 2012

He sent it to his twin brother, Tyler, and also to Divya Narendra, their other partner in the ill-fated ConnectU service.

Without going into all the well-gone-over deets (go see the Aaron Sorkin-penned movie and believe about 26 percent of it), ConnectU was the Harvard University dating site that Zuckerberg allegedly submarined in order to start Facebook.

Well, presumably water under bridge — unless you are talking about the perpetually disgruntled Winklevii.

At the time they finally dropped their seven-year fraud lawsuit this past summer, they then reopened to a different one then pending.

“The Social Network 2: The Overly Compensated Vii Strike Back,” anyone?

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According to several sources close to the situation, the Facebook board has been meeting early this afternoon at its Silicon Valley HQ to give the go-ahead to a massive initial public offering.

Facebook is expected to file regulatory documents as early as tomorrow morning for what will certainly be one of the most-watched IPOs in tech in recent years.

Sources also noted the filing could happen after markets closed tomorrow, too.

While sources said the filing time could still change even later this week, that seems unlikely, especially given the furor over every detail — including entirely meaningless ones — about the much hyped Facebook offering.

But it’s finally here and will be much scrutinized.

As I previously reported, the offering is expected to be below an overblown valuation number of $100 billion that has been widely reported and the amount being raised is also less than the $10 billion being bandied about.

I would tell you those numbers if I knew, but the offering has been locked down tight by Facebook — much different than blabbier recent IPOs from Internet companies. (Heeelllloooo, Groupon!)

That’s because Facebook management has been determined to conduct an IPO with as little drama as possible and is seeking to minimize a bubble atmosphere around the event.

(I might start liveblogging the IPO countdown right now, just to ramp up the noise and send CNBC into a frenzy.)

The board of Facebook is chaired by co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has been the most insistent about conducting the IPO with more deliberation and care.

One notable difference, for certain, has been Zuckerberg’s patience in growing the business before taking Facebook public. Still, it is important to remember that its history has actually been very short in time — the start-up was launched as thefacebook.com from his dorm room at Harvard University in early 2004.

If you are counting, that is only eight years ago.

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Earlier today, Harvard University and New Enterprise Associates announced the Experiment Fund, aimed at making sure that future Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gates can stay on campus and innovate without having to head West.

The irony of the pair of legendary entrepreneurs dropping out — decades apart — of the even more legendary university to start two of tech most significant companies, Facebook and Microsoft.

No longer, apparently.

The early-stage incubator, which will award funding to four to six start-ups in amounts from $250,000 to $500,000. It will focus on seed ventures in the Cambridge, Mass. area around Harvard, which includes many other schools such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Experiment Fund came from an idea born Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which involved NEA. Today, SEAS Dean Cherry Murray hosted an event that unveiled the initiative.

But, while faculty members will advise for the fund, Harvard has no financial stake.

In an interview NEA’s Patrick Chung said the intent was to enable talented students to “build a company here in Boston rather than have to go elsewhere.”

NEA will have full-time staffers working on the fund, investing in a wide range of companies. It has already backed a health app company, as well as a live Internet television offering.

“There has been an envy of the left coast, certainly,” said Chung. “Now, these talented engineers don’t have to leave when they reach the boundaries of the university where the ideas are formed.”

Added Chung: “They can walk right out of class and into a place that can make those start-ups real.”

In other words, let’s hope the third time’s a charm.

Here’s the map of exactly where the Experiment Fund is and official press release:

XFund press release

Being a cloud evangelist on the President’s cabinet appears to have made Vivek Kundra an attractive prospect for the private sector. Salesforce.com has just announced that it has hired him as its EVP of emerging markets.

When we last saw Kundra, he had stepped down from his position as Chief Information Officer of the United States, to which he was appointed by President Barack Obama. Having proposed between $5 billion and $20 billion in savings from the federal information technology budget — which, at $80 billion annually, is the biggest IT budget on the planet — he left government in June for a teaching stint at Harvard University.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff praised Kundra in a statement: “Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing … His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise.”

And, naturally, Kundra had nice things to say about Salesforce: “Salesforce.com is an industry disruptor, helping organizations use the transformative power of technology for change … I am excited to join the most innovative company in the world that is pioneering social, mobile and open cloud computing technologies for the enterprise.”

The statement is a little short on what Kundra’s job will actually entail. And emerging markets, at least geographically, aren’t exactly Salesforce’s strength.

For the year ended last Jan. 31, Salesforce reported sales of $1.7 billion, of which nearly $1.2 billion, or almost 70 percent, was derived from customers in the Americas; Europe and Asia accounted for 17 percent and 13 percent of sales, respectively. So, perhaps his brief will be to boost those numbers a bit.

If you project forward 10 years, each person will share about 1,000 times more things per day than they are now.

— Mark Zuckerberg to reporters on a recent recruiting trip to Harvard

In an unusual appointment for the longtime public servant, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will join Silicon Valley venture powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz as a part-time “Special Advisor.”

Summers got to know the firm with an assist from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who was a student of his when he was a professor at Harvard University.

Summers was later president of Harvard, as well as director of the White House National Economic Council in the Obama administration until late last year.

“I am doing this because I feel technology in general and information technology in particular is now having a real pervasive macroeconomic impact in our time,” said Summers in a phone interview this afternoon from his home in Boston. “Long after people have lost their memory of the dramatic financial crisis in recent years, they will remember what technology has done to transform our economy in these same years.”

Summers said he increasingly wanted to become closer to this important trend and thought he could contribute to the innovation in Silicon Valley by helping its portfolio companies better understand the global economy.

He was introduced to Andreessen Horowitz at first by Sandberg, who was also Summers’ chief of staff while at the Treasury Department, and was attracted to its investment philosophy.

“They have distinctive elements of strategy that seemed to be a good fit, such as their emphasis on market disruption,” said Summers. “They also have an audacity of the vision and were really supporting transformation.”

Summers said he would serve as an advisor to Andreessen Horowitz companies, focusing on global opportunities they should take advantage of.

He will not become a VC, though. “My life to date has been as a professor and public servant, so I am not in a position to be a major investor,” said Summers.

That said, Marc Andreessen quickly noted in the interview that “if Larry brings in a company, we are going to take a serious look at it.”

While he was not a partner, Andreessen said Summers’ compensation would be linked to the long-term performance of the firm.

Summers will travel between Massachusetts and the West coast, but will also continue to work on outside projects.

What he will not be doing is giving any long-winded economic lessons to entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

“I am not sure there is the attention span for some of my lectures out there,” he joked.

Here is Andreessen’s blog post about the Summers appointment:

Meet Larry Summers, Our New Special Advisor

By Marc Andreessen

Today I’m delighted to announce that economist and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is joining our team as a part-time Special Advisor.

A lot of people already know who Larry is, but here are the highlights of a remarkable career to date:

* Admitted to MIT at age 16, originally to study physics — clearly our kind of nerd.

* Became tenured professor of economics at Harvard at age 28, where he first started mentoring a young undergraduate named Sheryl Sandberg, who ultimately became his chief of staff at the US Treasury.

* Received John Bates Clark Medal for his research at age 38, one of the two most prestigious awards in the field of economics (the other is the Nobel).

* On the staff of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors in 1982-1983. (For those of you too young to remember, Reagan was a noted Republican.)

* Undersecretary for International Affairs and then Deputy Treasury Secretary for President Clinton between 1993 and 1999. Intimately involved in resolving major macroeconomic crises in Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. Became US Treasury Secretary in 1999.

* President of Harvard from 2001 to 2006.

* Until late 2010, served as President Obama’s director of the White House National Economic Council.

* And, most importantly, a pivotal character in the recent movie “The Social Network”.

Larry will be an advisor to our firm and our entrepreneurs on several topics:

First, as technology continues its relentless colonization of broad swaths of the global economy, Larry will help us understand the scope and nature of the opportunities in front of us and our industry.

Second, many of our companies are seeking to restructure and revolutionize various markets — such as telecommunications, advertising, entertainment, education, health care, and financial services — and Larry will help us and our entrepreneurs analyze and understand the economics and dynamics of those markets.

Third, Larry’s deep insight into global economics and geopolitics will be highly useful to our companies that intend to expand globally — which is to say, all of them.

According to the New York Times, “Years ago, Henry Kissinger suggested that Mr. Summers be given a White House post in which he was charged with shooting down or fixing bad ideas.” We can’t arrange that, but we are excited to have him on our team, both to do that and to contribute lots of new ideas to us and to our companies.

Yahoo is on a bit of a hiring spree, picking up longtime Internet exec Robertson Barrett (pictured here), to run its critical and powerful Yahoo News and Finance sites.

Barrett has held top positions at Tribune Interactive, Time Inc., ABC News, Primedia’s Channel One Interactive and The Feedroom.

Barrett worked most recently as chief strategy officer of Perfect Market, a Comcast-backed start-up.

Last week, Yahoo announced that Jai Singh will join the company as editor in chief. Before that Ken Fuchs was tapped as VP of Sports, Games and Entertainment.

For the huge Yahoo News job, Barrett replaces Mark Walker, who left for Disney a month ago. Steve Schultz left the top Yahoo Finance job last fall.

Here is Yahoo’s official press release, which confirms it and the particulars:

Yahoo! Names Robertson Barrett Vice President of News and Finance

Media Industry Vet to Oversee Company’s Category-Leading Properties

Yahoo! today announced that Robertson Barrett will join the company as Vice President of News and Finance. Based in Santa Monica, Calif., Barrett starts May 16, and will report to Mickie Rosen, senior vice president of the Yahoo! Media Network.

A media industry veteran, Barrett brings more than 20 years experience leading online ventures and as a reporter, including senior positions at Tribune Interactive, Time Inc., ABC News, Primedia’s Channel One Interactive, and The Feedroom. His appointment is the latest addition to the Yahoo! Media Network leadership team, which recently announced that Jai Singh will join the company as Editor-in-Chief, and Ken Fuchs as Vice President of Sports, Games and Entertainment.

Barrett will oversee Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance in the U.S., two of the company’s most renowned properties. In the U.S., the Yahoo! News Network is No. 1 in the general news category, attracting 86.6 million unique users in March 2011 and Yahoo! Finance has been the top finance destination for 39 straight months, attracting 42.6 million users in March 2011–more than twice as many unique visitors as the No. 2 destination Dow Jones & Company (comScore).

“Rob’s addition to our leadership team comes at a pivotal time for Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance, especially in light of the global and economic events driving massive consumer interest and engagement,’ said Rosen. “We have ambitious plans for these properties, and Rob will play a critical role in leading these businesses and deepening Yahoo!’s position as the premier digital media company.”

Barrett’s appointment comes on the heels of the largest traffic week in the history of Yahoo! News. Following the death of Osama bin Laden, Yahoo! News has experienced its heaviest-trafficked week, including 3 of its top 10 most visited days ever. Since the news broke, Yahoo! News has served more than 865 million pageviews, attracting more than 20.4 million unique users on Monday, May 2 and 17.6 million unique users on Tuesday, May 3 in the U.S. Yahoo! reaches more than 680 million users globally each month.

Barrett most recently served as Chief Strategy Officer of Perfect Market, a Comcast-backed venture, where he was responsible for building relationships with major news brands for the organization. Previously, he was EVP of Tribune Interactive, where he managed the operations and strategic development of online properties in 40 U.S. markets, including latimes.com, chicagotribute.com, baltimoresun.com, and all Tribune news, entertainment and TV sites. He also was previously VP and GM of The FeedRoom Inc., an Internet news venture backed by NBC, where he oversaw the development of video-on-demand for NBC, Tribune Company, CBS and local station groups. He was also co-founder and operating lead at online ventures for Time Inc., ABC News and Primedia’s Channel One Interactive. He holds a BA from Duke University and a Masters from Harvard University.

It seems Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the Don Quixote twins of the digital age, have tilted at yet another legal windmill unsuccessfully.

So now, after losing another court challenge to overturn a previous court challenge, they’ll have to settle for $65 million.

Actually, $100 million, which is how much shares in Facebook have appreciated since the pair and also Divya Narendra settled with the social networking giant.

Said the ruling from the U.S. Circuit of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in part:

The Winklevosses are not the first parties bested by a competitor who then seek to gain through litigation what they were unable to achieve in the marketplace. And the courts might have obliged, had the Winklevosses not settled their dispute and signed a release of all claims against Facebook. With the help of a team of lawyers and a financial advisor, they made a deal that appears quite favorable in light of recent market activity. For whatever reason, they now want to back out. Like the district court, we see no basis for allowing them to do so. At some point, litigation must come to an end. That point has now been reached.

The end? Say it ain’t so! BoomTown, for one, will miss those big lugs.

Not so much Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, especially since the pair allege the tech wunderkind stole the idea for the start-up while a student at Harvard University.

After much legal mishegas, they got $20 million and 1.25 million shares at a price of $8.88 each.

And that’s more than enough, said court to the the Winklevii–it’s their eternal nickname in Silicon Valley now–and they can’t back out of a settlement they made in 2004.

As for the specifics, the three-judge panel struck down every Winklevoss argument:

- They said the terms of the Facebook deal introduced after mediation were typical.

- They said Winklevii should have been sophisticated enough to understand valuation.

- They said Winklevii couldn’t use the sealed mediation settlement documents to argue their case.

It’s true, but it’s also sad to see it all over, since all the litigiousness between Zuckerberg and the Olympic rowing brothers has been so dramatic that it was the subject of the almost Oscar-winning movie, “The Social Network.”

But maybe they can go to the Supreme Court! One can dream!

And with their latest loss and all the Google machinating against Facebook, who’s up for a sequel: “Geek Wars: The Empire and the Vii Strike Back.”

In a statement, Colin Stretch, deputy general counsel of Facebook said: “We appreciate the Ninth Circuit’s careful consideration of this case and are pleased the court has ruled in Facebook’s favor.”

Here’s the full ruling:

08-16745

Yahoo’s Luke Beatty said he is not worried.

“We welcome the change,” he insisted about Google taking aim last Friday at so-called “content farms,” producers of low-quality content that spam up the Web and the search giant’s results. “And we endorse what Google is doing 100 percent.”

That’s ironic, given among those allegedly hit hardest by changing of its famous algorithm–based on early, and perhaps questionable, surveys–is Yahoo’s Associated Content.

But, if true, and traffic at Associated Content–which the Silicon Valley Internet giant bought for $90 million last May–is indeed badly hurt, it’s obviously going to be a problem for Yahoo, which relies on advertising revenue as its core business.

A quick poll by Sistrix, a search engine optimization firm, using one million keywords before and after Google’s changes, showed that Associated Content’s “visibility index”– including keyword and ranking positions ranking and clickthrough rate–was down 93 percent.

So yesterday, Beatty, who founded Associated Content and now works at Yahoo, dialed up BoomTown to talk about what the Google shift will mean to Yahoo.

First off in the wide-ranging interview, he noted, “everything on the Web is changing all the time,” noting that Associated Content used to rely more on the now weakened Digg and RSS for its traffic and distribution.

“Obviously, that has changed and we have still managed to grow,” he said.

Beatty said it is still not clear that the new tweaks in search criteria at Google would mean for Associated Content’s offerings–coming from 400,000 contributors of all kinds.

“Our data will not be reconciled for weeks…but some will be up and some will be down,” he said, adding the overall, “I suspect it will be down, although it’s not accurate by any means in the numbers released so far, since there is no way you can know this early.”

Still, it’s obvious that Google’s latest move has not been not good for Associated Content, although Beatty noted that the Silicon Valley search king is no longer the main source of traffic for Associated Content material.

Instead, that would be the owned-and-operated sites of Yahoo, most of all, and–increasingly–social networking sites such as Facebook.

“When we sold the company, we know that sites of Yahoo itself would be the biggest driver of our growth and that was the plan,” said Beatty. “And, though smaller, social means of distribution are clearly the way people are now finding our content.”

In an email later, Beatty underscored this point:

“Search traffic is not our focus within Yahoo–it hasn’t been for 10
months…traffic sources have changed endlessly over that last six years…search is one, albeit an important one and clearly, [but] now it too is changing and we see the future of our content distribution coming from O&O properties and social networks, as much as anything.”

Still, Beatty said Associated Content will adapt as long as Google does not make its tweaks on a network basis and rather than on a site basis. (Interestingly, that would presumably include Google’s own–and often spammish–Blogger property, which is fueled by its powerful AdSense engine.)

“It appears that changes have been made on an asset-by-asset basis
is good–networkwide cramdown would be inappropriate and uneducated,” he said.

Still, the best way to fight the Google initiative is by delivering higher quality content, which Beatty said was being done at the company via a series of ongoing measures to improve overall submissions.

Those include a Yahoo style guide for content creators, a two-tiered human editor review process, analytical analysis, a featured contributor program and, interesting, an online tutorial process called the Yahoo Contributor Network.

It’s not exactly Harvard University, of course, but Beatty said there is more to come.

“We are committed to supporting and helping our contributors navigate through this and every other change in the crowdsourced content economy,” he said. “We want the best article to get more traffic.”

Of course, with Google’s doubtlessly continuing changes in its criteria for what good content is, presumably, that won’t be Yahoo’s to decide.

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is certainly in the midst of a media bonanza.

Aside from all the heat over its recent investment whatever with Goldman Sachs, the young entrepreneur has been touted on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and been selected Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Oh, yes, and that movie–”The Social Network”–which you just know is going to win some Oscars on February 27.

Now CNBC has just aired a documentary on the huge social networking site, titled–appropriately–“The Facebook Obsession.”

There is no new interview with Zuckerberg, and it’s essentially the same story about the Silicon Valley wunderkind, told yet again. But all the old video clips and photos collected all together on another television show are nice.

Also, I always enjoy the Winklevii spouting off hambone arguments about why they are owed more than $65 million for Zuckerberg’s kneecapping of them back at Harvard University.

And, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-me appearance, I also make a showing, apparently as the grumpy one.

But I did not see it, as CNBC did not deign to post the entire report online, as “60 Minutes” so kindly did.

CNBC did do a preview and provide some clips, which are embedded below, as well the the much funnier Jon Stewart take on it all on “The Daily Show,” titled “The Anti-Social Network”:

Many years ago, before Google went public, I had an unusual late-night conversation in the lobby of the TED conference with its co-founder Larry Page about the prospect, about which–despite its inevitability–he had more than a little nervousness.

That would be: Taking the search company public.

After much ruminating, Page concluded that one of the more important reasons he felt compelled to have an IPO was to finally reward Google’s employees for all the work they had done to build the company.

While I have never had a similar chat with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the powerful social networking company and an initial public offering, I suspect that he would not express any such sentiment.

And it’s not because Zuckerberg does not value his staffers any less than Page did–instead, it’s because he seems to value his privacy most of all.

I know–ironic!–given how many perceive the company to be cavalier about important issues related to disclosures of personal information uploaded to Facebook by the mountain-load daily by its hundreds of millions of users.

That aside, Zuckerberg’s clear intent to keep the lid on Facebook tight–with no information about the details of financial performance and other pertinent information a public offering would require be disclosed–is clearly about to become a nettlesome issue for the company.

While that effort at preserving secrecy by staying private has resulted in little more than cute Silicon Valley media guessing games about a possible IPO, its most recent machinations are too clever by a half.

That would be the new and giant investment from Goldman Sachs, as well as a deal to get $1.5 billion of pre-IPO shares in the hands of the investment bank’s rich customers.

Aside from the appalling image that only the very wealthy can get an early shot at Facebook shares, which instantly became a press meme yesterday after the Goldman deal was announced, pretending this single investment entity–called a “special purpose vehicle”–simply feels like a Wall Street trick.

Plus, a special purpose vehicle sounds like a car that bankers use to take people for a ride.

Thus, a gaggle of rich doctors in New Jersey are treated like one blob, instead of what is plainly true to all. As the old Latin legal phrase goes: Res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself).

Of course, this strategic move is designed to keep the number of primary stockholders under 500, which is the IPO tipping point for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Therefore, by all means, let’s do it!

Or not, because I had an intense déjà vu about all this, and an unease that it felt vaguely familiar as a negative characteristic of Zuckerberg’s leadership that seems to cling to him.

That would be the dicey origins of Facebook, which remain a controversy to this day, including garnering an entire Hollywood movie on the subject.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Facebook’s history knows the basic question: Did Mark Zuckerberg “steal” the idea for Facebook from the Winklevoss twins, as well as sandbag their efforts, while they were all students at Harvard University?

And, more to the point, was it illegal?

The Winklevii certainly think so, continuing in their Don Quixote quest to take Zuckerberg down in a series of ever-more-comical lawsuits.

For me, the answer is a lot more complex–I think Zuckerberg most definitely screwed with the Olympic rowing twins and it was very creepy that he did.

But, in terms of breaking the law, not so much.

Of course, if you are endeavoring to always act with ethics in your career, this should not be the bar set. But in practical terms, it was most definitely an aggressive knee-capping that is not uncommon in business.

Zuckerberg has shown similar tendencies many times since then, especially around the thorny issues of privacy, where fast-and-loose behaviors are quickly followed by the I’m-sorry-I-didn’t-mean-it excuses.

Okay, fine, I get it. Business is war.

But, as it moves into a more mature place, the question now is whether Facebook should keep stressing this kind of wink-wink-nudge-nudge propensity, because it feels–how can I say this in the nicest way–icky.

Plus it will surely attract unneeded attention from the SEC, which is already looking into the opaque market for trading shares of closely held companies and where Facebook is the star attraction.

And this is to say nothing of other issues–for example, could there be insider trading problems around the buying and selling of these private shares, as one person close to the situation has noted to me?

Facebook, of course, will defend what it is doing as above board, say it’s not unfair to give special access to its bounty to the very rich in what is essentially a private IPO and wag a finger at critics like me and tell us we don’t understand sophisticated financial issues.

But here’s what I grok without a Harvard Business School degree: It feels sneaky, it feels elite, it feels opaque, and this kind of fancy financing footwork could end in tears.

Because these legitimate questions on how Facebook handles its stock will continue to dog the company until–when he is good and ready (and finances at Facebook look prettier)–Zuckerberg eventually pulls the trigger on an IPO.

It would be nice, even if Wall Street applauds his cleverness, if he didn’t keep shooting himself in the foot along the way.

Here is the whole CBS interview on “60 Minutes” of Mark Zuckerberg, which aired last night.

The quick poll of the piece on Twitter and in the blogosphere: The Facebook co-founder and CEO did great and his Harvard University nemisii, the Winklevoss twins, looked goony and graspy (even though Zuck did sandbag them).

And, yes, BoomTown said the Winklevii got enough dough for their role in social networking history and the “toddler CEO” turned out to be a prodigy. Also, that veteran television correspondent Lesley Stahl is a “fuddy-duddy” (she asked and I keed!).

But see for yourself, in two parts:

You may know me from my writings at GigaOM, where I covered topics like the social Web and online video for the last four years. If this is your first time reading me, I hope you’ll find my writing, reporting and analysis worth sticking around for.

My beat at All Things Digital is All Things Social, and you’ll be able to find my stories under the heading NetworkEffect, named after the idea that a community of users makes a service valuable for everyone who joins.

On the social Web, network effects help us improve the lives of our friends, family and neighbors, when we sign up for the same Web services and share our lives and experiences; they also factor in the power of critical mass to create new businesses from scratch. In the six years I’ve been a tech reporter, companies I’ve watched being born–such as Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube–have come to be major parts of people’s lives around the world. And I think that’s pretty awesome.

Of course, not everyone agrees. Example du jour: In this month’s New York Review of Books, the author Zadie Smith (whose novels I like very much) applied her considerable forces of perception to Facebook and the implications of its creation myth. Smith’s credentials to analyze Facebook are: She was a fellow at Harvard University when it was founded, she spent only two months trying the service before leaving it, she’s a full nine years older than Mark Zuckerberg (ancient!), and she calls herself a “private person.”

In her piece, Smith charged that Facebook encourages highly superficial, low-effort communication that threatens to replace actual relationships and experiences. She cited Jaron Lanier to assert that computers cannot represent actual human relationships, and, further, that the limitations of a tool can shape what its users think is possible.

So, basically, Facebook is devaluing the way we relate to each other.

Smith thinks her problems with Facebook come back to the site being created by Zuckerberg as an immature college sophomore who desperately wanted to be liked. “If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out,” she wrote. “[T]o Zuckerberg sharing your choices with everybody (and doing what they do) is being somebody.”

If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.

Smith noted in the piece that she doesn’t actively use Facebook herself, but she looked up some of Zuckerberg’s recent public comments and keenly observes that the Facebook CEO “uses the word ‘connect’ as believers use the word ‘Jesus,’ as if it were sacred in and of itself.”

Personally, I see my relationships extended and improved on Facebook, whether it’s knowing what my extended family is up to on a daily basis, or the great conversations I’ve had in the past few days about Death Valley, after I posted an album of pictures from my between-jobs road trip to the desert last week.

Still, I don’t often find visiting Facebook to be deeply satisfying either. But, whereas Smith sees reasons to run away screaming, I see an opportunity to better address some of the parts she finds lacking.

The real story here?

It’s about the capability of the social Web to improve so it better serves and extends our real-world relationships. It’s about the fact that these sites and apps are created by people whose versions of the world are expressed in them. It’s about the potential to communicate with people you don’t know, to cultivate and reward passionate fans and to learn the dark art of self-promotion. It’s about the wide-open opportunity to improve on and compete with Facebook, which is still really far away from delivering on its potential to improve the lives of the half-billion people who already use it regularly and the many more who don’t. Simply put, there’s a lot more to be done.

And that’s what I want to write about.

(P.S. As detailed in my ethics statement, which I will keep updated, my husband is a part-time employee at Facebook. His work is not a part of my reporting, and I obviously find the company fascinating and will not shy away from writing about it–both the good parts and the bad ones. )

That’s not much of a surprise, given the relentless marketing campaign by the makers of “The Social Network,” which opened wide last Friday. It has garnered terrific critical acclaim.

Still, BoomTown was quite surprised to see a mention of the film on one of my favorite celebrity sites, TMZ.com.

Of course, because it is gossip-saturated, TMZ featured it as one of its naughty regular features called “Who’d You Rather?”

As in…well, you get the point.

This time they pitted Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg against the Winklevoss twins in a “Facebook Fight.”

“As part of the movie ‘The Social Network,’ twin brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss claim their Harvard [University] classmate Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea and created what is now this little website called Facebook,” TMZ wrote.

Also surprising, as you can see from the screenshot above, given what hunks of dudeness the Winklevii clearly are, is that Zuckerberg seems to be attracting one-third of the votes compared with their two-thirds.

And since there are two of them, the billionaire social networking wunderkind could be considered tied with the brothers!

Sweet justice after the slamming the Winklevii have been giving Zuckerberg in the media of late, even though they had signed a confidentiality agreement after their first $65 million settlement with him?

The Winklevii are trying to have that overturned and are inexplicably going for more, of course, which should keep the themes of the movie resonating for a while.

That will also be true if “The Social Network” garners some award nominations, especially the Oscar.

Also interesting will be to see if the movie will perform well this weekend or will drop off. It’s so far proved popular in the big cities on the coasts and in Silicon Valley, but now it has to go wide to make some real dough.

But, for sure, it will be on television eventually. Today, the FX cable network said it had bought the broadcast premiere rights to the movie.

The question is: Which movie was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinking about when he decided recently to fork over $100 million to public schools in Newark, New Jersey?

Was it a bid to spiff up his image–with a splashy announcement on Oprah Winfrey’s popular television talk show tomorrow?

That would be the very same day of the New York premiere of “The Social Network,” a movie that rakes the now-26-year-old Silicon Valley wunderkind over some very hot coals in the sordid tale of how he founded the powerful social networking site while at Harvard University.

Or was it actually the impact of another film, “Waiting for Superman,” a just-released gripping documentary about the crisis in public education?

It’s become a topic that has apparently become of great interest to Zuckerberg, as he has been considering his approach to big-time philanthropy in anticipation of huge wealth after Facebook eventually has its long-anticipated IPO.

In fact, said sources, the timing of the donation was hotly debated within the company, with worries that it would look like Zuckerberg was trying to counter the flood of negative press from “The Social Network.”

And for good reason.

After seeing a screening of the movie recently, MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka noted that “the film portrays him as an insecure jerk who screws over people and becomes a much-richer insecure jerk…He’s the bad guy in his own creation myth.”

In fact, said sources, Zuckerberg actually has been cooking up the deal since he and high-profile Newark Mayor Cory Booker started kibitzing over the idea while both attended the Allen & Co. conference in July.

From there, Zuckerberg decided it was best to flood the zone–in this case, the deeply troubled Newark school system, which had previously been taken over by the state.

Now, it will instead get a big dose of friending–um, funding–from a foundation that Zuckerberg is funding with $100 million worth of Facebook stock, which will be sold off in secondary markets as needed.

Sources said his interest in the area was apparently sparked by watching the up-and-down experience of his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, whose first job out of college was as a teacher. She is now a medical student.

It’s all an unusual bipartisan effort, with Zuckerberg working with the Democratic Booker and also New Jersey’s new Republican Governor Chris Christie.

The pair of politicians, who will formulate a plan, pushed for the announcement this particular week on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in order to give the topic national attention.

Winfrey has been focusing on education reform this week on her show, and the Obama administration is reportedly going to do the same in the weeks ahead.

Thus, Zuckerberg himself decided to move forward now, sources said, apparently concluding that even if a prominent movie was portraying him as the villain, he did not have to act like one in real life.

It’s just a post on the popular entertainment blog “Deadline Hollywood.”

But it’s a clear indication the makers of the movie about the origins of Facebook are gunning for maximum attention and Oscar buzz with only a few weeks to go before its debut.

In fact, awards columnist Pete Hammond was pretty much channeling the marketing plan of Oscar-winning producer Scott Rudin for “The Social Network,” which has its premiere in New York on September 24 and its wide rollout on October 1.

Rudin–the volcano of a producer about whom I would like to see a biopic like the one he is sticking it to Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg with–has apparently been personally inviting every online chatterbox (not me!) and their mother to screenings of the film from the Sony (SNE) movie unit, Columbia Pictures, in recent weeks.

Writes Hammond:

It’s a smart strategy but even without a personal invitation from one of the film’s producers this is already the current must-see movie on every Oscar watchers list. As an example of that, one blogger actually got on a plane from Toronto to New York just to see Social Network, then headed immediately back to Toronto. His subsequent review was a rave declaring it the one to beat for Best Picture (a little premature on that I think). That’s just one example of the praise now starting to hit the Internet from Hitfix to Slashfilm to Chud and all cyber points inbetween.

A little premature perhaps, but it seems to have worked with Hammond:

I saw it at the first opportunity on Monday and would have to say fairly objectively that The Social Network is Sony’s best shot at Best Picture in years, a lock for Golden Globe and Critics Choice Awards. And most importantly, Oscar nominations in every major category including Director for David Fincher, Writing for Aaron Sorkin, lead actor for Jesse Eisenberg (playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg), Supporting Actor for both Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score, editing and so on. It also looks like it will be a major box office hit, hitting a nerve with the young demographic that are on the front lines of moviegoers…

Despite its high-tech bones, what Fincher and Sorkin have managed to do is tell a time-honored very human story, a social document for a generation that has as much relevance now as movies like On The Waterfront, Network, All The President’s Men, and The Graduate did in their time.

Expect more of the same from those who get sucked up into the marketing machine for “The Social Network” in the next weeks, even though it appears it will be devastating to the real-life version of its main subject, Mark Zuckerberg.

And really, really unfair, according to MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka, by taking one aspect of his personality–awkward arrogance or perhaps arrogant awkwardness–and twisting it into a much deeper malevolence.

I have no doubt in my mind that Zuckerberg pulled an epic geek sandbagging on the clueless Winklevoss twins by promising to work on their goofy concept for a social networking site at Harvard University, then not doing so and working on his own ideas instead.

And, for sure, he had a painfully typical start-up falling-out with his own early partners.

But let’s get real here–they all got paid off plenty for being present at the creation of something they themselves never could have created.

Does anyone honestly believe the Winklevii were capable of making Facebook, or any reasonable facsimile, any more than Zuckerberg was capable of rowing in the Olympics?

While hitting some right notes about Zuckerberg’s mannerisms–conversations with him can be very perplexing–the Mark of “The Social Network” is largely fictional.

Certainly, he has some glaring faults (and so do I!).

But they are no worse that other tech leaders’, from Bill Gates of Microsoft (MSFT) to Steve Jobs of Apple (AAPL) to Silicon Valley’s own twins, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google (GOOG).

Interestingly, the night before what turned out to be a very difficult onstage interview at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference in June, at a dinner just south of Los Angeles, Zuckerberg fretted to me about the film.

“It’s what a lot of people will think I am like, because it’s a movie and that has impact on their perceptions,” he said with a lot of concern in his voice.

I pooh-poohed his complaints and told him not to worry about it too much.

“It’s just a movie,” I said. “No one believes what they see at the movies anymore.”

But as this film chugs along–gaining Oscar velocity right onto the stage of the Academy Awards at the Kodak Theatre at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard on February 27, 2011–I can now see Zuckerberg might have been right all along.

How much is BoomTown and everyone else in Silicon Valley trying to nab a copy of Ben Mezrich’s likely-to-be-entirely-made-up-but-who-cares tale of dirty doings at Facebook?

Muchety-much! So much so that I called all my book industry contacts–hey, I am a published author, ya know!–even though I have not actually completed reading a book since the Internet started and gave me permanent attention deficit disorder.

But, so far I have come up peanuts in grabbing an early copy of Mezrich’s tome, “The Accidental Billionaires,” which is set to come out July 14.

Facebook is not pleased, of course, and will likely be challenging Mezrich’s work as specious dreck. But the drama around the book should be interesting, to say the least.

More so, since this week also came news that actors Michael Cera and Shia LaBeouf are being considered to play founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and that David Fincher, the director of the lugubrious Brad Pitt snoozer, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” is “attached” to the movie version.

Even better: “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin will pen it and actor Kevin Spacey will produce the Columbia Pictures film, which will be called “The Social Network.”

Well, Hollywood sure came up with an original title!

It certainly does not signal the juiciness of the proposal for the book–which did manage to leak out last year–with a lot of tale tales in it that seem to have pretty much tracked on its oddly purple subtitle of “The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal.”

The cover–which you can see on the book’s Facebook page (the delicious gall of Mezrich!)–features a spilled martini glass and a red bra flung nearby.

Martinis? Red bras? Sex? Facebook? Really?

Obviously, Mezrich has not actually met Zuckerberg, who is a very nice geekish young man, but who has approximately the sex appeal of a rack of Facebook servers.

Powerful yes! Spockish? Yes! Sexy? Um, no, no, no.

I will not even begin to parse the red bra thing, although I am attributing the martinis to stylish former COO (and now MySpace CEO) Owen Van Natta.

But, apparently, the sex part seems to have to do with Zuckerberg starting the company with others while an undergrad at Harvard University, as a scheme to meet some ladies.

I would say there are easier ways to attract the womenfolk–not that I could give tips or anything–but whatever!

Thus, since I cannot get my mitts on the book (yet!), here’s my list of 10 completely made-up, utterly fabricated, just-call-me-Jayson-Blair things that should be in the book.

10.) Facebook was actually going to be called OnlyPrettyLadyFacebook, but cooler heads prevailed.

9.) The Wall? A clever plot by Zuckerberg to build his online service on a fascist construct, touting his hegemony over all he surveyed.

Wait, that actually happened, and now some Russians are even investors.

Long live the Zuckrepublic of Palo Alto!

8.) Reason for stealing, oops, borrowing, oops again, completely separately developing an exact replica of ConnectU social network at Harvard:

The Olympically muscle-headed Winklevoss twins used to beat up the brainy Zuckerberg on his way back to the dorm, prompting a “Revenge of the Nerds” plot line.

7.) Facebook’s Beacon advertising? All Randi Zuckerberg’s idea, so she could find out what she was getting for her birthday from her billionaire-on-paper brother.

6.) Zuckerberg’s famous flip-flops were made in China under dubious working conditions. Wait, that’s true too.

5.) The 20-something Zuckerberg is actually 93 years old, a real-life version of Benjamin Button, which would explain the social awkwardness and staring-into-space-sometimes thing.

4.) The no-breast-feeding-pictures controversy pretty much proves no one is interested in bras or, more precisely, what goes in them at Facebook.

3.) COO Sheryl Sandberg is a cyborg sent to Facebook from Google for purposes of infiltration. She and her crafty sidekick, Elliott Schrage, will become self-aware in 2012 and hunt down Zuckerberg in a thrilling chase that will also become a movie.

2.) The sex, drugs and rock-and-roll stuff actually all took place at MySpace, which really pisses off certifiably dashing co-Founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson because, once again, Zuckerberg stole their mojo!

1.) This work of fiction, oops, “fact”-ion, oops again, nonfiction, is probably not going to sell many copies because it will mysteriously be uploaded in its entirety by a widget that will distribute it free to Facebook’s 200 million plus users while simultaneously SuperDuperPoking Mezrich, by throwing real sheep at him.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Ben.

(By the way, here is an extra for you: The $15 billion valuation for Facebook, along with all the other Web 2.0 ones? Totally true. Just ask any VC.)

And, in case anyone was wondering what the real Facebook looks like, here is a recent video tour I did of its new HQ in Palo Alto, Calif.:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090624/boomtowns-top-10-list-of-fact-challenged-revelations-that-should-be-in-the-facebook-tell-all-book/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20090616/inane-and-half-baked-twitter-is-the-forrest-gump-of-international-relations/ http://allthingsd.com/20090616/inane-and-half-baked-twitter-is-the-forrest-gump-of-international-relations/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:30:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=14601

In what is quite possibly the most spot-on comment about Twitter that BoomTown has heard thus far, Harvard University Professor Jonathan Zittrain said:

“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”

Zittrain was being quoted in a New York Times piece today about the use of Twitter by those protesting the election results in Iran, as other means of modern mass communications–such as email, Facebook and texting–got blocked.

In other words, Twitter is so simplistic and silly that it is a perfect digital tool to overthrow a government–which is kind of makes the trendy microblogging service the Forrest Gump of international relations.

Stupid is as stupid does, of course, but what it does illustrate quite smartly is that word of mouth–a concept as old as humanity–remains the most powerful way of distributing information.

While not always reliable, masses of people chattering away has always been the most fluid way in which news has been disseminated and received. Although much of that can be mundane and borderline idiotic, one cannot deny its impact.

What one can deny, though, is the hype that inevitably follows in the wake of every one of these breakthrough technologies like Twitter.

That’s a mistake, because it is how the tools are used by people, more than the tools themselves, that should be the focus.

Still, the media hyping of tech tools as savior is reliably annoying.

Television, of course, changed the presidential elections, as radio had before that.

And, more recently, weren’t mobile phone cameras critical in reporting the bombing in London’s Underground in 2005?

Or wasn’t Facebook key to protests in Burma in 2008?

And, even more profoundly, didn’t the simple fax machine get lauded during the uprising in China’s Tiananmen Square in Beijing as an heroic gadget?

Reported Time magazine in 1989:

“When word of the massacre in Tiananmen Square first reached the University of Michigan, the 250 Chinese students studying there jumped into action: they purchased a fax machine. Daily summaries of Western news accounts and photographs were faxed to universities, government offices, hospitals and businesses in major cities in China to provide an alternative to the government’s distorted press reports. The Chinese students traded fax numbers back home along the computer network that links them around the U.S. The fax brigades at Michigan were duplicated on many other campuses.”

Ironically, hardly anyone today uses a fax machine at all, having moved onto more effective methods of sending out critical news, data, pictures, updates and more.

Like Twitter today, which deserves this moment in the sun, to be sure, as long as it lasts.

Which it won’t, as people move onto the next way to do what they have always done, which is to connect.

As for tomorrow, who knows?

After all, digital life was, is and will always be like a box of chocolates–you never know what you’re gonna get.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090616/inane-and-half-baked-twitter-is-the-forrest-gump-of-international-relations/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090602/millions-of-chinese-twitter-users-suddenly-unaware-that-i-dislike-ramen/ http://allthingsd.com/20090602/millions-of-chinese-twitter-users-suddenly-unaware-that-i-dislike-ramen/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:19:15 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=18533

Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact, it is just the opposite.”

–Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang

If China wants to correct the “false impression” that it fears the Internet, ending its paranoid blocking of Web services would be a good place to start. This morning, Beijing extended the Great Firewall of China, restricting Internet access to Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail and Bing, among others. As confirmation of this, Herdict–a Harvard University site that monitors Internet accessibility–shows a spike in reports claiming that Twitter is inaccessible in China this morning.

The Wall Street Journal’s China Journal reports similarly.

The move–presumably part of the Chinese government’s efforts to censor media ahead of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre this Thursday–was more an inevitability than anything else. Like YouTube and blogging services WordPress and Blogger, Twitter provides Chinese citizens with an outlet for dissent and self-expression, things for which the Chinese government has a profound distaste.

So, it comes as little surprise that the repressive government in Beijing has blocked it. It did the same thing to YouTube back in March.

“It’s just part of life here,” said Beijing-based Twitterer Kaiser Kuo. “If anything surprises me, it’s that it took them so long.” 

I have a request for comment in to Twitter and will update if/when I hear back.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090602/millions-of-chinese-twitter-users-suddenly-unaware-that-i-dislike-ramen/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20090320/back-to-the-future-how-the-new-york-times-saw-the-web-in-1995/ http://allthingsd.com/20090320/back-to-the-future-how-the-new-york-times-saw-the-web-in-1995/#comments Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:43:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=5522 New York Times (NYT) chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. may not have figured out how his paper can adapt to the Web age yet. But give him credit: He’s been thinking about the idea for more than a decade.

Here he is in 1995, at a Harvard University forum on journalism in the “on-line era,” thinking outloud about the ways his company might make money in the Internet era.

This is all an experiment. We don’t know where this is going. In the end, it’s going to have to pay for itself. We do know that. In the end, it’s going to have to pay for itself. And there’s not a lot of ways to make money.

As far as I know, there are only four–three, if you exclude blackmail–“Mr. Roberts, I won’t put that information up in exchange for $100,” which may be the only way to make money at this business today. Either the reader is going to pay or the advertiser is going to pay, or we’re going to get a piece of the transactional action. If the reader decides that she wants to get theater tickets from the Shubert organization for “Cats,” one, we’ll try to talk her out of it, but if she still goes out to see “Cats,” then maybe we’ll get, you know, one one-hundredth or one-tenth, or whatever the heck it is, of that transaction.

I had no idea Sulzberger harbored such an anti-”Cats” bias. Who knew?

I’m also not sure what to make of the fact that the Times–and everyone else in the news business–is still struggling with online economics 13 years later. Should the industry get credit for grappling with a problem that’s much harder than it looks? Or should our collective big brains have resolved this one by now?

Thanks to Harvard’s excellent Nieman Journalism Lab for digging up the transcript of the forum, which also featured tech pundit Esther Dyson; Walter Issacson, who was at the time a top executive at Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc.; and Frank Daniels III, publisher of the now-defunct Nando.net. You can read the entire thing (warning: very, very long)  below.

neweconomicsofjournalism1995 – Free Legal Forms

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090320/back-to-the-future-how-the-new-york-times-saw-the-web-in-1995/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090213/law-and-disorder-the-curse-of-the-winklevii/ http://allthingsd.com/20090213/law-and-disorder-the-curse-of-the-winklevii/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 08:08:56 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=9749

One thing that’s nice in these volatile times is that the Winklevoss identical twins–aka the Olympic rowing hunks whom Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg seems to have repeatedly dunked since college–can always be relied upon to create nonstop entertainment for those riveted to their increasingly kooky lawsuit against the hot social-networking site.

(Tyler Winklevoss is pictured here and Cameron Winklevoss is below.)

This week, the latest news came from a bizarre cut-and-paste technique that allowed the Associated Press to get redacted financial details of the settlement related to a lawsuit between Facebook and the Winklevosses, in which they alleged that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them.

The method of how AP got to the numbers–getting to the “blacked-out portions by copying from an electronic version of the document and pasting the results into another document”–was perhaps the most interesting piece of news in the hubbub.

That’s because the $3.7 billion valuation for Facebook uncovered Harry Potter-style in the court papers–although treated as new news by the blogosphere–was actually old news from a while back.

For those not paying attention, the legal document revealed that Facebook agreed to pay the Winklevoss-founded social site ConnectU $20 million in cash and 1,253,326 shares of common stock.

The worth of those shares depends on whether you are using Facebook’s “own appraisal” to set the value of the start-up at $3.7 billion or the fictional-from-the-get-go $15 billion from when Microsoft (MSFT) forked over $240 million for preferred shares in Facebook in late 2007.

(If you’re bored, you can play investigative reporter on the docs here too!)

In any case, it’s only the legal hijinks–either via rank incompetency or, more likely, creative leaking–that I want to know more about, especially since heretofore confidential information seems to keep seeping out of this case like some hole-plagued rowing shell.

Besides the invisible ink trick, there was also the “accidental” leak earlier this week by the law firm that once represented ConnectU against Facebook about how well it had scored for the Winklevosses.

In a marketing newsletter, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges bragged it had earned them the higher $65 million figure, based on the Microsoft valuation, rather than the lower Facebook one.

ConnectU fired Quinn Emanuel over the settlement–likely because the lower figure was the right one–and, presto, the new information suddenly emerges.

And last year, Zuckerberg was subjected to widespread ridicule after the Boston-based magazine 01238 got hold of all sorts of court-sealed goodies about his bad behavior while a student at Harvard University, where he created Facebook.

It just gets curiouser and curiouser.

Of course, the documents that still have not gotten leaked are the alleged “smoking gun” that shows Zuckerberg to be guilty and the Winklevii redeemed. While many on the twins’ side have persistently insinuated they exist, such proof has not surfaced as yet.

That’s why, until then, this whole legal circus remains a ship of fools.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090213/law-and-disorder-the-curse-of-the-winklevii/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081103/nevermind-the-baallocks-heres-the-econolypse/ http://allthingsd.com/20081103/nevermind-the-baallocks-heres-the-econolypse/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:00:58 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=7704

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081103/nevermind-the-baallocks-heres-the-econolypse/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081103/nevermind-the-baallocks-heres-the-econolypse-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20081103/nevermind-the-baallocks-heres-the-econolypse-2/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:00:58 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=7704

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081103/nevermind-the-baallocks-heres-the-econolypse-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080818/the-entire-d6-interview-with-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-and-sheryl-sandberg-1-of-4/ http://allthingsd.com/20080818/the-entire-d6-interview-with-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-and-sheryl-sandberg-1-of-4/#comments Mon, 18 Aug 2008 07:14:39 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=2816 We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Unfortunately, due to issues too complicated to go into, we have to post all the D6 interviews in several 15-minute parts (I know, I know).

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

Here’s Part 1 of 4 of an interview I did with Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. (I will post one video part of the discussion with Zuckerberg and Sandberg every day this week, starting Monday and concluding Thursday.)

The social-networking site has had quite a year, as the hottest and most hyped of the Web 2.0 landscape. With fast growth and still-questionable monetization power, where Facebook is going will be a journey plenty will be paying attention to.

In this video, I get a Princess Phone from Zuckerberg and Sandberg and apologize to Zuckerberg about calling him “toddler CEO.” Then Zuckerberg talks about sharing information, learning to develop by hacking on AOL, and his time at Harvard University, and Sandberg talks about her time at Harvard, in the Clinton administration and at Google.

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