The news cycle about the deal spun out of Facebook’s control after leaks emerged around the new year, with the social networking company taking a beating for the tricky and elitist way it had raised funds in a seeming evasion of the public markets, and Goldman changing the rules of the deal after much interest and scrutiny.

Since then, the leaks have kept coming, with no official acknowledgement of the deal from Facebook, until now.

Facebook today shed light on some terms of the transaction: It had the option to accept between $375 million and $1.5 billion from Goldman Sachs, and elected to choose $1 billion in an offering that was completed today.

The company distanced itself from the deal, effectively saying that it didn’t need the money and it expected to cross 500 shareholders this year anyway (something All Things D was first to report).

DST and Goldman Sachs approached Facebook to express their interest in making an investment, and Facebook decided it was an attractive opportunity to bolster its cash reserves and increase its financial flexibility with limited dilution to existing shareholders….

Even before the investment from Goldman Sachs, Facebook had expected to pass 500 shareholders at some point in 2011, and therefore expects to start filing public financial reports no later than April 30, 2012.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

That’s the advice offered via the company’s JobsBlog, an HR site aimed at Microsoft (MSFT) job seekers. It comes in a post touting Microsoft’s overall awesomeness and the fact that the company is “constantly pioneering the future of technology.”

From the post (thanks to Joseph Tartakoff for spotting):

Do you already know everything about Project Natal and the Cloud? Is Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ jaw-dropping TED talk on augmented-reality Bing Maps and Photosynth last month’s news? Then check out some of the online chatter surrounding new releases of Window Phone 7 series handsets, Internet Explorer 9 and the upcoming Courier digital journal.

The blog hyperlinks “Courier digital journal” to this Engadget post offering “exclusive pictures and details” about the device. There’s a video too, which you can see at the bottom of this post. Looks pretty cool.

Is it the real thing? Device companies and gadget blogs play a weird game about new product releases, and the rules change depending on the company. Apple (AAPL), notably, gives out almost no information to any outlet about what it’s up to, right up until the release of whatever it’s working on. Other companies beg the blogs to promote their stuff. And a middle tier of companies promote their stuff via surreptitious “leaks” they’re happy to see published.

So maybe this is Microsoft’s way of putting its seal of approval on something it can’t officially approve. On the other hand, we should note that the company’s job site is written by a group of Microsoft recruiters, who may not be fully looped in to the company’s device plans and/or communications strategy.

Maybe we’ll find out. I’ve asked the company for comment and will let you know if it has anything to say.

UPDATE: That was quick. Microsoft is sticking with its long-running “no comment” stance.

“As a company deeply involved in the digitization of education and business information, we were as interested as anyone in the launch of the new device, although we were never part of the launch event and never in a position to confirm details about the device ahead of time,” Steven Weiss, VP of Corporate Communications for The McGraw-Hill Companies said in a statement given to Digital Daily.

“On Tuesday afternoon Mr. McGraw appeared on CNBC in a wide ranging interview to discuss our earnings announcement and growth projections for 2010. His speculative comments about Apple’s pending launch, which he shared earlier in the day in a call with investors, were simply intended to suggest that if the new device were to use iPhone applications, many of our education products would be compatible with the technology and could be made easily available on it.”

Concluding, Weiss wrote, “Unfortunately, it seems that many mistakenly interpreted his comments as being more specific to yesterday’s announcement. It is also important to note that only the products of trade publishers were featured in the launch event. Our digital education programs are not in that category and were never part of those negotiations.”

It would seem, then, that contrary to other reports making the rounds, McGraw-Hill was not abruptly excised from Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs’s presentation yesterday after Terry McGraw’s disclosure on CNBC. And indeed, multiple sources close to the situation say that the CEO was not given a demo of the iPad before its launch and that McGraw-Hill (MHP) was never intended to be part of iPad launch event in San Francisco.

In retrospect, all McGraw really did on CNBC was to recycle and recast some comments made during the company’s Tuesday morning earnings conference call. Reading over those remarks, it seems plausible that he was simply excitedly regurgitating the same collection of rumor and speculation we all were during the run-up to the launch event.
 
“In the near future, you will undoubtedly see a McGraw-Hill e-book for the college market running on an Apple tablet,” McGraw said during the company’s earnings call. “All our titles on CourseSmart, the industry e-book consortium, are already available to students on an iPhone operating system. That’s because CourseSmart developed an iPhone application last summer with support from Apple. The goal was to have core educational content available on the iPhone operating system, which also makes it possible for e-books to run on new Apple devices using that system.”
 
Continuing, McGraw said, “Consider then the Apple tablet computer, which will be introduced shortly. There is a lot of secrecy about the introduction, but many expect that the Apple device will use the iPhone operating system. If that’s the case, we are confident that our CourseSmart e-books should run well right out of the box on any Apple Tablet. Stay tuned.”

Similar to what he told CNBC, right? Thing is, McGraw spoke with quite a bit more certainty during that interview. He said:

“Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable.”

Those remarks don’t seem entirely speculative to me. Still, what was McGraw saying that we hadn’t already heard before? Maybe he reads the rumor sites too.