News.com's Beyond Binary blog reports that Microsoft and Facebook are close to a deal that could value Facebook as high as $15 billion. If true, it will be a heartbreaking outcome for the Google team that poured weeks into making a deal happen. But for Google itself? Not so much. We hear CEO Eric Schmidt has been a skeptic of the deal from the beginning, and he can go back to talking up Orkut, Google's big-in-Brazil social network, and Google's ad deal with MySpace. For Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who bowed and scraped in multiple meetings to make a deal happen? Well, he'll get to write a big check, and subsidize Facebook's ever-growing ad network. One outside possibility: What if Facebook got rights to sell targeted ads when Facebook users visit Microsoft-owned websites? That would be the ultimate cherry on top.

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