How would you like to be able to download everything you have ever posted to Facebook – all your photos, all your videos, all your status updates – along with all the posts to your wall, and even your list of friends – all at one fell swoop, in one file, that you can store on your computer? Well now you can! Here’s how. (Amusingly, the domain from which you will download your big zip file is, wait for it, “bigzipfiles.facebook.com”.)

If you are trying to reach Facebook right now, and all you are getting is a blank white page, or a page with just a little code, you’re not alone. In fact, it’s country-wide, if not world-wide. People around the globe are asking “Is Facebook Down?” “Was Facebook hacked?” “Is it the Wikileaks hackers?” “Was Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg getting named Time “Man of the Year” too much for some extremist faction and they are retaliating?”

In case you have been missing having to tear your hair out over Facebook’s privacy settings and policies, fear not, because with Facebook’s new “Instant Personalization” setting, you can tear away. Six months ago we reported on Facebook’s then-new ‘open graph’ with “social plugins”, or ‘social graph’, that followed you around to sites like Pandora and Yelp. This appears to have evolved into, or spawned, Facebook’s “Instant Personalization” where, explains Facebook, the goal is “to give you a great social and personalized experience with every application and website you use.”

With the advent of the newly-revamped Facebook Groups (which is now oh-so-much more like Yahoo Groups), lots of people have created lots of groups and invited (read as “force subscribed”) lots of Facebook friends to those groups. But lots of those groups created in the initial honeymoon blush are just empty shells – tests and experiments – that now should be deleted. Or, maybe you have an older group that is disused, and you want to remove the Facebook Group from Facebook. But how do you remove a Facebook Group from Facebook? Put another way, how do you delete a Facebook group? Here’s how.

Did you know that Facebook is keeping you from seeing some of your Facebook friends Facebook updates and Facebook status messages? Even though you are seeing regular Facebook notifications on your Facebook news page, you are not seeing everything from all of your friends. In fact, you are only seeing the Facebook stuff from your Facebook friends that Facebook thinks you’ll want to see. Facebook is making that choice for you. (“We’re Facebook .com, we know your mind better than you do.”) This gives rise to some Facebook problems, most notably that you are missing a large portion of your friends’ Facebook updates, not to mention that their Facebook status ideas as to what you want to see from your Facebook friends – and from which Facebook friends, at that – may be wildly different from what you really want to see. Fortunately, there is a way to override Facebooks selections, and to see the Facebook status updates from all of your friends.

Did you know that Facebook is taking your telephone number, and publishing your phone number to all of your friends in a handy dandy online Facebook phonebook? And, we don’t mean that they are ‘going to’ do this – we mean that they are doing it right now. That’s right, as we speak, Facebook is publishing your telephone number in a Facebook online phone directory for all of your Facebook friends, in a Facebook phone book available in their account (with your phone number).

If you are on Facebook (and according to the most recent stats, over 500 million of you are), then you may have noticed that many of your Facebook friends (mainly women) have posted a status update that reads “I like it on the floor”, or “I like it on the kitchen table” or “I like it on the couch”… you get the idea. You may be disappointed to learn that these ladies aren’t talking about where they like to get frisky. Rather, they are talking about…

There are several reports that Facebook and Skype are about to enter into digital matrimony or, at very least, are becoming friends with benefits. According to the reports, while rumours that Facebook and Skype may merge are not true, it is true that a partnership is apparently in the offing, and that Facebook users are going to be able to talk to each other over Facebook, using technology that is, under the hood, decidedly Skypeish.

If you think that because your Facebook or Twitter profile is set to “private” that it means that you can control who will see what you post, think again. In fact, even if you delete what you have posted – in your private account – you can still be forced to let others see it, even after you’ve deleted it. That’s the Court ruling in a recent case involving plaintiff Kathleen Romano, who may have deleted postings, made to her private Facebook and MySpace accounts, which would be beneficial to the defendant, the Steelcase chair company.

If you got a confirmation of resetting your password from Facebook today, but you don’t remember asking to reset your password, there’s a reason. It’s a scam. And it’s a particularly tricky scam, because it plays on your fear that someone else is scamming you by trying to guess your password. But the reality is that whomever sent you your version of the scam is the one trying to scam you. The versions we’ve seen claim to come from either Chasity Stahr, letnesa@facebook.com, or Mara Krafft jwaterhouse@facebook.com.

There is a meme going around this week, concerning Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and how he supposedly said that concerns over Facebook privacy were “overblown”. In fact, nearly 1,000 sites, including the Telegraph, the Latest Business Report, and SFGate, are reporting that, and we quote, “Facebook privacy concerns overblown, suggests Mark Zuckerberg.” However, in the actual interview on which these sites are reporting – an interview that Zuckerberg did with the New Yorker’s Jose Antonio Vargas – Zuckerberg never actually says that the concerns are overblown – in fact he doesn’t use the term “overblown” at all. Good thing too, because we just discovered that with a single click, Facebook is now revealing all of the applications that you use to your friends, and vice versa. (See screen shot below.)

You’ve heard of the neighborhood crime watch? That’s where the citizens of a neighborhood keep their eyes open for crimes in progress and report them to the police. Well, the police department in the town of Evesham, New Jersey, has turned this idea on its head. They are instead informing the local citizenry of people who have been accused of crimes. They are doing it by posting names and mugshots and other photos of suspects on Facebook! And these aren’t just suspects who have been booked – they are even posting pictures taken before a suspect has even been arrested (let alone charged).

Facebook has added a Facebook Panic button application, following an agreement with (read as capitulation to, but we don’t mean that pejoratively) UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP). The way that it works, at least in theory, is that it provides an easy way for young people on Facebook (and their parents) to report suspicious activity – by which we mean activity that may be aimed at luring, stalking, or bullying minors – to both Facebook and CEOP.

According to reports on the BBC and in the Register and other international news sources, a complainant in Pakistan has initiated a process against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg which could invoke the death penalty or, at least, life in prison, over the “Draw Muhammad” contest that was being hosted on Facebook.

A new phishing scam going around sends you email claiming that you have deactivated your Facebook account. Don’t fall for it. The links in it don’t really go to Facebook at all, although they look as though they do. They actually go to https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/, https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/, and https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/.