Facebook announced earlier this week that they had passed the 300million user mark, and that they are making money or, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it this week, they are cash flow positive. Put another way, Facebook is raking in the revenue.

A plague of rogue Facebook applications that are stealing user credentials – such as usernames and passwords – has been sweeping Facebook in the past week. The phishing Facebook apps work the same way that many other applications do – including sending an email to your Facebook friends, with links to click on, and when you type in your username and password, BAM! Your login credentials have been stolen.

A group of Facebook users has sued Facebook for violation of their privacy, and privacy law in general. The group, which includes two children under the age of thirteen, an actress, and a professional photographer, have sued Facebook in California Superior Court, alleging that Facebook’s practices violate California online privacy laws which make it illegal to reveal users’ private data for commercial gain.

The next time someone asks you about social networking, and what it is, or to describe a social networking website, you need look no further than the laws of the state of Illinois. Because Illinois has taken the unusal step of defining just what makes a social networking site, in the context of their new law banning sex offenders from using any social networking site.

While the Internet is all abuzz about how Facebook and Friendfeed have just announced that Facebook is acquiring FriendFeed, the bigger coup may be in that in the doing, Facebook has effectively acquired FriendFeed founders Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit, and Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh.

Hey, it happens. There are any number of reasons why you may want to “unfriend” someone from Facebook – that is, remove them from your friends list. It isn’t necessarily personal, in fact it usually isn’t. Perhaps you don’t really know the person that well; perhaps you or they use Facebook primarily for business and your uses of Facebook don’t jive. Or perhaps they overuse the Facebook invitation process or the sending-you-cute-non-existent-items-via-Facebook process. Whatever the reason, it’s perfectly acceptable to remove somebody from your Facebook friends. But how do you unfriend someone on Facebook? It’s actually pretty simple, once you know how.

A class action lawsuit has been filed against Facebook, alleging that Facebook is charging advertisers for more clicks than their ads actually receive, and also that Facebook is not doing enough to curtail click fraud which is resulting, the lawsuit says, from competitors clicking on an advertiser’s Facebook advertisment in order to use up their allotted clicks and run up the advertiser’s Facebook advertising bill.

As online society becomes ever more social, and cares ever less about personal security, the phrase “social security” seems more than ever an oxymoron. Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly brought home than in this week’s announcement by researchers at Carnegie Mellon that they have cracked the social security code, and were able to predict with frightening accuracy many social sercurity numbers (SSN). In many cases, their hack was aided by information gleaned from such social networking sites as Facebook.

Montana, once known as “Big Sky” state, just became the “Big Spy” state, with the revelation that those applying for jobs with Monatana’s City of Bozeman are required to provide their username and password for any social networking site to which they belong, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, and others.

Facebook has found itself in the rather unusual (some would say “indefensible”) position of booting from Facebook people with odd or unusual names, while refusing to boot pro-Nazi groups who deny that the Holocaust ever happened (so-called “Holocaust deniers”).

Proving that it really wants to be the hip Internet administration, the WhiteHouse now has a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and a MySpace Page. Check out the Whitehouse Twitter account, Whitehouse Facebook account, and Whitehouse MySpace account here.

It’s one of Facebook’s dirty little secrets, even though it’s been publicly available information for more than a year. Facebook takes information that you post, and sells it to advertisers who can use it in ads that are displayed to your friends. For example, if I posted “Eating Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream”, Ben & Jerry’s could then show an ad to all of my Facebook friends saying “Anne is eating Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream – shouldn’t you too?” The service is part of Facebook’s “Facebook beacons” service for advertisers, and the ads in which your Facebook info is displayed are called “Facebook Social Ads”. And if you don’t explicitly opt out of them, then you are fair game.

Gary Waters is one lucky perp. Already on parole for a burglery rap, he was arrested for gun possession, and went to trial. And then, he was acquitted because of comments that the arresting officer Vaughan Ettienne had made on Facebook and MySpace.

Less than a week after Facebook announced its new Terms of Service (TOS), Facebook has announced that they are going back to the TOS drawing board, and have reinstated their old Terms of Service in the meantime. They are also requesting user input via the Facebook group called “The Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities”.

Facebook has responded to the concern engendered by the new Facebook TOS with a post by none other than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself. In his comments, Zuckerberg tries to allay the fears of Facebook users by saying that even though the new Facebook TOS says that Facebook can use all user-generated content however they want, and forever, they wouldn’t really do so. Unfortunately, that doesn’t cut it.