According to sources, Facebook is moving to eliminate its observer status slot from its board. That position is currently held by Greylock Partners David Sze.

The reasons might be as simple as the fact that as Facebook grows, it needs a more formal board process, especially as it prepares for a public offering sometime in the future.

In that case, the observer slot might be eliminated, as the company moves to add more members to the board.

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Today, in yet another episode of the Web 2.0 lottery, Social Gaming Network grabbed $15 million in funding for its widgety gaming apps that are popular on Facebook and other social networking sites.

The round, led by Greylock Partners, Founders Fund, Columbia Partners and Novak Biddle Venture Partners, will go toward expanding its offerings, which include the popular Warbook, and also its network for other developers to create and publish online games on.

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Silicon Valley luminary Marc Andreessen has been asked to join the board of Facebook, according to several sources with knowledge of the situation.

While the arrangement is not completed yet, sources said the longtime entrepreneur has verbally agreed to accept the post to become the fourth member of the board of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social-networking site.

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While BoomTown does not usually do funding announcements, the $7 million that the adults-only social network Zivity will be announcing today is interesting for one reason.
No, not the fact that it builds its business model on the back–well, back ends, to be more precise–of photos of women in various stages of undress.
Get your minds [...]

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It’s Bubble Time!
As BoomTown broke the news in its post earlier today, Slide grabbed a big pile of cash from new investors–$50 million from Fidelity and T. Rowe Price–which puts the value of the company at $550 million.
In our post, we said the San Francisco start-up, whose widgets are among the most popular on Facebook [...]

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Call it the Facebook Funding Effect.

I am still collecting details, but Slide–the San Francisco start-up whose widgets are among the most popular on Facebook and MySpace–is completing a round of funding that could value it at many times a multiple of its most recent $60 million to $80 million valuation.

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What can we say about investor Peter Thiel, when it is much better to listen to him talk?

Here’s a longish video I made at Thiel’s office on San Francisco’s Presidio (no Sand Hill Road mundanity for Peter!) yesterday with the man who has become Silicon Valley’s most interesting venture capitalist and all-around great character of [...]

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Well, we’re glad it’s done, our conflict of interest shoved aside by the hey-big-spenders at Microsoft and we can again resume our incredulous analysis of the insane $15 billion valuation of Facebook.

No matter who would have gotten to make nice with founder Mark Zuckerberg in the hefty ad-investment deal–Google or Microsoft–we will be sticking to our guns on this ridiculous roundelay of hype and circumstance.

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“Why,” said a sharp Silicon Valley figure to me last night, “would Facebook give away the cow for the price of a quart of milk?”
Why, indeed, although it would be a $15 billion quart of milk.
But it was an interesting point he was making about the situation the hot social-networking site finds itself in right [...]

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Oh, my.

Oh, my.

Dig a hole and hide. The end is nigh. And how do you spell Ponzi (as in scheme) again?

When I reported in this column two weeks ago that Facebook was looking to raise a new round of funding and that software giant Microsoft was a prime contender as an investor, I suggested a big number was being bandied about to create a giant war chest for the trendy social-networking start-up.

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Here’s an interesting idea if you don’t want to get bought and you can’t quite IPO yet and you need to have a tidy war chest for expansion or perhaps a choice acquisition or two: Bring in more investors and raise more money at a huge valuation.

That’s a concept that the top dogs at Facebook are seriously mulling over now, according to sources, after getting so many inquiries from investment funds and several bigger companies–such as its ad-serving partner, Microsoft–about grabbing a stake in the fast-growing social networking Web site.

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