“The playlist ran out on my computer, and I thought, ‘You know, there’s really no reason why my computer shouldn’t just know what I want to learn next,” he explains. “So that’s what we made.” – Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard Crimson interview, 2004 Above is the Team page for Synapse , the Pandora-like music recommendation plugin Mark Zuckerberg and former Facebook engineer and Quora founder Adam D’Angelo built in 2002, while they were in high school together. You can access the entire site through the  Web Archive here .  Aol, Microsoft and WinAmp all expressed interest in buying the WinAmp program and Zuckerberg and D’Angelo reportedly received up offers of up to 2 million dollars, which they famously turned down.

Last Wednesday, I got my hands on a new Meisterstück Le Grand Traveller pen . I haven’t touched my MacBook Pro since.

It’s finally happened. MG’s love for all things Apple has manifested itself in physical form, and he now wears an iPhone to work every day. The doctors say we should try to make him feel like this is normal, so I’ve taken to donning a matching Android handset

This guest post was submitted by SGN founder and Executive Chairman, Shervin Pishevar . The entrepreneur and angel investor was founding president of Webs.com, a co-founder of Hotprints and Hyperoffice and has made several investments, including Nowmov , Aardvark , Thread.com, Gowalla , and Qwiki . So I just logged into my email tonight and I see this email titled: Super Talent

A new type of player is emerging in the market for Facebook shares. Investors are banding together and creating a growing number of entities that exist solely to buy stock in the company. While investors have been able to purchase shares from former employees for the past few years, these firms underscore ballooning interest in Facebook after it surpassed 500 million users and demonstrated increasingly established revenue streams, including brand and performance advertising, and its virtual currency, Credits.

In a New York Times profile on Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, the company revealed a few interesting stats showing the growth trajectory of the network. Twitter now has 175 million registered users, which is up from 145 million users in September

In conjunction with the company’s developer conference, PayPal announced a slew of news and product releases this week, including a new micropayments product and an apps platform for businesses. But tucked away in a release was another piece of news from PayPal that could be huge.

I read blog posts by Don Dodge and Glenn Kelman today about people jumping from Google to Facebook and it got me thinking about entrepreneurs. Most people have an aversion to risk, my college economics professor told me. Which means they have to be rewarded to take on that risk.

As promised , my guest on Ask a VC this week is James Chan of Neoteny Labs , an early stage Singaporean investment firm. Chan isn’t some banker-fied expat, he’s a “son of Singapore’s soil” as he phrases it. He was educated in the system, served his two years in the army and got a scholarship to study in the US, part at Carnegie Mellon University and part at Stanford.

Halloween is an exhibitionist’s paradise, and nowhere do more (safe for work) exhibitionists congregate than in online communities like DailyBooth , a site which asks users to upload photo booth style pictures of themselves. The  YCombinator-funded DailyBooth has decided to get into the Halloween spirit this year (or is just really good at spotting opportunities for marketing itself) and is running a program that allows users to strut their Halloween stuff using the hashtag #trickortreat. There’s already a critical mass of users sharing and a commenting on each other’s pics this Halloween Eve, and the momentum has inevitably spread to Twitter .