While the tale of a print magazine embedded in a troubled media company makes for much better reading, everyone loves a listicle. So, Time has once again put out its annual countdown of the 100 “most influential people in the world, from artists and leaders to pioneers, titans and icons.”

And, as usual, global techies represent big-time on the list, including:

* Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — about whom Virgin Group’s Richard Branson wrote, “It’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.”

* Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom, who gets inexplicably feted by entertainment bon vivant Ryan Seacrest (we are down with this anyway).

* Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos (yay for Ted, who is Mr. Nice Guy, especially for Hollywood).

* Ren Zhengfei, CEO of China’s telecom giant Huawei.

* Oh-Hyun Kwon, Samsung CEO, about whom former Apple CEO John Sculley wrote, “As Samsung builds a campus in Silicon Valley, all eyes will be on Kwon to see if the CEO with a PhD from Stanford can be as successful with software as he has been with hardware.”

* Music manager and Internet talent discoverer Scooter Braun.

* Minecraft developers, Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, whom my sons revere (and therefore are deserving of kudos!).

* OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, who is now CEO of Match.com.

* Microsoft and Apple irritant David Einhorn, who is the only hedge fund investor dude I like.

* Deservedly ubiquitous Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose “Lean In” is a bestseller.

* Apple design guru Jony Ive, about whom Bono noted, “Jony Ive is himself classic Apple. Brushed steel, polished glass hardware, complicated software honed to simplicity.”

* Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, who are among many in tech trying to change education.

* Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee.

* Google Ideas guy Jared Cohen.

* Afghanistan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob, who gets praise from Sandberg.

* Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen, about whom “Veronica Mars” star (and user of the fundraising tool) Kristen Bell said, “There’s something so smart and magical about that idea — connecting consumers with creators and letting them vote with their own money.”

* And listicle Olympian and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, garnering a major feting from Google’s Eric Schmidt, who wrote: “Google was lucky to have her help us grow into what we became, and Yahoo is lucky to have her taking them someplace new.”

(Cover photo by Mark Seliger for Time)

Hence this morning’s announcement. Facebook will work with the National Association of Attorneys General to promote privacy awareness and general tips for teenagers on how to use the social network’s page settings.

It’s pretty straightforward stuff. Facebook will work with 19 attorneys general across the country (potentially more to come), creating state-specific videos on how to better manage your Facebook pages. There’s also a general tip sheet with data points on the topic, as well as videos created by the privacy team answering questions sent from the Facebook-using public on privacy questions in general.

“At Facebook, we work hard to make sure people understand how to control their information and stay safe online,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in a statement. “We’re grateful for Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler’s leadership on this issue, and we look forward to working with him and attorneys general around the country.”

Sandberg met with NAAG President Gansler and a few other state attorneys general on Sunday to talk about the initiative in advance of a privacy summit this week, also chatting about general Facebook privacy and safety efforts.

It’s another in a string of Facebook’s recently promoted information session initiatives, headed by Erin Egan, the company’s chief privacy officer. The goal is to find better ways to inform its massive user base of changes to the network, and how to better navigate it — a tough challenge, considering that there are so many users to inform, each with different levels of technology savvy.

Probably a good idea, considering that Facebook agreed to years of privacy audits as a result of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission back in 2011. Not to mention the heightened attention paid to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in recent years.

Expect to see the videos and initiatives promoted on Facebook over the coming year.

Business Insider’s co-founder and editor is the subject of a Ken Auletta profile in this week’s New Yorker, which means Henry Blodget is now in some rarefied media mogul air (see: Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, etc.)

And at the end of Auletta’s piece, which you should be able to read here soon, Blodget tells Auletta he would like to come back to Wall Street, where he has been barred from working since his 2003 SEC settlement. Or at least he’d like the option:

“Ten years ago, I got what amounted to a dishonorable discharge from the industry, and I’ve always been ashamed of that. At some point, if it seems appropriate, I would like to explore the possibility of being reinstated.”

So there you go.

Is this an attempt at an attention-grabbing way of summarizing an extensively reported story someone else produced? Yep! And am I going to (respectfully) aggregate the rest of this piece? Of course!

• Henry Blodget says he was a “loner” when he went to Yale in the mid-80s. His extra-curricular activities included tennis, chess, frisbee, rock-climbing, a capella singing and studying for a pilot’s license.
• Business Insider, which claimed revenue of $5 million in 2011, lost $3 million in 2012.
• TBI chairman Kevin Ryan says the company will do $11 million this year (last summer someone told the WSJ the company would do $12 million in 2012); he says the site has only spent $7 million of the $13 million it has raised.
• Though Comscore pegs the site’s traffic at 9 million, Blodget tells Auletta that his Google Analytics numbers are at 24 million unique monthly users, many of whom come from outside the U.S.
• If you’ve spent a lot of time thinking and reading about Henry Blodget, you won’t find a lot that is new here. But Auletta is thorough, and does a particularly good job of explaining Blodget’s Wall Street past, and its context. So the time you put in on the 7-page piece is most definitely worth it.
• I’m quoted in the piece a couple of times, accurately. I still own a few shares of Business Insider. So I hope if it is acquired by a big media company, as a board member predicts will happen one day, it’s for a lot of money.

Sandberg and her team have been encouraging women to post their personal stories of when they leaned into their careers and Mayer certainly does that in her post, including discussing taking the job at the top of the troubled Silicon Valley Internet company when she was seven months pregnant.

She wrote:

Looking back to reflect on the question: Could I really take the helm of Yahoo when I was 28 weeks pregnant? Even now, it sounds absolutely crazy. I considered if and how I could make it work: learning more about the role, getting words of encouragement from close friends and family, and developing a plan. I’ve always believed you can never have everything that you want, but with work and dedication, you can have the things that really matter to you. If I took the opportunity, it was clear that I would have to find a way to have time with my baby without a long maternity leave. I also knew going forward that there wouldn’t be much time beyond my job and my family for anything else. Ultimately, I decided I was fine with that, because my family and my job are what really matter to me.

In the piece, Mayer also noted that she jumped at the chance to run Yahoo, which had actually put Google in business in many ways with an early search deal. She started her career at the search giant and was one of its higher-ranking execs.

“The alignment with my experience and career was uncanny: search, email, homepage, news, finance, maps, social, mobile and more,” she wrote, although she also said that after “13 years of really hard work at Google, I had been envisioning a glorious six-month maternity leave.”

Not so. Mayer took off from Yahoo only a few weeks after she had her baby son last fall, and she said it has turned out well for her. “I’ve come to realize that being a mother makes me a better executive, because motherhood forces prioritization,” she wrote. “Being a mom gives you so much more clarity on what is important.”

A year ago, in the run-up to its IPO, Facebook told the ad world that it had a new plan: “Sponsored stories” — ads that looked like “real” content, that would show up on users’ screens based on the way they and their friends behaved on Facebook.

New new plan: Facebook will let advertisers buy ads on the social network the way they buy ads all over the Web — tracking users’ travels outside of Facebook, and showing them ads based on their browsing history.

Facebook took a step toward this last summer, when it rolled out its Facebook Exchange, which allowed marketers to serve “retargeted” ads on the right-hand side of users’ pages. Today they’re making a small but important change, by letting advertisers serve the same kind of ads directly in users’ main “News Feeds” — Facebook’s primo real estate.

Unless they’re really paying attention, the average user won’t notice the difference between a retargeted ad in their News Feed and Facebook’s (not very) old-fashioned “sponsored story” ads. The formats look the same, and just like the old ones, you can see if your friends “Liked” or commented on a retargeted ad.

The main difference is that if you click on the ad, you’ll be sent outside of Facebook to an advertiser’s site, instead of inside to a Facebook page. (You’ll also, in theory, be able to opt out from seeing that kind of ad if you notice a small “ad choices” logo” and follow a series of steps.)

The real change is all happening behind the scenes: Instead of telling an advertiser that they’re likely to find someone receptive to their message based on their Facebook behavior, Facebook is telling an advertiser they can guarantee delivery of their message to someone who has visited certain websites.

That’s a big shift in the way Facebook has treated advertising. Before last year, the site didn’t allow any retargeting at all; both internally and externally, the concept was treated with disdain.

And that made some sense: If you’re going to sell ads on Facebook the way they’re sold all over the Web, then what makes Facebook different than Yahoo, AOL or any other big site with a ton of impressions?

But advertisers — at least certain kinds of advertisers, particularly those with “direct response” pitches — love retargeting, and they’ve gone gaga for the ones Facebook started selling last year. Presumably they’ll be just as excited about these ads, which will be much more visible. And if Facebook can figure out how to serve them up on phones (much trickier, for technical reasons), they’ll be into that, too.

The question is what this means for Facebook in the long run.

The site says it isn’t backtracking or moving away from its “sponsored stories” ads in any fashion, and that this lets it have the best of both worlds: You can buy ads on Facebook the Facebook way, or the way everyone else does it.

Wall Street might well conclude that this is a good idea, too, since it should add a whole new revenue stream for the site. Or it might conclude that Facebook is less enthusiastic about a worldview it was promoting just a year ago.

Time to find out.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg might still be trying to figure out the social networking giant’s mobile monetization strategy, but there’s one thing she has locked: The top spot on two of the most important bestseller lists at the same time.

This week, for the first time, her “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” ranked No. 1 on the influential New York Times list for hardcover nonfiction, as well as for combined print and e-book nonfiction. The list, which appears in this coming Sunday’s issue of the New York Times Book Review, actually reflects sales for the week ending March 16, 2013.

“Lean In” has been on Amazon’s top 100 list of all books for much longer — in fact, for 32 days. The tome on the many difficulties faced by women in the workforce reached No. 1 status several weeks ago.

The official release date of the book was March 11, which was followed by a publicity blitz of massive proportions, including the cover of Time magazine, huge takeouts in innumerable newspapers, and laudatory television pieces on “60 Minutes” and with Oprah Winfrey.

“Lean In” has also attracted a huge dollop of controversy, with everyone and their mother (and my mother, Lucky, too) arguing over its merits, as well as its message — including whether Sandberg blamed women too much for the lack of advancement in the executive ranks.

She doesn’t, actually — if you read it, which many pundits appear to not have done. But that has not stopped the rigorous and welcome debate over the important issue, which seems to be exactly what Sandberg was aiming for.

Sales appear to have been widespread, but seem to also be helped by big purchases by companies such as Cisco, which are encouraging employees to read it.

“Mike Schroepfer’s new designation as Facebook’s CTO reflects the unique and important role he plays across the company,” Facebook told AllThingsD in a statement.

The position was previously unoccupied due to the departure of former CTO Bret Taylor last summer.

Schroepfer — or Schrep, as he’s more commonly known — has been at Facebook for nearly five years, overseeing all of the company’s engineering, infrastructure and mobile efforts, a key figure as the company tries to reinvent itself as “mobile first.” He joined Facebook after a three-year stint at Mozilla, where he also served as VP of engineering, and did time as an engineer and CTO of Sun Microsystems’ DataCenter Automation and Clustering Software Division. (What a mouthful.) Schroepfer currently sits on the board of Ancestry.com, and is also a trustee of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.

He joins a strong executive team under CEO Mark Zuckerberg, with Sheryl Sandberg continuing to manage operations as COO, while CFO David Ebersman continues to handle the books.

Good timing, too, as we’ll be sitting down with Schrep at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York City this April! How convenient. We’ll ask him all about what he’s got planned for the company going forward in his new role.

A trio of high-profile tech communications execs from Twitter (Sean Garrett), Facebook (Brandee Barker), and Skype (Brian O’Shaughnessy), have joined forces to create a new firm called the Pramana Collective.

While PR types don’t usually get a lot of the attention, the joining of these three top Silicon Valley players is enough of a news event to warrant some mention.

(If only to try to figure out a good joke to make about its name, which sounds like a line of skin care products at a spa you can’t afford. I do like to amuse myself.)

Actually, according to a blog post from Garrett, which is below, Pramana is “the means by which one obtains accurate knowledge or true perception.”

(Namaste, and let’s hope that means Barker will finally give me a real comment when I shove my video camera in her face — inside joke alert!)

In all seriousness, communications is a critical part of the digital ecosystem, and this is a strong group. Barker, who was Facebook’s first PR head, has been doing a lot of consulting work since she left there; she was a key part of the team involved in the launch of “Lean In,” the unavoidable book by the social networking site’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg. O’Shaughnessy has just left the owner-changing Skype, and before that, he worked in key PR roles at Google. Lastly, longtime communications exec Garrett led the PR team at Twitter through some of its bumpiest years.

Here’s Garrett’s full blog post, which will give you enlightenment on the whole thing:

Finding Pramana

Brandee Barker has the calming wisdom of someone who learned a lifetime of lessons in her four years at Facebook. She started the company’s communications team and was its leader during Facebook’s most formative, fast-moving years. Brandee recognized that when you are moving at mind-bending speeds, you have to make 100 decisions a day and, within those, a few mistakes will be made. Brandee recognized and learned from both these mistakes and the many more successes gained by her and her team. She was my inspiration during my own journey of mistake/success reflection after my similar ride at Twitter.

Brian O’Shaughnessy makes things look easy. Yet, once you get past his self-deprecating jokes and his insistence on shining the light on others, you realize that you came away from a conversation with him twice as smart as when you started. And, one of most complex communications job in the last four years was running Skype’s. During that time, the company was owned by eBay, was spun out to a private equity consortium and then was sold to Microsoft. Off the 30 original eBay/Skype management team when Brian started in 2008. He left in February as the last remaining one. This wasn’t easy. It reflects on Brian’s innate ability to bring disparate people and perspectives together to forge successful strategies through leadership defined by bullshit-free objectivity and a mastery of technical knowledge.

Brandee and Brian share an unwavering sense of loyalty, strength of character and a desire to apply their learnings to something meaningful.

I feel the same way. And I’m pleased to join these two people that I have so much respect for as partners and co-founders of The Pramana Collective.

Since The Pramana Collective comes from the same place as the philosophies that I’ve clearly, if infrequently, written about here, I won’t dive into our feelings about the state of communications and the great changes that all corners of marketing are facing as lines between disciplines blur. But, practically, this change will have us focused on client needs and not definitions of marketing terminology or dated dividing lines. For example, whatever ‘PR’ was and currently may be to some is not relevant to us now — nor was it when we ran teams at Facebook, Skype and Twitter.

The Pramana Collective is a project-focused communications consultancy. This means that we will work with an organization to help meet a specific opportunity or solve a particular issue for a finite period of time. Among the offering mix will be branding, messaging, campaign development, and road mapping communications functions. This is the type of work that Brandee and I have both enjoyed doing as consultants since Facebook and Twitter.

What we won’t do is stick around to be an agency of record that provides ongoing support. We will provide objective recommendations on next steps and, as needed, suggest and help attain ongoing solutions of all stripes (in-house hires, consultants, agencies) to see through strategies. We look forward to partnering with our network of industry colleagues to find solutions for our clients long term interests.

Despite each of us having 20-plus years of experiences, multiple stints running comms teams for high-profile companies where we had amazing internal and external teams; we all would have benefited in the past from having access to a partner peer set that provided actionable intelligence, straightforward advice and a pure project solution mindset like The Pramana Collective’s offering.

When you are moving at a blindingly fast pace while trying to grow a team that’s never quite big enough, it can be a constant battle to stay ahead of being reactive to both external and internal forces and create space to form proactive campaigns around important initiatives and big moments — be they known well in advance or appear suddenly. We look forward to working with all sizes and types of organizations that share our interest in substantive, transparent and integrated communications.

This brings us to our name — The Pramana Collective. For you logophiles the full definition of Pramana is here, but, in short, it’s the means by which one obtains accurate knowledge or true perception. We believe that an organization’s sometimes hidden or obscured truths are the most powerful messages to drive a conversation. And, the “collective” will be our employees, clients and partners who both feel and act the same way.

Our first priority is hiring like-minded people from both the traditional comms world and other marketing disciplines who command the respect of entrepreneurs and executives. Indeed, getting the word broadly out to top talent who may be mapping out next moves is our primary motivation to talking about our consultancy’s formation now. If you are interested or merely curious, find me at sean at pramanacollective dot com.

And know that we believe that the best people need to have dynamic careers. As our projects will be diverse in scope, so will be the professional paths of individuals on our team. We may be a long-term opportunity for some and, for others, we might be an opportunity to attain broad perspective in between in-house jobs. Indeed, we plan to borrow the entrepreneur in residence (EIR) model that venture capital firms use.

We’ve got a lot of work to do. Having a basic web site would be nice. Regardless, whether it’s teaming on the small stuff or the profound, getting to work with Brandee and Brian already has made this journey one worth taking.

(Photo of Garrett, Barker and O’Shaughnessy courtesy of Steve Maller)

Women do not negotiate for themselves as often as men or as effectively as men. That is not because women are not smart. It is because women intuitively or implicitly understand the penalty they pay for self-negotiation. That is what we need to fix.

– Sheryl Sandberg, in an interview with Jezebel’s Tracie Egan Morrissey

As most of the free world knows by now — from the ubiquitous media coverage that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her new book, “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” has gotten of late — there are some nagging issues of women in the workplace.

That was also underscored by the huge debate that arose over Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s new rule for the Silicon Valley Internet giant that eliminated work-from-home employees.

Now, Cisco CEO John Chambers is weighing in, after a meeting with Sandberg last week, ordering each of his top managers to come up with new women-focused initiatives and put them into their development plans.

More interestingly, in an internal email I obtained, he also noted that his own leadership in the area had been lacking.

“While I have always considered myself sensitive to and effective on gender issues in the workplace, my eyes were opened in new ways and I feel a renewed sense of urgency to make the progress we haven’t made in the last decade,” wrote Chambers.

He pointed out that only one-fourth of the networking giant’s employees and top execs are women, and only 20 percent out of one million networking academy students are women. Currently, Cisco’s highest-ranking woman is Padmasree Warrior, its CTO and strategy officer, and it has three women board members.

Still, wrote Chambers:

“After reading Lean In and listening to Sheryl, I realize that, while I believe I am relatively enlightened, I have not consistently walked the talk … What we have been doing hasn’t worked, and it is time to adjust.”

Here’s the whole memo:

From: John Chambers
Date: March 8, 2013, 6:21:49 PM PST
To: John Chambers
Subject: International Working Women’s Day … Cisco Resolution

To my leaders:

I had the opportunity yesterday to discuss Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In with Sheryl and a group of my CEO peers. While I have always considered myself sensitive to and effective on gender issues in the workplace, my eyes were opened in new ways and I feel a renewed sense of urgency to make the progress we haven’t made in the last decade.

The data is startling. Women hold less than 14% of CEO positions, 17% of board seats globally, and 18% of congressional officials … and these numbers have not changed in a decade. At Cisco, less than 25% of our employees — and our leaders — are women. Only 20% of our current one-million networking academy students are women.

Today is International Working Women’s Day, and I want us, the leaders of Cisco, to see this as a leadership moment. Without realizing it, we operate every day with gender stereotypes and biases, many of which we do not realize. After reading Lean In and listening to Sheryl, I realize that, while I believe I am relatively enlightened, I have not consistently walked the talk. I think each of you, on reflection, will identify opportunities to operate at a new level with your women employees, leaders, customers, partners, and peers. I believe we — together — need to drive a fundamental culture change and it is up to us as leaders to make this change happen. What we have been doing hasn’t worked, and it is time to adjust.

I have two specific asks for each of you: 1) please read the copy of Lean In you will be receiving shortly, before we get to the SVP/VP off-site and 2) determine 3-4 specific things you will do differently and detail those commitments in your development plan and if you need help, please contact Sandy Hoffman, Chief Diversity Officer.

I know each of us will have a different explanation and a different solution, and there is power in the diversity of those ideas in driving change. I am asking two champions — Chuck Robbins and Kelly Kramer — to take a leadership role in moving us forward. I will ask them to report to the Operating Committee every quarter on the progress we have made and the action plans in place.

I think Sheryl says it best: “We can no longer pretend that biases don’t exist, nor can we talk around them … the result of creating a more equal environment will not just be better performance for our organizations, but quite likely greater happiness for all.”

Kath Weslock, Chief Human Resources Officer and I look forward to discussing this topic with many of you. We believe we have an opportunity to make a tremendous difference, and in so doing benefit our people, our culture, our company and, just maybe, the world.

John

Co-founded by Sandberg, serial entrepreneur Gina Bianchini, Debi Hemmeter and Rachel Thomas, the site will operate as a startup, with a full-time staff of four members who will continuously work on the site, updating and launching products as necessary.

The idea goes hand in hand with the major theme of Sandberg’s book, which “contains practical advice for women — and the men who want to help them — on how to lean in and close the gap” between the two, which Sandberg told AllThingsD previously.

The site’s appeal hinges on three primary features: A community section, where folks are encouraged to share stories on how to achieve their goals; an education section, which offers free online courses; and “Circles,” which are smaller, more intimate gatherings both on- and offline for people who want to dive further into the program.

While “Lean In” is all but guaranteed to be a bestseller with all the publicity leading up to the launch, there are no guarantees the website and organizational component of the plan will take off. It all depends on how well Sandberg and company can foster a community (which strikes me as somewhat funny, given her Facebook-ian background).

The site is live now, for all to see and visit, and the book will be released next week.

Flickr user Gaku

Here are our Top 10 stories from the week of Feb. 25:

1.) “Physically Together”: Here’s the Internal Yahoo No-Work-From-Home Memo for Remote Workers and Maybe More [Previously: Yahoo CEO Mayer Now Requiring Remote Employees to Not Be (Remote)]

2.) Groupon CEO: “I Was Fired Today.”

3.) Exclusive: PayPal Co-Founder Levchin Launches New Payments Startup, Affirm

4.) Survey Says: Despite Yahoo Ban, Most Tech Companies Support Work-From-Home for Employees

5.) Why Silicon Valley Is the Next Detroit

6.) A Wristwatch Tells When Phone Calls, Emails Arrive

7.) Why Carriers Just Love Firefox OS

8.) Cook: Forget About Our Share Price, Apple Has Some Great Stuff Coming

9.) Yahoo Work-From-Home Controversy Already a Silicon Valley Billboard Meme

10.) Old Media Doesn’t Get New Media, Chapter 203: The Sheryl Sandberg Attack

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Take one Silicon Valley exec. Who is rich. Who is a woman. Who seems, on the superficial surface at least, to have it all. Mix with high-profile book she has penned about gender issues in the workplace and a social networking effort to organize around. Sprinkle in some fear, some loathing and a generous dollop of startlingly ignorant assertions about how new media works. Bake in the spotlight for a millisecond.

Voila: Sheryl Sandberg Flambé.

Indeed, at this early point in the marketing game of the well-known Facebook COO’s new book, “Lean In,” the unusual level of vitriol aimed at her is, frankly, is eye-opening. While there is plenty that smart people can disagree with in her tome — after all, this is a very hot-button issue — the fact that it has ratcheted up this far before the March 11 publication date says a lot about a lot of things.

Not the least of which is that the relationship between old media and new media is, in the parlance of the huge Silicon Valley social networking company, complicated.

Consider Jodi Kantor’s New York Times article, titled “A Titan’s How-To on Breaking the Glass Ceiling,” which appeared at the end of last week.

As it was crafted, it immediately went right after Sandberg’s “carefully orchestrated media campaign” — leaving aside the pertinent fact that in this noisy day and age, every big media launch is carefully orchestrated — and then immediately took issue with her effort to start “Lean In Circles”

Oddly described by Kantor, the site is one on “which women can share experiences and follow a Sandberg-crafted curriculum for career success.” Actually, it was a little more complex than that, with major contributions from the highly regarded Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University to this effort.

Then, Kantor uses a sensationally arrogant-sounding Sandberg quote — “I always thought I would run a social movement” — from a recent video interview. As it turns out, though, it’s only a partial lift and almost totally out of context.

In full, it is about how Sandberg thought she would be a do-gooder who would doubtlessly not make much money: “I always thought I would run a social movement, which meant basically work in a nonprofit. I never thought I would work in the corporate sector.”

Then comes my favorite part from the Times piece: “With less than three weeks until launch — which will include a spread in Time magazine and splashy events like a book party at Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s home — organizers cannot say how many more groups may sprout up.”

Hmm. Hmm. They can’t say. Wow. Perhaps that’s because Lean In Circles have not started yet? You know, the service has not opened and therefore no one is using it.

Could Instagram have said how that piles of would use it before it started, especially since its first iteration was a dud? Nope! Could YouTube have known “Oppa Gangnam Style” was going to be a ginormous hit? Nope! Could the New York Times have known that it might have wanted to get ahead of this Internet thing before it decimated their business? Nope!

Here’s the thing — you can’t really fail before you start, but perhaps that’s just a Silicon Valley thing.

Let’s be clear, the “Lean In Circles” might turn out to be a big zero and perhaps Sandberg cannot compel women to use them. It could be an online ghost town. Or it could be very popular.

Who knows? All I am certain of is that it will — as the success of most online products depend on — be about whether people find whatever Sandberg is offering useful.

Also wrong is an account of Lean In essays that Sandberg has requested from some prominent women, which Kantor underscored asks for happy endings. True, but not quite if you read the whole document, which also says in part:

“Leaning in means pushing through the challenges and going down a path with an uncertain outcome. The path often leads to a positive internal result (newfound confidence, strength or determination) and often an external
reward (promotion, raise or goal achieved.) Leaning back means choosing to stay in a known or comfortable situation. This often leads to an internal
realization (desire to grow, change, consider leaning in the next time) and possibly a negative external result (stagnation, missed opportunities, loss of income.)”

After that, like many pieces so far, the article is all about how rich ladies with big houses and nannies should not lecture to other ladies without them. Perhaps that is so in some contexts and there is no question that her own massive success might be Sandberg’s most potent Achilles heel in trying to get her message out.

But in my reading, book as a whole is less grand and tsk-tsk than I expected and more about the plethora of depressing stats about women in the workplace, as well as some advice that has vaunted her to the top.

Lots of high-profile male execs have done this without the same level of anger directed at them. Thus, even though Sandberg is not the bilious and appalling as Donald Trump, she does not get to pontificate in any way that seems like, you know, she’s had some traction in the workplace — the Treasury Department, Google, Facebook — and might have some good tips to share.

Interesting, though it was not the only media account like this, the Times then followed today with one of the more bizarre and hyperactive columns I have seen of late by Maureen Dowd, who never met a pun she did not abuse mercilessly (and I love a good pun!).

“She has a grandiose plan to become the PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots reigniting the women’s revolution — Betty Friedan for the digital age,” Dowd wrote, also using the out-of-context Sandberg quote again to make her obtuse point. “She seems to think she can remedy social paradigms with a new kind of club — a combo gabfest, Oprah session and corporate pep talk. (Where’s the yoga?).”

Unpacking all those disparate images is a task for someone else with more energy than I have, but it becomes less comical when she goes all digital media expert.

“People come to a social movement from the bottom up, not the top down,” wrote Dowd. “Just because digital technology makes connecting possible doesn’t mean you’re actually reaching people.”

Um, no, it does not — and I am not sure who said it did. Although I am certain Sandberg knows more than Dowd about reaching people online and the potential for getting them to act.

Still, it is just a start and Sandberg does not seem to be saying otherwise. And perhaps it is a good thing to debate whether book is pushing women meet goals they perhaps cannot.

Or — maybe, just maybe — it is a little more complicated. In fact, it is a lot more complicated — the issue of women at work is a thorny issue –which is why it will be interesting to see if Sandberg’s book and social network will have an impact or not.

To be clear, I have no idea if it will and neither does anyone else. No one thought Facebook would have a billion users (I definitely did not!).

That answer is to come, of course, after what will doubtlessly be a rollout where the turbulence is just beginning.

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” wrote Sandberg in her book.

True that. That’s because, as it turns out, leaning in turns out to mean a very bumpy ride for those who do.

That might be part of the play here. But I hardly think that’s the whole answer.

To my mind, an Atlas play would really be about attribution.

After all, it is attribution that’s the biggest driver of ad dollars online since day one. Google is a perfect example here: It’s incredibly easy to draw a straight line from the keyword you advertise on, to the text you deliver to a searcher, to the landing page you send the searcher to — and finally to the sale (or failure to make a sale). It’s that ease of attribution that made Google into the most successful direct marketing property in history.

As of now, Facebook isn’t a serious contender for those direct marketing dollars. Just think about how often you’ve heard or read the question, “Do Facebook ads work?” (most common answer: Maybe). If Facebook wants to compete at Google levels for ad dollars, it needs to develop a way to let advertisers and agencies draw that direct line between Facebook ads and ROI.

That’s especially true since digital media has made the entire marketing world far more accountability-focused — to the point that some of the world’s largest agencies are shifting to pay-per-performance models. If accountability were a huge leg up for helping Google in the dot-com era, it’s likely a make or break for Facebook today.

Which brings us to the speculation about Atlas. The ad network theory makes sense because Atlas can 1) do complicated computations around which ads are served when, and 2) draw complex pictures around how users engage across different types of media — including interactions between Facebook and other media properties. Meanwhile, Facebook’s privacy changes from last May allow the site to leverage user data to serve ads to users while they’re not on Facebook.

If you put those points together, it does seem likely that an ad network may well be in the works, and Atlas may become a key piece of technology behind it. But if that’s the only piece of thinking going on here, then Facebook is essentially looking to solve the revenue hurdles of its core business by using that core business to support a side project. That’s an awfully convoluted and less strategic path to growth.

It seems a lot more likely that Facebook is less interested in using Atlas to port data out onto the Web, than it is in using Atlas to bring all those off-Facebook conversions back into the world of Facebook itself. In other words, Facebook wouldn’t look to Atlas as the backbone of a new ad network; Facebook would look to Atlas as the infrastructure for tools that show how users engage with Facebook ads, and where Facebook fits in the conversion path. Those are the tools that Facebook needs to prove that yes, Facebook ads do work. And no matter how lucrative an ad serving business or ad network would be, building those tools is infinitely more valuable.

Of course, beating Google at the ad network game may be one of Facebook’s goals (and it’s certainly something Sheryl Sandberg has the chops for). But if Facebook isn’t thinking first and foremost about its attribution problem, then it’ll never beat Google for ad dollars — ad network or no. Zuckerberg, Sandberg and company are smart enough to realize this. And if they are looking to buy Atlas, attribution is the reason.

Bill Wise is CEO of Mediaocean, a marketing technology company that powers $130B in media spending globally. Follow him at @billwise.

As I told you this morning, the outlook was fairly optimistic — consensus expected a 34 percent boost in revenue from the previous quarter at around $1.525 billion, with an EPS of 15 cents. Facebook surpassed that revenue, coming in at $1.59 billion and an EPS of 17 cents per share. The street immediately proceeded to sell, trading down about four percent in after-hours.

“We think we delivered strong results this quarter,” CFO David Ebersman told AllThingsD on a call this afternoon. “It’s encouraging as validation for the recent investments we’ve made in monetization and in mobile as well.”

The biggest eyebrow raiser: Mobile accounted for 23 percent of ad revenue, up from approximately 14 percent in Q3.

“I just think the mobile number is really terrific for us,” Ebersman said. “It’s such a great foundation for us, given our belief that 2012 was a year of transforming ourselves into a mobile company. And that that’s really where the future is going to be.”

No kidding. The company has been playing up its mobile ambitions for the past year-plus, ever since the company’s S-1 filing to go public. (If you haven’t heard by now, mobile is the future!)

It’s true at least in terms of user activity: For the first time this quarter, daily active users on mobile surpassed that of Web visits to the site.

But on the earnings call, neither Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg nor Ebersman delved deep into which of Facebook’s new advertising products led the company to its leaps and bounds in mobile revenue.

Though there were hints. Zuckerberg said that the sponsored stories in the news feed were doing exceptionally well, and saw massive engagement returns compared to that of the traditional advertisements in the right rail (you know, the ones we’re used to seeing). That’ll mean a decreased return in right-rail ad engagement, Ebersman hinted, but also said that the shift to news feed ads and mobile will supplant the declining numbers from the right rail.

One big thing: When Facebook says it’s a “mobile first” company, that doesn’t mean it’s in the business of building a phone. As AllThingsD has reported in the past, Facebook has indeed dabbled in producing a proper Facebook phone — codenamed Project Buffy — with hardware partner HTC. But as of late, there haven’t been many rumblings on those plans.

Perhaps Zuckerberg’s denouncement of the Facebook phone was in earnest; after all, he used his strongest language to date in denying it. “We’re not going to build a phone,” were his exact words.

Still, that didn’t stop Facebook’s C-suite troika from trumpeting “mobile mobile mobile!” the entire call (ad nauseum, if you ask me).

Check out my notes below for the call’s highlights.

————————–

(Earlier)

Howdy! Still waiting on hold, like the rest of Wall Street. Wonder who of Facebook’s C-Suite will show up today?

1:53 pm: This hold music isn’t terrible.

And the Street can’t seem to make up its mind: Shares are trading up, down, up, down in after-hours. Right now, FB is down about 1.5 percent.

1:59 pm: Worth noting that shares aren’t trading down as much as the last time Facebook hit its numbers.

Q3 saw an immediate 10 percent drop after the print hit. Oh, Wall Street. So fickle.

2:02 pm: Running a bit behind. Come on, y’all.

And here we go.

So Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Ebersman are all on the call. As has been tradition for the past few quarters.

Legalese. Please hold.

Zuckerberg stresses the shift to daily mobile users. “This is challenging for us to navigate…we started off the year with apps that weren’t as high quality as we would have wanted.”

“Today there’s no argument. Facebook is a mobile company.”

Whatever you say, Mr. Zuckerberg.

Zuck talks about mobile mobile mobile mobile. I expect this on every major Internet company earnings call henceforth.

Instagram doing great, Zuckerberg says. Skips past that whole terms of services unpleasantness of last year.

Next up, Platform talk and the social graph. Plays up Graph Search, with disclaimer of it being an early beta product.

“It’s good for lots of things that you wouldn’t use a traditional search engine for.” In other words, not Google.

“Down the line, this could potentially turn into a meaningful business for us.” Zuckerberg on Graph Search.

Take that, Goog.

Zuckerberg says App Install ads is off to a good start, but no specifics.

Plan for ad biz going forward involves improving targeting, designing better ads and working on custom audience targeting. You don’t say.

Zuckerberg wants to “temper near-term expectations” on payments biz — i.e. Gifts and Graph Search.

Guess Gifts ain’t off to a gangbusters start.

Expenses are likely to grow at a faster rate in 2013, due to increased expenditures in product development.

Headcount going to shoot up, too. Take a look at this quarter’s numbers, and you’ll see it already has.

2:12 pm: Now on to Sandberg.

Sandberg cites brands using Facebook ads during the holiday season as the strength of their performance. Yep. Spending through the rest of those ad budgets.

Ad strategy over the last quarter — building tools for “every type of marketer — brand, direct, local businesses and developers.”

Sandberg cites Walmart’s success in delivering mobile eyes over the holiday quarter. Michael Kors, too.

Quite the brand disparity, I’d say.

Talk about Facebook “Offers.” Nearly 42 million unique users claimed offers. Not bad.

Emphasis on Offers explains the Graph Search push into local and social discovery, by the by.

2:16 pm: Now to Facebook Exchange. Pay attention here.

FBX served 1 billion impressions daily, supported more than 1,300 advertisers per day.

App install ads seem to be doing well enough. Games getting the bulk of installations, but Sandberg thinks this will expand to other types of categories — travel, shopping and the like.

Talking up Facebook marketing campaigns. As an aside, I’ve heard it’s still tough for small-timers to use Pages to their advantage. Big brands probably still doing better.

Anyone counting how many times the word “mobile” has been uttered on this call? I’ve lost track.

Ads in news feed apparently drive 8x the amount of offline sales than those seen in the right rail, acccording to a study FB conducted with a partner.

In other words, news feed ads are important.

2:22 pm: Now on to CFO David Ebersman.

Going back over the numbers — big shift to mobile, growth of monthly and daily users globally.

All the numbers that Ebersman is citing “do not include Instagram, which continues to grow at an impressive rate.”

Ad revenue up in Q4 as strongest of all of 2012. Attribute that to the new ad products.

18 percent increase in avg. price per ad in the U.S. and Canada. That’s good.

Payments revenues from games were essentially flat year on year from 2011.

Expenses increased 67 percent, “driven primarily by headcount and infrastructure.”

That’s a lotta hiring.

Ebersman chats a bit about the stock lockups expiring. Expects taxes to go up slightly in 2013.

Expectations for payments in 2013 — still hopeful for games, “however, we still face a declining headwind … because games payments revenues still coming primarily from desktop users.”

2:28 pm: Come on, Zynga and others. Make that shift to mobile faster.

Total expenses expected to grow about 50 percent in 2013. Woof.

Now it’s Q&A time with the analysts.

Question from Doug Anmuth at J.P. Morgan — did FB open up more ad inventory for Q4? They saw a big jump.

Zuckerberg on measuring ad quality in the news feed: They look at “Likes” and the like. Ranking improvements made last year improved ad quality by 50 percent, Zuckerberg says.

Inserting ads resulted in about a 2 percent reduction in “Likes” and comments. Says it’s marginal, not too shabby.

A question on engagement. How do you measure it?

Zuckerberg: “We want the organic content to be the same basic types of content as paid content.”

In other words — “Yo, ad guys! Make better ads! We’ll help you. Don’t worry.”

Zuckerberg basically wants your news feed ads to not suck. Cites Instagram as a great model for native ads.

Now when are you going to monetize Instagram, Mark?

Sandberg on Facebook Exchange: Facebook exchange on Triggit drives 36 percent more conversions than ads anywhere else.

Hmm.

2:37 pm: Zuckerberg: Early on, didn’t expect to show everyone an ad every day. Mostly because quality wasn’t there. But now that they’re showing ads, the engagement didn’t take a big hit.

Translation: They can spend time improving quality, but it’s really not as bad as they thought it would be.

It’s more about good targeting and good ad formats now, says Zuckerberg.

A question about Graph Search vs Google. Dun dun dunnnnnnnn!

2:39 pm: Zuckerberg: Something we talked about when rolling out Graph Search is all the connections within Facebook. We’re just coming from a completely different place [than Google].”

Though that also implies that Google’s efforts to link people with the things they like using Google+ isn’t exactly up to snuff.

Question about video in the news feed. Remember that rumor that video would appear in news feed ads in the future?

Ah, a non-answer from Ebersman about video ads. Shucks.

Zuckerberg: For video ads, it’s not critical that Facebook hosts it. They could link out to others, for example.

Question: Talk about the relative ad load in the U.S. vs. Europe and Asia.

Also, why are mobile ads shooting up? Any particulars?

Ebersman adds little color. ARPU took off in the U.S. first, then rest of the world afterwards. Makes sense, because that’s where the rollouts were concentrated.

Again, non-answer on mobile. Basically, we make good products, so mobile ad revenue shoots up.

“We’re not going to build a phone.” Zuckerberg. That’s the strongest language he’s used in saying they aren’t going to build a phone. Ever.

Although still could be a Steve Jobsian feint!

Never say never, right?

A question about the right rail. Since it’s not working as well as news feed ads, how do you expect it to trend going forth?

Ebersman says Facebook doesn’t really consider it separate businesses. Not going to break it down.

Oh, and another “growth in mobile usage” comment. So reading between the lines, expect right rail revenue to decrease as mobile usage increases, as per Ebersman’s comments.

2:49 pm: Sandberg: “The click is not really the most important metric for us.”

Sandberg: In terms of our measurement capabilities — still really early.

As is everything Facebook is working on! Wonder how long the “we’re early in this” argument is going to fly.

Ebersman: “We want Facebook to be the default social infrastructure for mobile games.”

Wonder how Zynga, who is developing its own mobile social mesh, feels about that?

2:52 pm: The college kids love the Facebook, Ebersman says. And that’s good for our future.

Sandberg claims a strong position on mobile, particularly because of logged-in identity and the ability to serve relevant ads.

More questions about payments. Talk about health.

Ebersman on Payments: Note that this year as opposed to last year we have a little bit of revenue from non-game sources.

We still see a nice diversification in games.

In other words, it’s not all Zynga.

When will Facebook Exchange come to mobile, analyst asks?

Sandberg shuts him down. Nothing to share. Sorry, pal.

Ebersman saying Facebook still needs to help people understand how to actually use Gifts.

That’s confusing and not easy. Anecdotally, I’ve tried with a few of my friends and parents. They are confused.

2:59 pm: Zuckerberg: Android is a very dynamic and open platform, as long as Google keeps it that way.

The two companies don’t really have a “relationship where they really talk,” Zuckerberg admits.

In a nutshell: We dig Apple, our relationship is cool. Google and us, not so much. They better keep Android open. — Zuck

Them’s antagonistic words, Mr. Zuckerberg.

3:02 pm: And that’s a wrap!

What a way to go out.

The Street was expecting around $1.52 billion and 15 cents a share. Shares immediately headed down, so presumably investors wanted a bigger beat. They’ve dipped as low as 7 percent. And now, about 25 minutes after the release hit, they’re bouncing around in the negative 4 percent to 5 percent range. (Update: And now they’re back! Maybe the Facebook IR team has magical powers.)

Per usual, not a lot of detail in the press release (full text below), aside from user numbers and a few quick details. The only financial one of note: Mobile accounted for 23 percent of ad revenue, up from approximately 14 percent in Q3. Would have been nice to hear about Facebook Exchange, Sponsored Stories and other elements of the business, but we’ll assume that will come up in the call.

Overall ad revenue of $1.33 billion was up 41 percent year over year; Facebook says that if you factor out currency effects, it would be up 43 percent.

Facebook had 1.06 billion active users at the end of December, which means they generated $1.54 in revenue apiece in the last 3 months of 2012. A year ago that number was $1.38.

There don’t seem to be any particular red flags here; Facebook is growing revenue, and it’s growing mobile revenue, and expenses seem in line. So if you sold today, my best guess is that you wanted to see much more growth.

Maybe Mark Zuckerberg and/or Sheryl Sandberg can win you over during the earnings call. Check back at 5 pm ET, when my colleague Mike Isaac will be covering it live.

Here’s a handy guide from Citi analyst Neil Doshi that should (maybe?) provide some insight into the way investors will react to the numbers (click to enlarge):

Facebook Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2012 Results

MENLO PARK, Calif. – Jan. 30, 2013 – Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) today reported financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2012.

“In 2012, we connected over a billion people and became a mobile company,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “We enter 2013 with good momentum and will continue to invest to achieve our mission and become a stronger, more valuable company.”

Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2012 Financial Summary

Fourth Quarter 2012 Operational Highlights

· Monthly active users (MAUs) were 1.06 billion as of December 31, 2012, an increase of 25% year-over-year
· Daily active users (DAUs) were 618 million on average for December 2012, an increase of 28% year-over-year
· Mobile MAUs were 680 million as of December 31, 2012, an increase of 57% year-over-year
· Mobile DAUs exceeded web DAUs for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2012

Recent Business Highlights

· Mobile revenue represented approximately 23% of advertising revenue for the fourth quarter of 2012, up from approximately 14% of advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2012
· Facebook launched Graph Search Beta, a structured search tool that enables users for the first time to find people, places, photos and other content that has been shared on Facebook
· Launched Facebook for Android 2.0, completely rebuilt to deliver improved stability and faster performance and opened Facebook Messenger to anyone with a telephone number

Fourth Quarter 2012 Financial Highlights

Revenue – Revenue for the fourth quarter totaled $1.585 billion, an increase of 40%, compared with $1.13 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011.
Revenue from advertising was $1.33 billion, representing 84% of total revenue and a 41% increase from the same quarter last year. Excluding the impact of year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates, advertising revenue would have increased by 43%.
Payments and other fees revenue for the fourth quarter was $256 million. As planned, in the fourth quarter of 2012 the company recognized revenue from four months of Payments transactions for accounting reasons detailed in our Form 10-Q filed on October 24, 2012. Adjusting for the $66 million of revenue in the extra month of December, Payments and other fees revenue would have been essentially flat year-over-year.

Costs and expenses – Fourth quarter costs and expenses were $1.06 billion, an increase of 82% from the fourth quarter of 2011. Excluding share-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses, non-GAAP costs and expenses were $849 million, an increase of 67%.

Income from operations – For the fourth quarter, GAAP income from operations was $523 million, compared to income from operations of $548 million for the fourth quarter of 2011. Excluding share-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses, non-GAAP income from operations for the fourth quarter was $736 million, compared to $624 million for the fourth quarter of 2011.

Operating margin – GAAP operating margin was 33% for the fourth quarter, compared to 48% for the fourth quarter of 2011. Excluding share-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses, non-GAAP operating margin was 46% for the fourth quarter, compared to 55% for the fourth quarter of 2011.

Income tax provision – The GAAP income tax provision for the fourth quarter was $441 million, representing an 87% effective tax rate. Excluding share-based compensation expense and related payroll tax expenses, the non-GAAP effective tax rate would have been approximately 41%.

Net income – GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $64 million, compared to net income of $302 million for the fourth quarter of 2011. GAAP EPS for the fourth quarter was $0.03, compared to $0.14 for the same quarter in the prior year. Excluding share-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses, and income tax adjustments, non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $426 million, or $0.17 per share, compared to $360 million and $0.15 per share for the same quarter in the prior year.

Capital expenditures – Purchases of property and equipment for the fourth quarter were $198 million. Additionally, $89 million of equipment was procured or financed through capital leases during the fourth quarter of 2012.

Cash and marketable securities – As of December 31, 2012, cash and marketable securities were $9.63 billion.

The volume of selling doesn’t appear unusual for a newly public company — the 37.5 million shares sold represent less than 2 percent of Facebook’s shares outstanding. Compared with other recent Internet IPOs, Facebook executives and directors have been less active sellers than insiders at Zynga Inc., but more active than those at Groupon Inc.

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On Thanksgiving, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg sent Wal-Mart’s marketing chief Stephen Quinn a text, “Good luck!”

After months of planning, Wal-Mart’s social-media team was in the command-control room of the retailer’s Bentonville, Ark., headquarters, which is typically reserved for natural disasters. Ms. Sandberg and other Facebook executives were on standby in New York and California.

Over the next 72 hours Facebook and Wal-Mart rolled out the social network’s biggest mobile-advertising campaign ever, consisting of 50 million ads.

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Tonight, new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer gave her first public interview since becoming the leader of the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Not to cranky me, of course, but to the much more amenable Fortune magazine writer and editor Pattie Sellers, who hosted the former Google exec at a dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., as part of the magazine’s Most Powerful Women franchise.

Fortune recently put a glamour shot of Mayer on the cover, and Sellers also did a profile. Now, Mayer was ready to sit down to talk about Yahoo and more.

(I wish I could have reported from the event, and almost did. I had initially been invited to the dinner at the Garden Court Hotel for about 100 guests, mostly women. But I was then waitlisted, and then told by Sellers directly that I could not attend, as the editors had decided to close out outside media and only have Fortune staffers covering it.)

Whatever! I have my ways to liveblog it and do it faster than any magazine writer can — and none involve disguising myself as a cater-waiter or solely using the Twitter feed from Fortune. As if!

Here goes:

7:50 pm: After some lovely cocktails, the audience sits down at about 10 tables of nine people and starts in on the salad course.

Soon enough, the night starts off with a speech by a McKinsey partner (and presumable sponsor of the dinner), delivering some stats as part of a study of some sort about how businesses are using — or should be using — social tools.

More than 60 percent of knowledge workers spend time exchanging information … Social can deliver an estimated $1 trillion in value.

Big news! Not! Even! Slightly! Oh dear, please get to the opening act!

Finally, Sellers gives her intro of Mayer.

8:04 pm: Sellers notes that her conference had hosted Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz in 2010 (she was ousted in 2011), and in 2011 had Mayer when she was an exec at Google (she became Yahoo CEO this year).

Now, in 2012, Mayer is top dog at Yahoo, and the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500.

“Why don’t we just call this ‘the most powerful Yahoo dinner,’” jokes Sellers.

Why not!

Mayer — for those who care, and forgive me, since I am fashion-stupid — is wearing a black frock and some heeled Mary Janes. She gets big applause when Sellers notes that Yahoo stock is up 18 percent since Mayer became CEO.

Note: It did go down when she made a shareholder misstep early in her tenure, but has gone up since she repeated mobilemobilemobile with confidence on a recent earnings call that got investors excited about her tenure.

8:08 pm: By the way, Mayer put in a call for people to vote for her as Time magazine’s Person of the Year (she is on the list of nominees — more kudos from a Time Inc. property).

Mayer starts off with basic PR messaging that she trotted out previously on the recent earnings call, around how she wants Yahoo to be focused on “delighting and engaging users” and how it is a brand that touches people every day.

Therefore, its products need to be inspiring and delightful.

Daily delight! This is the buzzword.

Also, she notes, Yahoo should be the bestest place to work.

As apparent proof of that, Mayer says that all Research In Motion BlackBerry smartphones have been banished, and that Yahoos will be using Apple’s iPhones, Google’s Android phones and Microsoft’s Windows phones.

This has been endlessly reported, even though most other Internet companies do this, but it’s a good line, anyway.

8:12 pm: By the way, iPhones are the most popular with Yahoo employees.

News at 11! (I will add that iPhones are the most popular with the Swisher boys, too, and — irony alert — one of their moms works at Google.)

Sellers then asks about what makes a good product, which is precisely why the product-savvy Mayer was brought in to fix Yahoo.

Says Mayer: “Acute user need.”

I acutely need doughnuts. Does this count?

Also, says Mayer, products have to be created in a way that is “frictionless and beautiful,” and that the offering cannot get in the consumer’s way.

Sellers asks her to name a great product. Mayer notes that she was not talking acquisitions, but quickly namechecks the iPhone and Google.

Since those companies’ market caps are a billionty times bigger than Yahoo’s, she def cannot acquire anything there.

8:17 pm: Mayer also apparently likes some kind of luxury paper made in Germany that looks like velvet. It’s Gmund, by the way.

The topic moves on to Flickr, the once hip photo-sharing service that Yahoo bought and proceeded to ignore. Meanwhile, Instagram.

Mayer says that Yahoo needs to focus on the “global suite” services that are excellent, and on executing them well.

She points out Yahoo’s fantasy football service, mentioning its recent breakdown on game day that sent fans into a tizzy.

It’s a they-love-us-so-much-they-hate-us point.

Yahoo will not do things like online maps, though, Mayer says, noting that where Yahoo cannot compete, it should partner.

Sellers asked about acquisitions.

Mayer: Mobilemobilemobile! (It worked before!)

8:22 pm: Mayer then mentions the importance of small teams that work together, such as its recent Stamped purchase.

She notes that the bigger and more strategic opportunities are around advertising technology. Calling the Rubicon Project!

Mayer veers away from a question about layoffs, a sad Yahoo tradition. I have reported previously that she will make cuts via performance reviews.

At Yahoo, she says, it’s now about performance, not potential: “No offense to potential, but what we really care about now is performance.”

No offense taken!

Also, everyone’s goals will be posted on the Yahoo Web site for everyone to see.

Oh, wait, there will surely be offense taken by those lazy potential people at Yahoo.

Mayer does add that Yahoo should be a “growth company,” and not one defined by cuts.

8:28 pm: “The consumer Internet is growing, and we need to invest,” she says.

To achieve this will be a hard job, and will take multiple years, she adds.

Sellers asks about the Disney turnaround, which Mayer is apparently fascinated with. Mayer does indeed love Disney.

Who doesn’t? (Well, me, but I am an outlier.)

Speaking of Disney, one of its directors, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, sent regrets, but has emailed a question from its board meeting in New York.

Sandberg once worked at Google with Mayer, though the pair is still not working on a search engine together.

Sandberg asks what was most surprising to Mayer about taking over at Yahoo.

Mayer says she thought the job would be hard, and her new baby would be fun. Mayer had her first child at the end of September.

“The job is fun, and the baby is easy,” says Mayer.

Sellers wants to know how Mayer gets it all done. The answer: “Ruthlessly prioritize.”

She notes that that’s why she has not talked to the media at all, and why she will not be talking after this event.

(Well, I guess I will go back to not waiting by the phone for Yahoo PR to call back. Hi Anne! — also looking forward to not getting the holiday media party invite, which is no prob as the Googlers are throwing one the same night and they usually have organic arugula picked by elves they employ that’s acutely delicious.)

Then, as a Wisconsin Green Bay Packers fan, Mayer does her version of the famous Vince Lombardi quote: “God. Family. Yahoo.”

Cheesehead moment! And Mayer and I have so much in common! Mine is: Dog. Family. Yahoo.

8:33 pm: Sellers throws in one more question from famed investor Warren Buffett, who apparently wants to know what, if Mayer was not CEO of Yahoo, would she want to run?

Not Berkshire Hathaway! Mayer says she would build something herself.

It seems as if that is what she is doing at Yahoo, so we await the result.

Until then, Mayer’s mum. So to speak.

Ms. Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, recently sold more than 350,000 shares at average prices ranging between $20.79 and $21.10, according to a filing.

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As many Facebook employees’ restricted stock units vested on Thursday, all eyes will be on the social networking site’s share price come early November.

That’s when 271 million shares of the company’s stock will be issued to pre-2011 Facebook employees, and those shares will be available for trade on the Nasdaq for the first time next week.

That includes upwards of 45 million shares from six members of Facebook’s executive team, according to a series of SEC filings made Friday: Facebook VP general counsel Ted Ullyot, COO Sheryl Sandberg, marketing VP David Fischer, VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer, CFO David Ebersman and chief accounting officer David Spillane.

It’s good news for early employees who want to finally spend some of their hard-earned stock on any number of creature comforts.

But it might not be for beleaguered investors of Facebook.

The thing to watch, of course, is just how many employees decide to cash out right away. If too many shares flood the market at once, it could deal another blow to the company’s stock price, which has already had a rough time, cut nearly in half from its initial price of $38 down to a low of $17.55 during its first six months on the Nasdaq.

This is only one in a series of lock-up expiration dates. The first occurred back in August, which allowed Facebook’s original investors (such as Peter Thiel) to sell shares.

But the big stock vesting has yet to come. On November 14, upwards of one billion employee shares become tradable on the public market.

There is no way to tell who will be selling among the company’s 3,000-plus staffers. But it is reasonable to expect staggered sales from the company’s executive team. Since they’re privy to inside information at the highest levels, they’re required to sign up for a plan which sells shares automatically over a pre-determined period of time (under SEC Rule 10b5-1, for the finance wonks out there).

Ideally, it’ll keep the market from jumping every time an executive team member sells off shares, and it’s a common practice across major public companies.

One person who won’t be selling right away? CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has vowed to wait at least a year until cashing in any of his giant pile of stock.

Shares of Facebook closed down 2.74 percent on Friday afternoon, and were down .24 percent in after-hours trading.