How funny that a young man who helped elect Barack Obama and who's championed sharing, openness, and transparency would put himself out of circulation for a cover story in ... Fast Company, the forgotten bible of booms of yore. Was this really worth staying away from the rest of the press during his ex-boss's inauguration?

The best parts of the profile are the personal ones, where Hughes talks about how touched his parents were when Obama recognized his efforts, or where he describes how he came out as gay in boarding school. But as a business profile — the "Company" in Fast Company — it disappoints.

I'd been pursuing Hughes since January, when I noticed that Obama's former social-networking guru wasn't part of the new White House Internet team. A cryptic answer from a White House flack spurred my curiosity as to what he'd be up to next. And the Fast Company story doesn't really answer that question.

It's an odd time to cover Hughes's third act. The two powerful acts of creation he participated in — Facebook's founding and Obama's campaign — are still inchoate in their results. And Hughes himself doesn't really know what he wants to do next, which is why he's pursued stopgap (if well-paying) gigs in venture capital and PR. A cover story about someone whose career is pretty much pure potential? It makes a certain sense, if you think about how tarnished anyone with actual accomplishments is.

Unlike the part-time PR gig he announced last week, this is a real full-time job. Except not quite. Venture capital firms hire entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley equivalent of a Hollywood first-look deal; they pay EIRs a salary in exchange for the chance to invest in their next big thing.

So Hughes has a business card and a place to call home — but he's still figuring out what to do next. After cofounding Facebook and helping elect the most powerful man in the world, almost anything would seem like a comedown. Lucky for him, he's found someone willing to pay him while he figures it out.

Hughes has kept a low profile since the election. He gave a speech in Washington, D.C. in January, and attended Google's inaugural ball. He only recently popped up again on Twitter. When asked if Hughes would be signing up with the Obama administration, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro was curiously coy. Even sources at Facebook expressed hope that Hughes, who served as the social network's first spokesman, might return.

The firm that has signed Hughes up as a strategic advisor, GMMB Communications, worked with the Obama operation during the campaign. It's a subsidiary of PR conglomerate Fleishman-Hillard. It will be a commute: GMMB has offices in D.C., Los Angeles, Seattle, and London — but not New York, where Hughes is currently living. (Brooklyn, the preferred borough of Internet hipsters, to be precise.)

It seems like a maddeningly prosaic gig for a 24-year-old who dropped out of Harvard to start a company which now counts 175 million users, and who then went on to lead an Internet campaign effort which many say got Obama his job. And perhaps it's not the end of the story: Hughes, in a text message, says GMMB is not "a full-time gig." "Other news on that in a week," he adds.

We do have an idea for one client he could sign up. Hughes is gay, and the same-sex-marriage movement, which suffered a disastrous defeat in California, could use an effective spokesman. How about it, Chris? You started Facebook. You got Obama elected. Get gay marriage legalized coast to coast, and you'll earn your place in history. Seems a lot better than being known as a flack.

Thomas Gensemer. Gensemer joined Blue State Digital, a Boston-centered political consultancy founded by veterans on Howard Dean's Internet-powered presidential campaign, in 2005. He'd previously worked as a venture capitalist who backed Blogger and Meetup.com, among others. He's currently touring in Britain trying to drum up business for a newly opened office as "Obama's digital guru."
How much credit does he deserve? "Campaign insiders suggest privately that Blue State has so impressed Obama that, if he wins in November, the company could be in the unique position to play a role inside the White House," BusinessWeek wrote last June. That hasn't happened — which may explain why Gensemer has moved on to London.

Jascha Franklin-Hodge. Blue State's cofounder and CTO, Franklin-Hodge, a Boston computer programmer, led the heavy lifting on my.barackobama.com and change.gov, Obama's transition website.
How much credit does he deserve? The technology Blue State developed, including software which distributed lists of voters for volunteers to call, was key to Obama's operation. Franklin-Hodge deserves a large share of the credit, but as a programmer, he's unlikely to grab it.

Joe Rospars. Another Blue State cofounder and veteran of the Dean campaign who embedded himself in the Obama organization as new media director. Portfolio dubbed him "Obama's tech guru." He served as a spokesblogger and argued that content, not technology, was key to Obama's victory.
How much credit does he deserve? Pop quiz: Can you recall any of Obama's blog entries?

Chris Hughes. The New York Times called Hughes the "Facebooker who friended Obama." A cofounder of the social network who served as Facebook's spokesman in its early days, Hughes left the company in 2007 to join the Obama campaign as its director of online organizing. Hughes operated the tools Blue State built to set up local networks of fundraisers and get-out-the-vote efforts.
How much credit does he deserve? A lot, according to Obama, who told the Times:

One of my fundamental beliefs from my days as a community organizer is that real change comes from the bottom up. And there's no more powerful tool for grass-roots organizing than the Internet.

Hughes was in D.C. for the inauguration, attending Google's inaugural ball, but hasn't gotten — or taken — a job with the administration yet. When we asked about Hughes' role a couple of weeks ago, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro cryptically said, "Nothing for you on that at this time."

Scott Goodstein. A D.C. campaign manager whom the L.A. Times dubbed "Obama's text-message guru." He also built Obama's presence on external social networks, including Facebook and MySpace.
How much credit does he deserve? Obama's Facebook presence had 3 million followers by the end of the campaign. His team also developed Obama's iPhone app. But Obama's attempt to announce his vice-presidential pick via text message got scooped by old media.

Arun Chaudhary. Obama's director of field video production and "video guru" won the "YouTube primary" for Obama, according to Business Insider.
How much credit does he deserve? Obama is now delivering fireside chats on an official YouTube channel — but does anyone really buy the idea that Obama won the election on YouTube?

Joe Trippi. Howard Dean's campaign manager, credited with inventing the modern practice of Internet campaigning.
How much credit does he deserve? In theory? All of it, since the Dean campaign led directly to the founding of Blue State Digital and inspired the operation of Obama's online efforts. In practice? None, since he worked for John Edwards' doomed campaign in the 2008 Democratic primary.

Katie Stanton. A Googler who launched Google Finance before spearheading Google Moderator, an online voting tool that the incoming Obama administration used on Change.gov.
How much credit does she deserve? None, since she had no involvement in the campaign. But she's the one who actually got a cool Internet job in the White House as Obama's "director of citizen engagement."

(Photos via Phorecast, NetSquared, AP, Boston Globe, >Washington Post, and peanuggets)

But the defense is timely for Sandberg as well. Sandberg served as Summers's chief of staff before she moved to Silicon Valley and joined Google, setting her up for her current job at Facebook. Summers and Sandberg had a close professional relationship; he even escorted her as his guest to a White House dinner in 2000. At Google and Facebook both, colleagues roll their eyes as they recount how often she brings up her Washington experience and brags about how working in tech is a cakewalk compared to D.C.

But Sandberg's tenure at Facebook has been controversial. She's been acting as if she's the company's No. 2 executive, despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg's reassurances that her role is limited and she's not a CEO-in-waiting. Several key tech and product executives have left since she's arrived — and, crucially, she has not made visible progress in improving the company's ad-sales operations. At least one prominent investor has been talking about "reining her in."

So why not head back to D.C.? If Summers gets the Treasury job, he'll surely call on Sandberg for advice, and perhaps more. Will she be able to resist the call to public service? Her husband, Dave Goldberg, is an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital — a placeholder job he could easily leave. Her children are young enough that she could move back east without disrupting their schooling. It might be a now-or-never opportunity.

It must be on her mind — and on the agenda at Facebook's next board meeting. Sandberg leaving Facebook for the government gives everyone a graceful out from a bad situation. Zuckerberg could help give her a nudge; his cofounder, Chris Hughes, was the director of Obama's Web campaign. Perhaps he could put in a good word for Sandberg? If Summers gets the Treasury job, the only question is whether, having made millions at Google, she really wants to work as hard as she tells everyone she used to.

And yet that's what Obama's campaign ended up doing. The plan was to send it out Saturday morning, not in the middle of the night — a time chosen to make things difficult for reporters with advance deadlines. But the campaign's hand, it seems, was forced by intrepid reporters who smoked out Biden by process of elimination. No worries, Chris. The scheme succeeded in its real aim — getting millions of cell-phone numbers to call and text in the runup to Election Day.

"If the typical Gore event was 20 people in a living room writing six-figure checks, and the Kerry event was 2,000 people in a hotel ballroom writing four-figure checks, this year for Obama we have stadium rallies of 20,000 people who pay absolutely nothing, and then go home and contribute a few dollars online." Obama himself shrewdly capitalizes on both the turnout and the connectivity of his stadium crowds by routinely asking them to hold up their cell phones and punch in a five-digit number to text their contact information to the campaign.

Cofounder Chris Hughes left a while ago to work on Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Another cofounder, Dustin Moskovitz, has been rumored to be on the outs with Zuckerberg, though Moskovitz attributes any disputes to normal friction between founders. And now D'Angelo — though not a founder, one of the small group who helped Facebook relocate from Zuckerberg's dorm room to Palo Alto — is gone, too. He may be leaving for his own reasons, but his departure is a sign that the company is fitfully growing up.

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