Here’s a video I did on a visit to Facebook’s HQ in Palo Alto, Calif., that I made in July, 2007. In it, I take a gander at the offices (complete with artistic graffiti) and chat with a passel of nice execs at the hot social-networking site like Mike Murphy, Owen Van Natta and others.

In the interest of time-saving, we will group them all here in one easy list that you can clip and save.

DEALS AFOOT?:

Yes, there is always a lot of sniffing around out there, especially given that a lot of Web 2.0 companies are more likely to be acquired than go public.

Do look for smaller ad networks to be bought up in the wake of a spate of bigger sales of late–DoubleClick to Google, aQuantive to Microsoft, Right Media and BlueLithium to Yahoo).

Now, it looks like AOL might get into the game again, after presciently grabbing Advertising.com way back in 2004 for $435 million. The new target, in a deal that a source close to the company said is “80% there,” is Quigo–the content-targeting ad network. The price? About $300 million.

Less likely for action are some other names being bandied about.

WordPress (the blogging software and hosting company AllThingsD.com uses), for example, has some suitors and is contemplating a sale after some offers. But don’t bet on it.

And RockYou is not being bought by, say, Yahoo–at least not this week. While rumors of wild valuations for the No. 2 maker of widgets on Facebook (Slide usually outranks it) have been bandied about, it has not had any significant talks with anyone.

GOOGLE GETS FRIENDLY (EXCEPT TO FACEBOOK):

As we wrote in a post yesterday, contrary to rumors, the Google project (codenamed Maka-Maka, doubtlessly by that wacky pair, Graham Spencer and Joe Kraus, pictured here, formerly of JotSpot and Excite, who worked on it) was imminent. As in now. Right now. This instant.

Officially named OpenSocial, it is a way to create a social graph over the Web that is open to third-party apps friendly and, as I wrote, is indeed both a “real attempted assault on the Facebook platform or more of a way to widely spread the gospel of social networking (and, thus, an assault on the Facebook platform).”

While Google has signed a bunch of prominent partners, it has yet to grab the No. 2 social-networking site Facebook (unlikely) and the No. 1 MySpace (much more likely, but don’t hold your breath). But it’s definitely a put-up-or-shut-up dare by the search giant, especially given Facebook’s professed love of openness.

Who knows if it will catch on, given that it is clear it is all in the hands of the apps developer community. If not, it will surely be a big black eye for Google, if it can’t motivate widely beyond search.

FACEBOOK IS A BIG BOY NOW:

It looks like former Yahoo Mike Murphy–who heads ad sales at Facebook (and is pictured here)–is finally getting his ducks in order with a new ad offering to be called SocialAds next week at its big confab in NYC.

Unlike the competition’s contextual ad programs, this will be squarely aimed at people’s self-expressed interests and demographics.

And, of course, Microsoft will be Facebook’s partner in serving the ads, for now at least. Good lord, it has bought and paid for this date many times over, so a fine time must be had by all!

I can’t tell you how thrilled we are that Facebook (and that nice boy Mark Zuckerberg) is finally putting some meat on its skinny little business model to take advantage of its fast-growing popularity.

But let’s keep in mind that it remains to be seen how lucrative this kind of ad network is and how scalable it is across the Web (and not just on Facebook).

It will also be interesting to see if the offering is truly innovative and different than existing solutions–or if it just serves up some dumb and useless ad for blood supplies, because you happen to be playing Vampire a little too much.

(We’re teasing, Mark, but not very much at all.)

OH, YES, THAT GPHONE:

More open verbiage from Google, which will roll out a mobile-phone operating system of software and services for a new kind of open cellphone sometime in this millennium (are you as sick of the speculation about the Gphone as I am?).

Since we’re talked out, here’s a much better Wall Street Journal Online video on the subject:

BOVINE UPDATE

Yahoo’s holy cows? Still sacred and going strong!

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Murphy, in fact, came from Yahoo, where he was a longtime and high-ranking sales exec. He hopes to jump-start the Facebook business and prove that social networking can be just as lucrative an advertising market as it has been and continues to be–despite the recent spate of difficulties–for Yahoo.

Here’s the video of Murphy talking about it:

Is there a trend in my post yesterday about the deal former Hollywood execs Lloyd Braun and Gail Berman struck with Pepsi to make original online content that the entertainment and marketing arm of the beverage giant will have a chance to fund and sponsor?

“We want to create great online content … and also something that is more than a glorified Internet ad at the same time,” said Braun to me yesterday. “So we’ll work with Pepsi hand-in-hand to bake new kinds of ad solutions right in organically at the earliest possible moment.”

What struck me was that this was also the same line being touted by Facebook ad sales majordomo Mike Murphy, whom I interviewed Tuesday about what it will take to make the popular social-network site as popular with advertisers. (See video below again.)

Bandying about the phrase, “return on involvement,” he noted that it was his job to show marketers that becoming part of the conversation could be as important as much-measured click-through rates.

“Banners are great for branding, but this is a more relevant message that leverages social media,” said Murphy. “If we can help you make your idea or product relevant to a consumer and get the best involvement rate … it’s a different game.”

And then last month Valleywag posted here on an amazingly idiotic roundelay about a group of bloggers associated with John Battelle’s Federated Media being part of a Microsoft ad campaign, by weighing in on what the software giant’s “people ready” catchphrase meant to them.

I was going to write about it, and even talked to Om Malik (he was sorry and withdrew from the campaign) and Battelle (not so sorry, noting to me that how we all look at marketing has changed in the new paradigm).

But the prospect of headache-inducing debates about it that would go precisely nowhere stopped me cold. I come from an Italian family and I know from pointless arguments.

My own conclusion was that, even with all the disclosure, which could have been a lot better, it was probably a dicey and even flat-out wrong thing for most bloggers to do.

Except apparently for Michael “Pound Sand” Arrington, who doesn’t appear to care what most anyone thinks anyway. (Are you looking at me?)

But Battelle has kept bringing up another interesting phrase called “conversational marketing”–which again refers to engaging audiences more deeply with advertisers. Federated, in fact, is having a “Conversational Marketing Summit” in mid-September, with a laundry list of Web marketing honchos.

It apparently “brings together leaders in conversational media and marketing for a two-day dialog around the issues, lessons and opportunities of this emerging medium.”

I, for one, am looking forward to understanding what it all means, despite the fact my initial reaction is suspicious, as a reporter who naturally worries about the sidling up of ad-sales people to the editorial process.

That feeling of distaste was articulated by Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee, who wrote that the Pepsi deal “sounds kind of sleazy, honestly.”

Well, we shall see, of course, and this is just entertainment we’re talking about. And, perhaps more important, it seems to be an inevitable drift, given trends toward increased interactivity by consumers, especially younger ones.

“A lot of online content is already developed and ads and marketing are slapped on afterward,” Russell Weiner, vice president of marketing for colas at Pepsi-Cola North America told me yesterday. “We want to be part of the DNA of a show from the very beginning.”

And that, I think, is what they call the origin of the species. What species that might be, we shall all see soon enough.

Thus, I finally got a sit-down with the Money Guy at Facebook, Media Sales Vice President Mike Murphy.

I had known the affable Murphy (pictured here) only a little bit from his many years at Yahoo, which he left for Facebook in March 2006 in what now looks like a particularly prescient move, given the Internet giant’s recent ad troubles and Facebook’s seemingly high-flying trajectory.

I use the word seemingly, because no one really knows what the record or the prospects of Facebook are exactly when it comes to becoming an ad powerhouse, like Google and, yes, Yahoo, which did more than $1 billion in revenue for the current quarter, as weak as results were.

Here’s a video I made of my visit to Facebook HQ in Palo Alto, Calif., seeking answers to this and other questions from Murphy, as well as a drop-in from COO Owen Van Natta (who mimicked founder Mark Zuckerberg and called me “nasty” on this video, even as he chatted away, which questions his credibility related to my true level of meanness), PR head Brandee Barker and others.

To get a lay of the land, Facebook’s total revenues have been reported to hover around $100 million and it is profitable, execs and investors have told me many times.

I am not sure how much profit that means–and Facebook isn’t saying–due to the growth in staff and bandwidth demands of late.

Murphy, who would not confirm any total figure, told me about half their revenue was due to Facebook’s own ad efforts and the other half to a sweetheart deal the start-up struck with Microsoft to sell its banner ads with a guaranteed revenue payment that has been extended to 2011.

The Microsoft connection–made right after Google forked over $900 million in guarantees to News Corp.’s MySpace, the by-far dominant social network–is a nice padding for the company to have, of course.

But most of Facebook’s future depends on how Murphy and his team can translate its growing popularity and frequency by users into ad sales.

As some who read this blog might know, I often give hats off to founder Zuckerberg and his team for Facebook’s clean, handsome and highly usable service, as well as its growth.

But without other revenue streams like subscription fees, it needs to get its ad business really cooking and fast.

Or perhaps not so fast, according to Murphy and other execs at Facebook, who say building the core service and rolling out better features is the goal for now.

That will give them time to figure out the real options for ad growth on Facebook, including dreaming up a whole new way of marketing, which Murphy calls “return on involvement.”

I like his chutzpah using this term, and I vaguely understand it to mean the ability of a marketer to develop a closer relationship with a customer.

It’s been called at various times “conversational marketing” too, but it is the most credible idea for highly interactive Web sites like Facebook to pitch a new story to advertisers.

In fact, story is one of the ways Facebook is selling ads, allowing marketers to insert them in a targeted way into its powerful newsfeeds of its users, linking back to a marketing site on Facebook. When that happens, it can then go out to that person’s friends and so on and so on and so on.

If the marketer makes a good enough offer or is clever enough, then the impact could indeed be more significant than simply slapping up a banner and hoping for the best. Of course, there are those banners and links, too.

“Banners are great for branding, but this is a more relevant message that leverages social media,” argued Murphy, who said the ad sell is that it produces a cornucopia of “trusted referrals,” which is basically a nice phrase for leads.

How well that works is a big question, and some reports–though few have real proof–indicate that marketers are still on the fence about the effectiveness of this kind of marketing on Facebook.

Murphy bristled at this characterization, noting that it was his job to show marketers that becoming part of the conversation could be as important as much-measured click-through rates.

“It is an exceptionally different experience,” he said. “If we can help you make your idea or product relevant to a consumer and get the best involvement rate … it’s a different game.”

In any case, Murphy thinks the real point for Facebook right now is to build its user experience, which is more important than inundating the service with ads.

“We’re building a consumer experience here … and we’re happy to fund that development,” he said. “A lot of Web companies would love to start all over and try new concepts and not have the expectations about the delivery of revenue.”

Wouldn’t we all, Mike?

Although expectations, as an old pro like Murphy knows, can certainly cut both ways. In fact, they always do.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.