In yet one more bid to ensure that Facebook users never leave Facebook’s site (and, of course, if they do, Facebook will be following them), Facebook has announced the launch of their Facebook Movies service. The Facebook movie service, which is a movie rental service, allows users to trade Facebook credits to rent and stream a movie for up to 48 hours. First up: the Batman movie, The Dark Knight. That said, the Facebook movie rental service isn’t actually being offered by Facebook itself, so much as being permitted by Facebook, for a cut of the action.

Facebook has teamed up with the Samaritans confidential emotional health service to allow Facebook users to report, through Facebook, if they are concerned that one of their Facebook friends is exhibiting suicidal tendancies, or threatening suicide. If a Facebook user reports (at the link included below) that they are concerned about a Facebook friend’s suicidal thoughts or talk of suicide, the Samaritans will reach out to that friend.

Rodney Knight Jr. is clearly no criminal mastermind. In fact, some news outlets are giving him their “Most stupid criminal ever” award, although we think we have a few candidates for that as well. He’s right up there, though. Knight broke into a house. The house of a major journalist for a major paper. And stole the journalist’s son’s laptop. Then he used the stolen laptop’s browser to post a picture of himself to the son’s Facebook account!

As if it isn’t bad enough that Facebook is sharing your private phone number with all of your Facebook friends, there has been quite a stir this week over the news that Facebook is moving forward with their plans to allow third parties to access your contact information, including your address and telephone number. While Facebook denies this in the press, Facebook themselves confirmed it in a formal letter to the U.S. legislature, signed by Facebook’s VP of Global Public Policy, Marne Levine.

Perhaps you’ve already heard of the new online service, SocialEyes (SocialEyes.com). What you may have heard is that it’s like the Russian Chatroulette, only clean, and with your Facebook friends. Which isn’t really accurate, because Russia Chatroulette connects you serially with random people, while SocialEyes allows you and several of your friends (whom you know, they are not random people) to chat all at once with each other. However, it has severe limitations, and several quality issues. For example, you cannot invite friends on SocialEyes directly, they have to be on Facebook and you can only invite Facebook friends. And nowhere do they tell you how to cancel SocialEyes (we tell you how to remove SocialEyes below).

We have often taken flack for saying that children have no business being on Facebook (or the Internet in general), and that parents really don’t understand the dangers of letting your child on the Internet without adequate supervision and precautions. Now a group of police officers is saying the same thing, going so far as to say that you need to have your child’s Facebook password, and monitor their activity on Facebook – even if it means stealing their Facebook password to do it.

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”.)

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 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.)