One Hundred Percent but Unconfirmed….hmmm

Facebook is “one hundred percent” buying Plaxo, we’ve just heard from a source.

Wow, starting your story with that sentence certainly grabs your attention, doesn’t it? VentureBeat’s managed to make a statement of “fact” without actually saying that it has confirmed the story. Nice!

Well, assuming it’s “one hunded percent” then I guess we can soon expect our Plaxo accounts to start sniffing around our business contacts and phoning home to the Facebook mothership. You see, part of the reason why Facebook would be interested in coughing-up as much as $200M for Plaxo is that the service has done a great job of convincing us to install its plugins and share our contact info.

That’s the type of info that would be very valuable to Facebook…

Mountain View, Calif.-based Plaxo could help Facebook gather data through its large user base, and through its plugins for email programs Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, and Thunderbird as well as a plugin for instant message service AIM, among others. Plaxo has developed technology to sync contacts through its home web site and its plugins, to create a sort of universal address book. It has also developed native mobile syncing technology for Windows Mobile and other mobile operating systems. Syncing between all of these different services is a very hard problem — that Plaxo has solved.

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Facebook isn’t ready for its close up.

In a television interview, Facebook’s Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said it was unlikely for the social networking site would go public this year.

“I think what I can announce is that it’s highly unlikely that we will go public in 2008,” Zuckerberg told CBS (nyse: CBS -news - people ) news program “60 Minutes” in an interview aired Sunday.

Instead, the tech-sector’s prodigy looked two or three years into the future.

“When going public makes sense to do, we’ll do that. Maybe that’s two years out. Maybe it’s three years out,” he said.

Despite Facebook’s high-profile, Zuckerberg’s comments were a non-issue on Wall Street.

“That deal wasn’t really on a lot of radar screens,” said Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Sal Morreale, “everyone’s talking about Visa and other deals.”

Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news -people ) paid $240 million in October for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, valuing the startup at $15 billion. Facebook reportedly has turned away offers to buy the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company outright, stoking speculation that it is preparing for an eventual IPO.

Shares of Microsoft were up 1.2%, or 47 cents, to $34.38, in late-afternoon trading on Monday.

Bankers are expecting 2008 to present a less welcoming environment for technology-sector IPOs than 2007. A survey of 100 technology bankers by research firm 451 Group shows they expect a median of 25 IPOs this year, down from 60 in 2007.

Despite starting as a simple social networking site on college campuses, Facebook quickly turned into true cultural and business phenomena.

For example, Facebook executives recently set up camp to offer a peek into how it hopes to answer that question with a new advertising platform that will let marketers track where the 50 million members of Facebook go online and what they buy. The goal of keeping track of all this activity is to help advertisers send the most “appropriate” ads to consumers–and ultimately sell more products and services (See“Facebook’s Big Play To Earn Money”).

“For the last hundred years, media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be part of the conversation,” Zuckerberg said. The company calles the new platform Facebook Ads.

Captured in those millions of pages of profiles on Facebook is exactly the kind of information that makes most brands salivate. Among the top 10 questions Facebook asks when you create a profile are where you shop and what you buy.

 Southern California man convicted last year of hacking into the Lexis-Nexis owned consumer database Accurint was arrested on charges on extortion Friday after allegedly hijacking the MySpace account of an internet celebrity.

Jeffrey Robert Weinberg, 22, was arrested by LAPD detectives in Southern California early Friday morning, a department spokeswoman confirmed. While police aren’t discussing the particulars, the arrest follows a detailed blog post by “Amor Hilton” an 18-year-old Los Angeles woman who says she helped detectives build a case against  Weinberg after he hijacked her MySpace account and demanded nude photos and “phone sex” in exchange for its return.

Hilton’s weekly live video show Bare Naked on the amateur streaming site Stickam, has made her an online celebrity of sorts.  She named herself for fashion model Nicky Hilton, sister of heiress Paris Hilton. Weinberg was one of a gang of hackers who penetrated Paris Hilton’s cell phone account in 2005, theWashington Post reported last year. 

According to her blog post, Hilton found herself locked out of her MySpace account on December 28th, the same day she began receiving harassing phone calls from a hacker calling himself “V.I.P.” — a handle used by Weinberg in the past. The calls continued over the course of several days, and often took a threatening tone, she says.

  And if you would believe it, so are Japanese pop diva Ayumi Hamasaki, Bollywood queen Aishwarya Rai, US President George Bush and even Singapore’s Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew.If you type in Mr Lee’s name on the Find Friends function on the social networking site, you will find four profiles with his name - three with his photos.One of the profiles lists 13 friends - which include ‘Tony Blair’, ‘Mao Ze Dong’ and ‘Gregori Rasputin’ - the latter two being, respectively, a deceased Chinese leader and the infamous Mad Monk of Russia who was murdered in the early 20th century.An Eric Lee from Malaysia writes on this profile, ‘Err… who exactly are you ah?’, to which, ‘Mr Lee’ responds: ‘Go read your papers.’Facebook fake? Quite likely.And there are a slew of them. There is even one open profile of Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, where the only application added is an IQ test.Fake celebrity profiles made headlines recently after two bogus Facebook profiles of Bilawal Bhutto Zardari were found on the site.Bilawal is the 19-year-old son of recently-assassinated Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto. He took over his late mother’s position as party chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party.

Under the agreement, IBM will pay $58 for each share of Cognos (COGN:

cognos inc com

COGN 57.15, +4.17, +7.9%) (CA:CSN: news, chart, profile) , an Ottawa-based software company whose products help businesses gauge their performance.

The offer represents a 9.5% premium over the Friday closing price of Cognos. In recent action, Cognos shares were up 7.7% to $57.07.