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Marc Andreessen, early web technology pioneer and veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has officially joined Facebook’s board of directors, according to a rather interesting press release just put out by the company.

Andreessen, as many of our readers already know, is currently the co-founder of a create-your-own social network service called Ning. When the Andreessen-Facebook board rumor first came out nearly two months ago, we and many others wondered how that conflict would be managed. Here are some clues.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s statement from the company press release:

“[Andreessen] has experience that is relevant to Facebook in so many ways: Scaling companies that are experiencing extraordinary growth, creating successful technology platforms, and building strong engineering organizations. I know Marc will be a great mentor to me and our leadership team.”

The release goes on to call Ning “a complementary [my bolding] platform to Facebook that allows people to create their own social network with any design, any feature set, and in any language.”

While Facebook’s vision is to use its “social graph” of users, their interests and friend relationships to offer new ways of connecting people (and advertising), Ning’s vision is different. It wants to let people create their own, small social networks focused on niche topics — it doesn’t have an overall social graph.

But Ning is using platforms offered by social networks to create social graphs, of sorts. It already lets users add third-party applications originally designed for Facebook. Ning is already starting to use Google’s rival “Friend Connect” service to fill its networks with data from other sites that Google shares through that service.

Hypothetically, then, maybe we’ll see Ning coming out with niche networks based heavily on Facebook user data. We’ll see how that all works out. The “complementary” aspect is pretty vague right now.

Current Facebook board members include Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and Clarium Capital. Board observers — members who can watch but not vote — include David Sze of Greylock Partners and Paul Madera of Meritech Capital Partners.

[Also somewhat complementary: Andreessen's expression in this old photo I dug up, at the top, and Zuckerberg's expression in the photo beneath it.]

It looks like social networking site ConnectU’s lawsuit against Facebook may not be over yet. Although the two companies agreed to settle in April (and have since signed the paperwork) ConnectU attorney John Hornick told a judge yesterday that his clients want to pull out of the deal, according to Bloomberg News.

Since reaching the agreement, Hornick said ConnectU has found instant messages on Facebook’s computers that are a “smoking gun” backing the company’s allegations. U.S. District Judge James Ware still needs to approve the deal, and Hornick said that if they’re “forced into a settlement,” ConnectU’s founders will file a fraud claim.

Judge Douglas Woodcock didn’t have much sympathy for Hornick’s argument, characterizing it as “buyer’s remorse.”

Back in 2003, when they were all at Harvard, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg worked for ConnectU’s co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, helping them develop a campus dating site called Harvard Connect. After Facebook took off, the Winklevoss brothers filed suit against Zuckerberg and his startup; they alleged he stalled their project while stealing ideas and code for himself. The case has revealed some embarrassing details about Zuckerberg, including his diary, and could also be liability if Facebook wants to make a public offering. The details of the settlement are secret, but it will definitely be a step backward of Facebook can’t put this legal battle behind it.

I emailed Facebook, but a spokesperson declined to comment on the case.

I won’t waste your time weighing in on whether this makes Facebook look more or less guilty, because your guess is as good as mine. But I will reiterate Woodcock’s point that it looks silly and embarrassing to reach a settlement while you’re still going through the evidence, and then try to call the whole thing off when (surprise!) you find new information in that evidence. The Winklevoss brothers may agree, and are apparently unhappy with the legal advice that led to the settlement — CNET reports that they’ve hired a new attorney.

Facebook has just hired a new COO, Sheryl Sandberg of Google (our coverage). So I talked with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg today, to get some more context on her hire and how it fits in with the company’s larger plans.

In the Q&A below, Zuckerberg says he plans to continue on as CEO — indefinitely. He also says the company’s monetization efforts are going well, and that its platform will evolve to further help developers use Facebook data on other sites.

VentureBeat: What is your role going to be now that you’ve hired a chief operating officer with wide-sweeping responsibilities?

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s a full-time job to lead the company and make sure that we’re moving in the right direction. All of the different parts of the company are growing quickly — on the product side, on the business side — having Sheryl on board will allow us to scale.

We’re also making product management separate from engineering. Matt Cohler [a long-time Facebook executive] will be running it.

VB: Some people are speculating that investors will want you to step down from your CEO role, when you guys go public within the next couple of years.

MZ: I’m planning to stay on as CEO, and we’ll continue building out a strong management team. The theory on this: A lot of companies have a partnership where the founder runs strategy and another executive focuses on scaling business operations. In some companies, the founder doesn’t have a CEO title but is essentially still running the company. We think the most honest thing is to have the guy running the company [in this case, Zuckerberg] be the CEO. If people are uncomfortable with that, then that’s an issue they should work out [Note: Zuckerberg said this phrase matter-of-factly, not insultingly].

VB: How are your monetization efforts going? How about Beacon, how about your other “social ads” experiments?

MZ: Social Ads are doing pretty well by all metrics, although we don’t talk about specifics because we’re a private company. We’re scaling these efforts — and Sheryl [Sandberg] is in a great position to help us continue to build our advertising base. We’re happy with how we’re doing in terms of number of advertisers, and revenue.

VB: Many application developers are upset about Facebook’s recent platform rule changes, and are looking at spending more time building applications for MySpace and other rivals. How do you see Facebook’s platform evolving?

MZ: Our developer community has never been larger — we have more than 300,000 third-party developers now. I wouldn’t say that developers aren’t finding value here.

The trend in platforms is that they aren’t going to be focused on any single site, such as www.facebook.com. We’ll be focusing on improving the platform to help developers build applications that live on other web sites, so people can use the connections they have to communicate more efficiently. An increasing number of Facebook applications live outside of Facebook.com

VB: Facebook has recently joined DataPortability.org, a working group among web companies, that intends to develop common standards so users can access their data across sites. Is Facebook going to let users — and other companies — take Facebook data completely off Facebook?

MZ: I think that trend is worth watching.

Third party traffic data shows Facebook usage dropping off in core markets — like these numbers just in from Hitwise (see graph, below) — even as the company struggles to do things like monetize and improve important projects like its developer platform. Facebook is moving out of its rosy childhood and into adolescence, assumably re-shuffling its executives to cope with its challenges.

So who should help founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg lead the company? Before you vote in the poll, above, here are some thoughts.

Zuckerberg is a visionary, a product guy. He needs to focus on making sure Facebook continues to have one of the best user experiences and largest, most active user bases in the world. Instead, as blogger Kara Swisher details, the company is looking to hire a new top executive who has experience in advertising, marketing and operations.

Basically, Facebook needs somebody who can monetize without destroying the cool quality of Facebook, help double its headcount, and eventually take the company public.

Swisher suggests a long list of potential executives, and concludes that leading entrepreneur Marc Andreessen is the best fit, because he and Zuckerberg have had similar personalities and experiences. But, it’s hard to imagine Andreessen wanting to spend time doing advertising or marketing as opposed to product development. Also, Andreessen is busy with Ning, his do-it-yourself social network service that in some sense competes with Facebook for users.

Or maybe, Zuckerberg, who has openly admired Bill Gates, will want to continue honing his own operating skills, and distribute power among multiple executives (what he has done up to this point).

Or maybe, Zuckerberg needs to hire a media executive who can turn Facebook into more of a content and celebrity-focused site like MySpace or Bebo, as some have suggested. Or maybe, with the success of some simple game applications, Facebook needs an executive who understands advertising and games.

The company has lots of fires to put out all at once, now. A Nielsen report published yesterday showed Facebook traffic growth numbers dipping in the UK, although Facebook tells us that January had more monthly active users than December. Today, numbers from ComScore show the same thing happening in the US. Meanwhile, the company has been refining its platform, possibly out of concern that spammy third-party applications are bombarding users with invite requests and emails (our coverage)

If Facebook is going to ever be worth $15 billion, who should it bring in? Vote in the poll below to let us know what you think.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apparently told his employees about the company’s financial state in some detail during a company meeting yesterday, Kara Swisher reports.

The numbers aren’t particularly surprising and if anything highlight the company’s stated plans to build out its operations and get a lot bigger — and hopefully profitable — before looking for an exit strategy.

Facebook revenues in 2007 will end at $150 million (incidentally, the amount many people thought Facebook should sell itself for, a few years ago), and is breaking even. Zuckerberg projects 2008 revenues to more than double to between $300 million and $350 million.

The ads that Microsoft sells on Facebook, per the two companies’ strategic partnership, have been monetizing well and have been steadily rising since they started working together. This is apparently in contrast with Google’s efforts to make money from selling ads on Myspace. (More here.)

However, Facebook plans to spend more than $200 million on capital expenditures (servers, etc….) in 2008, as well as more than double the workforce from around 450 now to more than 1000.

This means the company will be operating at negative cash flow in 2008, according to these numbers. The company will make $50 million in earnings from 2007, before taxes, interest, depreciation and amortization. Known as EBITDA, a calculation used to judge a company’s operationing efficiency, among other things. Subtract capital expenditures from EBITDA

Zuckerberg reportedly said yesterday that he “did not care about maintaining EBITDA anyway,” according to Swisher’s article. Which makes sense if you’re trying to grow fast, and you have $300 million in recent investments to pay for the infrastructure required to grow.

1) Rumor: Google to buy Sprint?
2) The U.S. House of Representatives passes VC tax
3) Berkeley Bionics brings exoskeletons to market
4) Fox Interactive Media may start its own ad network
5) Railpower Technologies to steam on, for now
6) Zuckerberg, speaking grandly
7) Are Facebook’s ads illegal in New York?
8) Murdoch calls Facebook a phonebook
9) Sprint and WiMax startup Clearwire have ended plans to form a joint venture

Rumor: Google to buy Sprint? – The rumor surfaced yesterday, here, suggesting that despite a number of major issues, owning a carrier would give Google crucial control over developing and distributing its own mobile services. The issues, however, are numerous. Google would have to beef up its governmental lobby arm to compete against AT&T and other carriers for favorable regulations. It would also have to manage retail stores for mobile customers (expensive, although they’ve worked for Apple!). The move might also send the message to AT&T and the others considering the Open Handset Alliance that Google is actually going to compete directly against them, regardless of the Open Handset Alliance that Google is spearheading. Om has more about how this move could make sense for Google, Intel, Cisco and other leading Silicon Valley companies.

The U.S. House of Representatives passes VC tax — It will change the carried interest from a capital gains to ordinary income, thereby lifting tax to about 35 percent on VCs and other private equity professionals. It is not expected to pass the Senate, however, and President Bush has suggested he would veto it.

Fred Wilson’s series on the struggling VC industry – Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has a good series of posts about the rise and fall of the VC industry, and explains how the official data VCs report may look better than reality (because poorly performing firms have decided not to report their data, or are shutting down and so can’t report their data), and that even top performing firms in the industry aren’t doing that well. It suggests the VC industry is in for some serious pain.

Berkeley Bionics brings exoskeletons to market – It provides technology to give you extra muscles, and plans to augment human strength in places like the war zone (for military) or other emergency situations (firefighting, and so on). This system provides its pilot with the ability to carry loads up to 150 pounds on his back “with minimal effort” over any type of terrain for extended periods of time without reducing his agility. The company is a spinout from the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory and is raising funds. Via Alarm:clock.

Zuckerberg, speaking grandly – “There is no opting out of advertising,” Zuckerberg said of Facebook’s new platform last week, “Once every hundred years media changes. The last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise [then] was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years, information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have.” Via TechCrunch.

Fox Interactive Media may start its own ad network – FIM may be planning to begin providing advertisements, as well as living off of them. Company representatives have been making the rounds to gauge the interest of outside media sites in showing ads provided by Fox, according to the Silicon Alley Insider. Of course, FIM may be large enough to create its own ecosystem: The company runs AskMen, Fox.com, Dow Jones, Myspace and several other giant media properties. We’re not sure if it’s connected, but we also recently reported on FIM hiring a consulting company to streamline its ad operations. Maybe the advice was, “Go forth, and build your own.”

Railpower Technologies to steam on, for now – The fires were flickering for Railpower, a maker of hybrid locomotives, but the Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan decided to step in and keep the engines running. The fund put $35 million into the cleantech train company, noting that it expects that “increasingly stringent environmental regulations in North America and globally will open up new markets” for clean rail startups like Railpower.

Are Facebook’s ads illegal in New York? — That’s what the New York Times is saying, citing a 100-year-old New York State statute which says that “any person whose name, portrait, picture, or voice is used within this state for advertising purposes or for the purposes of trade without the written consent first obtained” can sue for damages.

Murdoch calls Facebook a phonebook –”The two platforms are very different in the user experience,” said Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp. and owner of MySpace, the competitor to Facebook. “MySpace is a place for self-expression, where users’ MySpace pages become their home on the Internet. It is where they discover people, content, and culture — where they share information, communicate, and consume. Facebook, on the other hand, tends to be a web utility, similar to a phonebook.” Via ZDNet.

Sprint and WiMax startup Clearwire have ended plans to form a joint venture — WSJ has details.

Here at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, the chat with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was the first major draw. The reason: The company, the hottest subject in Silicon Valley, is reportedly in discussions with Microsoft, Google and Yahoo about taking a large investment from them. Only one of them is likely to win the honor.

One dominant rumor is that Microsoft wants to own a five percent stake in Facebook, at a valuation of between $10 billion and $15 billion.

Zuckerberg, when asked about how the negotiations are going, said it’s about done: “It’s going well. We’re almost wrapped up,” he said.

Other than that, the crowd mumured about Zuckerberg’s reluctance to say anything specific at all about any of the questoins thrown at him. No other news on this one, we’re afraid.

Dean Takahashi, of the Mercury News has more about the talk here.

Harvard student Aaron Greenspan says he came up with the idea for Facebook before Mark Zuckerberg founded the popular company of the same name.

Greenspan’s claims, backed up by emails, are the latest salvo in the controversy surrounding the true origins of the social networking company. His claims have surfaced before, but in a New York Times story just published, Greenspan goes to greater lengths at proving his case.

In 2003, Greenspan sent an email to Harvard students describing the newest feature of houseSYSTEM as “the Face Book,” an online service for finding other students. It was four months before Mr. Zuckerberg started his own site, originally “thefacebook.com.” In other emails, Greenspan also discussed key features that Zuckerberg would later implement in his own company. Greenspan even corresponded with Zuckerberg, and the two apparently talked about joining up, but Zuckerberg ultimately decided to go it alone, raising capital and creating his own vastly more successful company.

Most significantly, however, Greenspan doesn’t appear ready to sue Zuckerberg. He says he’s come to terms with Zuckerberg’s success. The real outcome of his assertions is likely to be a further weakening of the lawsuit filed by Tyler, left Cameron Winklevoss, two of the co-founders of ConnectU, who said Facebook was their idea and that Zuckerberg stole it from them, and are pursuing their claims in court.

Still, Greenspan has been critical of Zuckerberg. See his open letter to Zuckerberg, for example. In his “Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions,” a 306-page autobiography, he notes many of the features he originated before Zuckerberg, and describes his frustration at how Zuckerberg got media attention from Harvard’s Crimson (see his references to Zuckerberg here).

updated

Serial entrepreneur Sean Parker’s new philanthropy focused company, Project Agape, launches tonight, with a special version of its software tailored for Facebook users.

It is called Causes on Facebook.

Just as significant as its launch, however, is its intent to showcase the strengths of Facebook’s new “Platform,” a set of tools to allow developers to build applications upon Facebook. More on that in a second.

Project Agape is the most ambitious social network we’ve seen that lets people mobilize around causes of their choice. It has been secretive until now, providing a sneak preview to a handful of people, including VentureBeat (see coverage). Even today, its release for Facebook’s platform is a limited one. A more extensive version will be released next month.

A competitor, Change.org, launched just two days ago (see our coverage). That network focuses on political change. Its service tries to tap users to choose slates of politicians and other recommendations to effect change. But that site is bare bones, and still has relatively few users.

While Agape too is new, its advantage is formidable. Its software is by far the most integrated of any third-party company into the Facebook platform. Any of Facebook’s more than 24 million users can select Agape from a menu, and with one-click install it on their Facebook toolbar for continuous use. See early screenshots at bottom.

Here’s how it works:

Called “Causes on Facebook,” it allows you to create a cause, or promote an existing one to their friends You can pick from 1.5 million non-profits in the U.S. It uses Facebook’s “feed” feature to notify friends when you’ve joined a new cause. Finally, it allows you to promote the cause in other ways, building up points through a reward system, letting you show off virtual trophies that you win on your profile page after say, donating money. Ultimately, it wants to make it easier to raise money for causes. It launches with formal partnerships with ten non-profits.

It plans to use Facebook’s “social graph,” or the network of relationships users have with their friends, and their friends’ friends. The point is to mirror real life, where activists and other fund-raisers reach out to influencers and ask them to reach out to their own followers. (We wrote about this in our first post). Facbook Photos and Facebook Events have done well by building on this. “Cesar Chavez would ask a farmer to gather their friends in their hut, and he would talk to them,” explains Joe Green who co-founded Agape with Parker.

The two go further, arguing that young people have become alienated from political and social causes precisely because there has been no way to mobilize online. They point to an “erosion of social capital” caused by modern lifestyles. A decline in local chapter-style organizations has left a void, they say.

Parker’s convinced this will work because Facebook’s users exhibit a higher level of engagement than most sites. About 50 percent visit the site daily, with an average use-time of more than a hour.

One advantage Agape has is how it sits on top of Facebook’s platform. New internet companies find it hard to attract users from scratch. Most try a “sucking” strategy. Photo, video and other companies, for example, let users place so-called widgets on sites like MySpace, and by trying to suck those users back to their own sites with links, registrations and so on. Agape’s method is different because it seeks to remain native to Facebook, with style and features that make it look like just another Facebook application. It uses Facebook’s mark-up language, “FBML.” Its icon is similar to that of Facebook Photos and Groups.

The close partnership stems from Parker’s relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook. Parker was an early collaborator at Facebook, before leaving the company more than a year ago. Green, meanwhile, was Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard.

“Causes on Facebook,” is just one of 80 applications built by 65 companies on Platform. Zuckerberg announced more details about the platform just now during his keynote address. He emphasized that Facebook will encourage companies to make money from advertising and other transactions, giving them free access to the “canvas” pages of their applications to do as they please. This contrasts with the more closed nature of other networks, such as MySpace, which notoriously shut down access to Photobucket when that company tried to promote sponsorships. Zuckerberg also called on to the stage representatives from Microsoft, Amazon and Slide to announce integration partnerships.

Update: One attendee, I think it was Saar Gur from Charles River Ventures, went so far as to say this might represent the “end of Web 2.0.” Most new consumer Internet companies will feel forced to launch from within Facebook, because of its huge base of young, interested, experiment-happy users. If you can’t succeed there, can you hope to do so outside? So Facebook becomes the platform. Provocative thought, and clearly an overstatement, but it stayed with me.

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Facebook, the social-networking Web site courted by Yahoo, isn’t for sale, board member Peter Thiel tells Bloomberg.

“It’s going to remain an independent company,” Thiel said in an interview last week. “The plan is to actually build it, maybe at some point take it public, but definitely not to sell it.”

Thiel said the site is actually worth $8 billion or more, citing the site’s college-aged users, according to Bloomberg. He said the company is focused finding the best way to make money from its millions of members. VentureBeat also talked last week with Thiel and and his partner Sean Parker, who helped build Facebook, and we’re not surprised to here this. Parker is convinced that Facebook’s mode of letting its users communicate, and its social graph, is the way of the future (we wrote about his views here), so they may think Facebook is undervalued by Yahoo.

However, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, doesn’t appear as assertive as Thiel:

“We are not necessarily focused on what the exit is going to be — whether it’s selling the company or an IPO or when that’s going to be,” Zuckerberg said in an interview. “But we obviously think that there’s a lot of potential to keep growing.”

The Founders Fund, the venture firm led by former PayPal chief executive Peter Thiel, has hired Sean Parker, the controversial entrepreneur, who has just turned 27, as a managing partner.

Parker somehow attracts attention wherever he goes. He has already launched three well-known companies. At 19, he co-founded Napster, and his cheekiness drew anger from the recording labels, which eventually shut down Napster with lawsuits. Parker told VentureBeat last week, in an interview, that his time at Napster was his biggest lesson — about who to hire to run companies and who to take money from. “I wasn’t sophisticated enough, I didn’t know any better.” But Parker’s past still has some investors in Thiel’s fund nervous. Thiel responds: “Sean has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, in part because he’s been so successful.”

One person he rubbed is the big-gun himself, Michael Moritz of Sequoia — an early backer of Yahoo, Google and YouTube. After Napster, Parker co-founded Plaxo, a site that updates contacts. Soon, Parker was in peoples’ faces again. Some accused Plaxo of spamming, because of its constant update requests. During the post-bubble downturn, Parker got pushed out by Sequoia Capital and Ram Shriram, and there’s been silence over the real reasons ever since. There were reports of private investigators going after Parker. And things weren’t improved, Thiel says, when Parker wouldn’t let Sequoia invest in his next company, Facebook. “Sequoia had no chance to invest,” Thiel explains, “because of the way they mistreated him at Plaxo. He’s been treated worse than he deserved.” VentureBeat has contacted Sequoia for comment.

Without Parker, Plaxo has become more diplomatic — but almost too much. You never hear about it anymore.

Parker soon met Mark Zuckerberg in New York, after the young “Zuck,” as he is known, had launched Facebook. Parker helped Zuckerberg learn the ropes. He helped him raise money at great valuations — ticking off several VCs who’d wanted in on the deal. They first raised seed money from the Founders Funds’ Thiel, who Parker had met through Sequoia’s Michael Moritz — an irony. Facebook raised only $500,000, and it was profitable immediately. Facebook’s traffic rocketed, and the company went in red again after taking more venture capital from Accel Partners to expand.

While Zuckerberg has been widely acknowledged as Facebook’s leader, even by Parker himself, there’s little question Parker helped Zuck keep control and ownership. Zuck loves coding, so with Parker’s business sense the two were a great pair. Parker helped bring in Owen Van Natta as COO. Parker was one of four board members at Facebook (along with Zuck, Thiel and Accel’s Bryer). He hired former Napster employee Aaron Sittig to redesign the site as we know it. Parker obsessively negotiated with the owner of facebook.com to buy the domain. Parker also came up with much of what we see as the Facebook News Feed, and he believes that format is the future of communication on the Web. “The social graph,” he says, referring to the connection people have with others through multiple degrees, “is the critical ingredient.”

[Side note: See this link here for other details. It was written by Numair Faraz, a friend of Parker's who said Parker had tacitly agreed to the post. Numair forwarded it to us a couple of weeks ago. At the time, we ran Numair's blog post by Facebook's spokeswoman, who reviewed it, and declined comment. When we ran the facts by Parker, he clarified the following: Plaxo had two other co-founders, Tipping Point was not an inspiration for either Plaxo or Facebook, he met Facebook's Zuckerberg met in NYC and Zuckerberg had every intention of turning the site into a business; Parker just accelerated the process, he clarified. Finally, regarding Numair's comparison on Parker with Jim Clark (pictured above), the same comparison was made by Peter Thiel. In an interview, Thiel said Parker reminded him of Clark, who also founded three high-profile companies (SGI, Netscape, WebMD) but that Parker was twenty years younger: "He's just getting started," Thiel said. "The time horizon is really long."]

Parker’s self-acknowledged insecurity is what drives him to be edgy, but also to excel: “I’m still super insecure,” he said. Parker feels it in talks he’s having with entrepreneurs on behalf of the Founders Fund, he says: “I always feel like the underdog. I walk away from meetings asking myself ‘Did I add any value, or are they going to tell other people that shouldn’t talk with us?’”

Like many people at Facebook with ambition, Parker left Facebook quite early in the game. Facebook is firmly in Zuck’s grip, along with a few trusted “family” members, as his close-knit circle is referred to. Parker retains a sizeable chunk of Facebook shares. Others have left, impatient because Zuck won’t sell the company or give them more responsibility.

Parker says his three start-ups have also exhausted him, another reason for him to try out VC: There was “a lot of stress, a lot of conflict,” he said.

He said he joined Thiel because of Thiel’s maverick ways. Thiel is not a classic VC; he runs the firm with an entrepreneur’s bent, from his Clarium Capital hedge fund offices — swanky, we add, nicely perched atop the hills of the Presidio. Parker says too many VC firms are run by people who never launched and ran their own companies. At Founders Fund, Thiel is focused on investing in early-stage companies, and he’s given Parker a carte blanche to find the best companies he can, Thiel says. Founders Fund is investing a $50 million fund, and it is about to launch a second, larger fund.

The latest in tech-land:

German competitor rains on LinkedIn’s parade — LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke flew to Germany to manage the opening of a new German Web site there. Upon his arrival, however, LinkedIn’s German competitor, OpenBC announced it plans to go public within the next six months on the German and Swiss exchanges, depending on market conditions. Seemed a coincidence for the company to make the statement, and perhaps an attempt to grab the headlines? The company is reportedly making a mere 6 million euros in revenue per year, not enough for it to go public in the U.S. Guericke, in turn, tells another German publication that the two companies had talked about merging, but couldn’t come to an agreement. (Update: Guericke tells VentureBeat that the reference in the article to “talks” was misinterpreted, and that a merger offer was never made. Moreover, he says OpenBC’s stated traffic numbers have declined, from 1.5 million in a July press release, to 1.45 million in their IPO announcement.)

They both have a similar strategy — letting business people connect with each other through their network. OpenBC has about 1.5 users, compared to LinkedIn’s 8 million.

Google giving bloody noses with “free strategy” – A consistent strategy of Google is to offer things for free — Gmail, video, office apps, you name it — soon, perhaps even phones. Google is offering its online payment feature for free until the end of the year. It’s also offering a new coupon feature and the ability to send customers an invoice by email, all of which are likely to make eBay and its leading payment product, PayPal feel the pain. Now Google’s chief exec Eric Schmidt is probably giving eBay fits by saying phones should soon be free. This comes even as some executives are leaving eBay’s other property, phone service Skype.

The New York Times tries to coin “Web 3.0″ — It has become somewhat trite: Declaring that we’ve moved to Web 3.0.

Web 1.0 was the Web as we first knew it, offering information, but not much way to interact. Web 2.0, the NYT explains, described the ability to seamlessly connect applications (like mapping) and services (like photo-sharing). Web 3.0, the NYT concludes, is the ability to generate semantics, or human-like understanding, so that a Web site can respond intelligently to a question like: “Which American city would be most vulnerable to an anthrax attack during summer?” The story is worth reading, to get a sense of the various efforts underway, but it’s not clear whether we’re getting there anytime soon.

Mentioned are:

– Radar Networks, of San Francisco, which we mentioned earlier here. It is gathering content from web sites, and storing associations it sees between various people and things within its database.
–KnowItAll, a project run by a group of University of Washington, that has been financed by Google. It has created one system called Opine, designed to extract and aggregate information from review sites.
–Cycorp, an Austin company run by Doug Lenat, which is learning by mining the Web and which says it can answer the question posed above about anthrax.

Mark Zuckerberg wearing flip-flops — Lot of brouhaha about Zuckerberg, chief executive of social networking company Facebook, wearing flip-flops at the FourSquare conference, where everyone else — including media moguls — wore perfectly pressed suits. Good for him!

That’s what Rolling Stone wants you to believe, in its latest edition. In a story called “Baby Billionaires of Silicon Valley,” Rolling Stone catches up with a group nine entrepreneurs who get together to strategize. This is another hype job, since none of these people are billionaires. (Update: Blake Ross, in comment below, says this is no secret society, and headline is wrong.)

From the piece:

That’s why they’ve gathered here tonight. This is one of the first meetings of a secret society they formed and jokingly called the Young Guns; a more apt moniker might be the Valley Brats. It’s an invite-only cabal of the most powerful under-thirty-year-old mavericks in town. Every few weeks they gather to drink, plot global domination, make friends and, mainly, just act their age. “We got sick of hanging out with older guys,” says the Brats’ gregarious founder, Rob Pazornik, twenty-six-year-old creator of an online shopping startup called LicketyShip. “All they talk about is mortgages and nannies. It’s like hanging out with your dad’s friends.”

Featured in the cover photo, from left to right: Blake Ross (formerly Firefox, now Parakey), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Matt Sanchez (VideoEgg), Robert Pazornik (LicketyShip), Seth Sternberg (Meebo), Todd Masonis (Plaxo). Also featured are Chad Hurley & Steve Chen (YouTube), and Bram Cohen (BitTorrent).

Facebook’s founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for the “feed” features the site released earlier this week, and unveiled some corrections.

Facebook has bolstered privacy controls, which is fully explained here (if you are a member). Zuckerberg blogged about his thoughts early this morning.

Here is the gist:

Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

The comes in response to protests by hundreds of thousands of Facebook’s users about the features, which let users automatically see the updates on pages of other members of their college and chosen circle of friends. Protesters said it made it even easier for stalking and annoying voyeurism.

Facebook has just made two big changes. Facebook’s Ruchi Sanghvi has blogged about it here.

First, Facebook has released “News Feed,” a feature that that appears on your homepage to let you know what is happening in your social circles. It pulls in the latest information about your friends or other contacts, notifying you for example when your secret crush breaks up and becomes available for dating again.

Second, it has released “Mini-Feed,” which appears in each person’s profile. This is for when you visit other peoples’ pages, and just want to know what they have changed recently (notes, photos, etc). As opposed to “News Feed” which is pulled into your page, “Mini-Feed” resides only on the pages of each individual member. You can remove the updates, if you don’t like them.

These features seem to be pretty useful, but they are really only update mechanisms. They seem consistent with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s penchant to restrain members’ freedom on how their profiles look (which, btw, can be a good thing, if you consider the ugly, unreadable MySpace pages you see sometimes).

It is noteworthy that Facebook still does not allow things like video-sharing.

YouTube recently added YouTube Colleges, a video-sharing feature for use only from within specific colleges.

Update: The Facebook feature has been heavily criticized.