The timing of the launch leaked out early when the New York Times accidentally published its story early and then promptly took it down.

In a cached version of the story, which is also available in RSS feeds with the words “embargo-till-midnight/” in the URL, explains that the test markets will be Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco. UPDATE: The story now has been published officially.

A lot of details on how Facebook Deals planned to operate and how it anticipated rivaling others, like Groupon and LivingSocial–or even Google Offers, which launched last week–have been available for some time.

The one noticeable aspect that the unpublished article confirms is that users will be able to use Facebook Credits to pay for the offers.

Up until now, Credits have mostly been used for virtual goods inside of games, or for some movies. Facebook typically takes a 30 percent cut from those transactions, but it’s unclear whether that will continue to hold true for these deals as well. Users will also be able to pay by using a credit card.

So far, the economics of group-buying on other sites would in theory support Facebook taking a 30 percent cut. Typically, a merchant offers its services for 50 percent off, and then gives the company that generated the lead 25 percent of those revenues.

It was already announced that Facebook had signed up nine partners: Gilt City, HomeRun, OpenTable, PopSugar City, Tippr, KGB Deals, Plum District, ReachLocal and Zozi.

Facebook’s goal is to focus on group activities and to make it easier to share deals with friends when they see a friend purchase something.

It’s been a dog’s age since BoomTown revisited Sugar Inc., the scrappy women-focused content start-up run by Brian and Lisa Sugar.

I first paid a visit to the San Francisco headquarters of Sugar three years ago to check out the flagship PopSugar (celebs), GeekSugar (tech), CasaSugar (home) and YumSugar (food) sites.

Since then, it has moved into a range of other arenas, via acquisition, such as:

ShopStyle.com for Web commerce; FreshGuide, which makes women-aimed city guides that show off daily offers in a wide rage of arenas, such as beauty, health and fitness; and video shopping start-up Shopflick, which is now a Los Angeles-based branded entertainment unit called Sugar Digital Entertainment.

And, most recently, in mid-July, it launched a fashion game on Facebook called Retail Therapy. where you run your own fashion boutique.

While mine would be all jeans, T-shirts and Puma Mostros, it is an interesting idea from a content company, injecting into the content model doses of virality, commerce and user passion.

And, of course, Sugar has launched the requisite Apple (AAPL) iPhone and iPad apps.

Last summer, Sugar also cut its ties with NBC Universal by buying back its shares and got a Series C funding of $16 million from Sequoia Capital.

Sequoia has been an existing venture investor, having put $5 million into Sugar in late 2006. NBC invested $10 million in 2007.

And while Sugar has had serious acquisition flirtations with Yahoo (YHOO), it currently remains on the road to building a new media content company of the future from scratch.

Here’s a talk I had with Brian Sugar last week about that and more, as well as a tour of Sugar’s office.

Also below, a very funny video called “The Zoeinator,” which Sugar did for Rachel Zoe’s Zoe Report, as an example of its branded content efforts:

Enjoy: