Editor’s note: Contributor  is the founder and CEO of .  Follow him .

Leadership guru Warren Bennis asked whether leaders are born or made. When asked if Wall Street would accept a young in his early 20s as CEO, Facebook investor Peter Thiel said: “Well, we’ll wait until he’s over 25 to file”.  Wise move, considering that Mark’s title on his business cards read “I’m CEO, bitch”.

This week Facebook its S-1 to go public.  Mark is 27.  How Mark managed to launch a social networking site after Friendster had crashed during MySpace’s zenith has been .  What’s been less discussed is how Mark mastered the six requirements to succeed, namely Ambition, Vision, Determination, Execution, Luck and Timing.

Ambition

“The tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut by the scythe”, Russian Proverb

The foundation and building block of any successful person is Ambition, or the desire for personal achievement.

People are driven by success, recognition, respect, money, power or fame. If you believe everything in The Social Network, Mark launched Facebook to level the playing field at Harvard and to succeed at getting girls. 

Two days ago, I received an invite to Pinterest. (I know, I’m late.) After signing up, I pretty much ignored the welcome message, just as I do with most services. But last night I decided to get myself caught up after the Crunchies, and started reading through all my unread emails (even the ones from Nigerian royal’s relatives) and found myself actually reading through the Pinterest welcome email, too.

It’s wonderful, and the reason it’s wonderful comes down to just one bullet point:

Pin carefully! As one of the first members of Pinterest, your pins will help set the tone for the whole community. Use big images, write thoughtful descriptions, and pin things you really love. Also, no nudity

Welcome messages are important because they’re usually the first point of contact between user and service. Good ones “set the tone” for the relationship the user will have with the service, give them helpful tips on how to get going (and be good at it), and usually have some kind of indication of what

I dare you to Facebook Like or even comment on this post. You can’t, because the , the backend system which allows developer applications and Facebook’s own apps like Likes and Comments to communicate with the data available on the social network, is down, and has been down for at least an hour as far as I can tell, begging the question, “If article falls on a blog and no one Likes it, does it make a sound?”

Okay, that was lame, I’m sorry.

The JavaScript API status on the Facebook reads:

“Currently, the JS SDK is returning /* Not a valid locale. */. We are working on a fix now. We will update the live status as we have more information. You can following along in https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/20327564310313″

Presumably thousands in the developer community are somehow affected (I’ve emailed Facebook for more concrete details and will update this when I have them), for example apps like Turntable.fm, Quora and TinyChat have lost their Facebook Login capabilities.

“I think this is the longest downtime ive seen of their

Those of us who have been following the social gaming industry already know that Zynga makes up a big portion of Facebook’s revenues. But lots of public investors only seem to have gotten the memo on Wednesday evening, when revealed that the developer accounts for , or $445 million.

In the two days since, Zynga’s stock has gone up more than 26%, to close at $13.39 this evening.

This is far more than most analysts had previously projected. The ones who began covering Zynga after its December IPO had pegged its stock well under ten bucks. When analysts at banks who underwrote Zynga entered the fray a couple weeks ago, they were . Following the end of the quiet period, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Barclays Capital, along with analysts from banks not involved in the IPO, all put their target price above Zynga’s public opening amount of $10.

This drove the Street’s average target price up to $11.08, as you can see from the table below.