• Columbia Pictures and director David Fincher have set its core cast for “The Social Network,” the Aaron Sorkin-scripted drama about the formation of Facebook. Just who is going to play the part of the founders? We find out today from Variety that Jesse Eisenberg will play founder Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Timberlake will play Sean Parker (Napster co-founder who became Facebook’s founding president) and Andrew Garfield will play Eduardo Saverin (Facebook co-founder who fell out with Zuckerberg as the social network became a financial juggernaut).
• Production will begin next month in Boston and then move to Los Angeles. Scott Rudin, Michael De Luca, Dana Brunetti and Cean Chaffin will produce. Kevin Spacey is executive producer.
• The pic focuses on the evolution of Facebook and how overnight success and wealth changes the lives of the classmates who created it.

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• If your Mom is friends with you on Facebook or following you on Twitter, this one’s for you.

• Facebook has acquired FriendFeed! No details yet on the acquisition price, but we are guessing somewhere in the $50M range. It’s not quite what Facebook wanted (they original tried to nab Twitter last month for a reported $500M only to be turned down). FriendFeed had been showing steady growth over the last year up until Twitter ‘really took off’ in the past quarter, continuing to grow at an impressive 20% a month.

• It’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few of features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates. Facebook has already built out some of FriendFeed’s functionality so there is some overlap, but there are still numerous ways FriendFeed beats out Facebook’s News Feed setup. FriendFeed works a little bit more like a forum, where people can comment on status updates (can’t do this on Twitter), and new activity pushes items back to the top (can’t do this on FB or Twitter).
• Facebook really scored by retaining the founding team which consists of an all-star cast of ex-Googlers such as Paul Buchheit, who is responsible for creating Gmail, pioneering some of Google’s early (and incredibly lucrative) advertising products, and coining Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto.

• Facebook investors and employees (not executives however), are finally getting a chance to sell some of their stock. Digital Sky Technologies, the Russian investment firm that in May invested $200 million in Facebook, has made an offer to purchase up to $100 million of Facebook common stock from existing stock and option holders. This would be about $14.77 a share, valuing Facebook at about $6.5 billion; less than the $10 billion valuation of its previous investment (althogh for preferred shares).

“While individuals must make their own decisions about participating in this program, I’m pleased that the price D.S.T. is offering is much greater than the price originally considered last fall,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, in a statement. “This is recognition of Facebook’s growth and progress towards making the world more open and connected.”

• Employees and outside investors are relieved to liquidate some of their holdings.  Facebook previously tried a stock buyback program, but it failed several times due to a lack of agreement on an internal valuation. Zuckerberg said this current offering has no effect on the company’s timeline to go public

• Facebook quietly chose a new CFO today, months after getting rid of Gideon Yu, for not having enough ‘public company experience’. Former Genentech CFO David Ebersman was officially announced today as the man taking on the task of raising more money for the company and getting it ready to go public in the next 2-3 years. Ebersman has been at the biotech firm for almost 15 years and was relieved of his duties after Hoffman-La Roche acquired Genentech [they had their own CFO]
• Until now, former Netscape exec and VC Peter Currie has served as a stand-in for Yu since he left, although has not been an active financial exec. [Kara, AllThingsD]. Here is the full press release.

PALO ALTO, Calif.–June 29, 2009–Facebook today announced that David Ebersman, the former executive vice president and chief financial officer (CFO) of Genentech, the pioneering biotechnology firm recently acquired by Roche, will become the company’s chief financial officer.

Ebersman will report to Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Founder Mark Zuckerberg. He will oversee Facebook’s finance, accounting, investor relations, and real estate functions. He also becomes a part of the company’s executive management team, which directs all aspects of company strategy, planning and operations. Ebersman will formally start in September 2009.

“We received a lot of interest in the CFO position and had the opportunity to meet with many impressive candidates,” said Mark Zuckerberg. “We quickly recognized that David was the right person for Facebook. He was Genentech’s CFO while revenue tripled, and his success in scaling the finance organization of a fast growing company will be important to Facebook.”

“After meeting with Mark and the rest of the team, I was thoroughly impressed with everyone’s drive and sense of purpose to help people connect and share,“ noted Ebersman. “Mark is constantly pushing the company forward and he’s assembled a world-class team that is achieving remarkable results both for its users and as a business. I’m excited to join this effort and this new industry.”

Ebersman worked at Genentech for nearly 15 years. He served as the firm’s executive vice president and CFO from 2006 through April 2009, when Roche Group acquired the company. Prior to joining the company’s finance organization, he was senior vice president of Product Operations. He joined Genentech as a business development analyst. Previously, he was a research analyst at Oppenheimer & Company Inc.

• Facebook today launched Friend List, a useful way to organize and filter your chats on Facebook. Maybe you want to be online with your best friends but offline with your work colleagues. With Friend Lists, you can group friends to more easily share with and view information from specific sets of people. You already can use them to filter your home page, send Inbox messages and manage privacy settings. From the bottom right corner of your browser, go online with Chat and choose which lists you’d like to include in the Chat pane. You can use your existing lists or create new lists directly from Chat.
• To create a new list, select the “Friend Lists” menu on the Chat pane, enter a new list name, and drag the names of people you want to include into the list. You can exclude lists from Chat by unchecking them in the “Friend Lists” menu. If you don’t want your friends grouped in Chat at all, you can simply uncheck all the Friend Lists, and you’ll then see your friends listed alphabetically.
• Facebook finally getting a little more efficient in the chat space. Now they need to work on better placement for the chat box so it doesn’t continue to interfere with that 160×600 ad placement on the right.

• According to the New York Post, Facebook has just held informal exploratory meetings with Providence Equity Partners, General Atlantic, Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and others. The article cites Facebook to be looking for fresh capital at a $5 to $6 billion valuation, however no one is willing to shell out for more than a $2 billion to $3 billion range. (Wauters, TC)

• People familiar with the matter, are claiming Facebook’s attempt to raise additional capital is creating quite a stir among existing investors, which includes Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Microsoft and Peter Thiel. Microsoft feeling it the most, jumping in at a $15B valuation with a quarter million dollar investment, that in this state may have earned them about 8% of the company. People like Thiel say it’s time to start making money off of the user base, which at this point is causing the company harm it’s so large (200+ million now)

• Facebook may not have a lot of choice when it comes to what valuation they will take money. The company is burning through at leat $20 million a month in cash and cannot stop their unbelievably quick (but unmonetizable) growth internationally. If things keep going the way they are, Facebook could be out of money by 2011. Time to start charging?

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• Looks like things are actually moving forward with a film based on the early days at Facebook. Insiders at FB say that executives have been warning former employees not to talk to people involved with the making of the movie. Facebooker has already told the movie’s team that it was unwilling to cooperate in the event that the film was based on a salacious new tell-all book about Facebook.
• The man behind the movie is West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin and is reportedly based on a book by Bringing Down the House author Ben Mezrich, who is known for scandalous stories circa elite universities. Sounds like a good match for Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who as we all know founded the concept for FB with some Harvard friends whom he later snatched the code from. The film will obviously not be portraying the Zuck in a good light.

• Facebook says it will tweak its homepage in the coming weeks in direct response to user backlash over recent designs changes. The social network caved to customer feedback, since millions of users chimed in favoring the old Facebook 93%.
• Chris Cox, Facebook Director of Product, posted a lengthy blog post Tuesday explaining features that are being looked into for reverting back to the previous design. The most changes will be seen in the users’ streams, which will finally get live updating and friend list filters. Thinks like pictures in the news stream will be fixed as they have been taking up more than 60% of the entire homepage on some circumstances.
• “Redesigns are generally hard to manage, in part because change is always hard and in part because we may miss improvements that any individual user may like to see,” said Chris Cox in his blog post. This is a surprising change coming from Facebook, who decided to ignore user feedback when they changed the design this past September. The poll responses were identical, 93% preferred the previous Facebook when the design was changed. Now everyone loves it, go figure….

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• As if Facebook already wasn’t the crowd favorite at the moment due to layout changes. After today, they really won’t be. I went on my Facebook this morning to post one of my usual stories, accompanied by a link. As soon as I did so, a Security Check popped up asking me to input a CAPTCHA code. Talk about the antithesis of copying Twitter, the popular micr0-blogging service wouldn’t dare ask me to verify whether or not I’m trying to spam their ecosystem, let alone my own personal network that I’ve been building for nearly 6 years. Is this what our relationship has come to Facebook? Does this mean that users syndicating their updates from Twitter to Facebook will now be blocked if accompanied bya URL? Our current poll shows users prefer the Old Facebook layout to the New one by 93%. I wonder what it will go to now?

• It has been an up and down two years for the founders of ConnectU, who after many attempts to sue Mark Zuckerberg over stealing their code as a developer to start Facebook, finally settled. When the story finally broke that Facebook compensated the ConnectU founders, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the deal was supposed to stay tight lipped. It stayed quiet until this week when the firm who previously represented the brothers outed an internal document containing how profitable the settlement was. Legal firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges shows the settlement amount at $65 million in both a combination of cash and stock. (.pdf provided by law.com)

• Why disclose the amount now? Quinn published the report after they got into their own legal fued with the brothers, since the Facebook settlement was won after the brothers fired them. Tyler and Cameron found new evidence against Zuckerberg and decided to go with legal firm, Scott Mosko, a Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner. Quinn is seeking a $13 million pursuant off of a contingency fee agreement.




• As you probably know, Zuckerberg was hired to work on code for a dating Web site for Harvard students. They sued Facebook in 2004, accusing Zuckerberg of purposely delaying the project while using the information to start his own Web site. As soon as things took off, Zuck quit Harvard and moved to Palo Alto to grow the company.

• It has been an interesting couple years for Facebook, who has finally made nice with all former co-founders and contributors. Just last week Facebook added Eduardo Saverin to the company’s founder page, which seems to get a little longer each year after different lawsuits and threats. Saverin, who seemed to know more about the beginnings of Facebook than anyone, was planning to release a book unless he recieved due credit. Andrew Sorkin, the West Wing creator was on board to write the book. Too bad, that would have been a great read.

• Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview to Silicon Alley Insider today that the company is doing very well. According to The Zuck, Facebook beat their 2008 internal revenue expectations and are still hiring. I don’t doubt the company is still hiring, but in terms of profitability, I’m crying foul. Here’s what he said to SAI:

• Facebook’s 2008 revenue performed “really well” against internal expectations, “especially compared to how the economy seems to be going.”
• “I think we were discussing ranges within the company, and I don’t even know if that was accurate, but between direct sales and online ads, Facebook is seeing really strong growth.” Most speculate between $300 and $350 million.
• Facebook, which has about 800 employees last time we checked, will cross the 1,000 employee mark this year. “We’re one of the few companies that are still growing.” says Zuck. Facebook is looking to hire more engineers/technical types and expand its direct sales force internationally and in the U.S.
• Facebook will be opening up more offices in 2009 including the ones they have already announced are opening in France and Ireland (Now Facebook’s HQ).
• The company is pleased with how Facebook Connect is going.

• fbFund announced it’s top 25 winners back in October, who all received $25,000 to help in development of their facebook apps.
• Facebook just announced the top 5 winners, who will all receive $225,000 on top of the first $25,000.  What’s curious to me is that Facebook isn’t taking any equity in the apps.  Instead, they’re awarding developers 100% equity.
• The top five are: GroupCard, Kontagent, HitGrab, WedSnap, and WildFire.
• Who agrees with me in saying that the fbFund is a serious waste of seed funding?

Mash

• Facebook video has flown somewhat under the radar since its launch last year.  Even though it’s a small part of the site, it still pulls in some 100,000 new videos everyday, with a total of over 45 million.
• Facebook just announced some upgrades to their video service that’s sure to up those numbers in the upcoming year.
• The first addition is the ability to embed videos on other websites.  The great thing is Facebook allows you to control your privacy settings, no matter where they’re being shared.  Users can choose to share videos with their friends or selected friends (must be logged in to view) or an everyone setting.
• Another piece of mediocre good news is they’ll be supporting higher resolution video with capabilities as high as 720p.

TC, MSH

• Months ago, Facebook distributed a request-for-proposal to a slew of classified sites earlier this year to redo and rebrand the Facebook Marketplace (see Craigslist)
• Speculation was that Oodle, the classifieds provider that powers Wal-Mart had the job. Well, today the speculation comes true.
• The marketplace needs serious help. In Silicon Valley, New York City and San Francisco combined, the amount of new listings to the Facebook Marketplace was less than 30 yesterday!
• Classified listings is a business that never needed to make it out of the web 1.0 era. Craigslist is simple, efficient, and everything you need to find/buy things or services. Adding social features around it just doesn’t make sense. Most people agree that they’d rather not know the person they are buying something from as then it brings some sort of history with it and never feels like ‘your own’.
• Chegg was first on the scene in 2005 to launch a mildly successful social classifieds site (for college students) up until Facebook decided to take them on. Now Chegg is a successful textbook rental company making serious dollars. Maybe Facebook should have copied that model instead of trying to kick the dead horse back to life (i’m kidding, but seriously social classifieds wil never kill Craigslist)
• It will be interesting to see what Oodle can do with the classifieds business for Facebook. They certainly have the audience, now they need to engage. My thoughts are that their audience doesn’t care. TC