It looks like we have reached the point in the continuing Facebook saga that it’s OK to questions whether Mark Zuckerberg should continue on as the CEO of the social network. For the record, I really have no opinion either way on this one. The future of Facebook will certainly be influenced by who is at the helm but it is likely to be even more influenced by the whims of social media users as they mature in their use of the medium.

But that won’t stop the headlines:

Chicago Sun-Times – Could Facebook Fire Zuckerberg?

Los Angeles Times – Is Mark Zuckerberg in Over His Hoodie as Facebook CEO?

Mashable – Should Zuckerberg Resign from CEO Position?

And you know this must be big because even Perez Hilton asks “Should Mark Zuckerberg Step Down as CEO of Facebook?”

Twitter is in the news for two different, but possibly related stories. First, sources are reporting that the network is close to “completing an $800 million funding deal that will include a second part in which around $400 million of the total will be used to cash out current investors and also employees.”

Second, TechCrunch is reporting that four of the companies key product managers have been let go. TechCrunch sees it as the final stage of cleaning out those loyal to the old regime, but it does seem like an odd time to give that many top people the boot.

In recent months, Twitter has been on an upswing with new advertising programs and a new design. Kicking out the key people who made it so, just before a round of new funding feels weird. Is Twitter planning some radical change in the near future, like upping the character count to an even 200!

It appears Facebook is built on a house of cards.

Cards that rely on more than 4,000 MySQL “shards” or should that be sharts?

According to GigaOm:

…Facebook has split its MySQL database into 4,000 shards in order to handle the site’s massive data volume, and is running 9,000 instances of memcached in order to keep up with the number of transactions the database must serve.

And, citing database guru Michael Stonebraker…

…Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to “a fate worse than death,” and the only way out is “bite the bullet and rewrite everything.”

That may sound like an exaggeration, but having lived through this nightmare myself, he may have a point.

Grab some popcorn and pull up a chair because there’s nothing quite like a conspiracy story that involves Facebook hiring a high-profile PR firm to spread a smear campaign about Google to the mainstream media.

For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

We could stop right there and this would be a juicy enough story, but it gets better. Not only is the company behind this anti-Google media campaign none other than Facebook–pot calling the kettle black, anyone?–but apparently Facebook has admitted it hired Burson-Marsteller to run the negative campaign.