Facebook added a feature today which allows you to classify your friends. You know, one group is for the friends you like, another for the people you have to pretend to like. Some are calling the feature a LinkedIn killer, since you can now set apart work pals from personal connections. We're not so sure. So far, you can't set privacy settings for an entire group, or limit how often its members appear in your news feed. What's the point?

Until last weekend when a fix quietly went into its code, Facebook was unintentionally publishing information about its users, Yahoo developer and scifi novelist Kent Brewster illustrates on his blog. Code monkeys should go there now. For those of you in a higher pay grade, here's the executive summary.

The millionaire Long Island couple who were found guilty yesterday on 12 counts of enslaving and abusing their Indonesian help had their mansion confiscated yesterday. One of their twentysomething daughters, a diabetic, fainted in court when the verdict was read aloud; her mother followed suit. From the Facebook page of the couple's oldest child, 23-year-old Parsons grad Pooja, it's hard to tell that anything other than questionable decorating and bad makeup was going on in that house. In 400 candid images, the four Sabhnani kids come off like less-mouthy and more-Indian versions of the Gotti boys. "OMG, i LOVE the gift!! thank you soooooooo much deedz!!!" writes one of Pooja's sisters, both of whom go to Pace, on her page. "Hey! Didn't see you today :( and now i'm working at Borders tonight yet again - so try to come over tomorrow or else i'll just see you next weekend!" is how a wall post from a friend goes. Who knew slave owners also tended toward abuse of the exclamation point? More pictures after the jump.

Facebook is looking for platform developers to test a payments system, an administrator announced on the Facebook Developers forum. Details are scant, but it's more likely than not built on the micropayments software Facebook developed for its virtual gifts. (Which, by the way, is a brilliant Trojan horse strategy: Charge people a token amount for something that costs you nothing, and get their credit-card numbers while you're at it.) The good news for the rest of us is that the new payment system might mean we'll see some Facebook apps that are meant to do something besides show us ads while we goof off.

Stalking isn't just for Facebook anymore. According to a recent Pew Internet report, 53 percent of adult Internet users use search engines to find out what family, friends, romantic interests, and business colleagues are up to. The shocking number? Only 9 percent say they stalked someone they are dating or in a relationship with. But then how'd they know what to say to each other on the first date? (Photo by Marxchivist)

Over the weekend, Google began trying out a new product called Google Profiles. The move seems prompted by jealousy over all the buzz Facebook is getting. And sure enough, Google may just have come up with something creepier than Facebook's Beacon.

"Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate "too many" friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure." A fact not mentioned in the story: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has 2,842 friends. [New York Times]

"Ted Stapleton is excited about his new cardigan" and Werther's advertises Murray Mints in this parody, "Pensionbook."

They know that Facebook's main purpose is violating their peers' privacy. Hence "Facebook Stalking," an original ditty by Straight No Chaser, an Indiana University a capella group. "Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg!" Remind me: When's the last time someone sang about how grateful they were to Bill Gates or Larry and Sergey?

OpenSocial, which we've always maintained is a surprisingly elegant PR scam, isn't due out until next year. Facebook continues to add 100 (still entirely useless) apps a day to its now purportedly open platform. So is there any point to Google's OpenSocial anymore? Sure there is. Just ask the guy whose career at Google depends on it.

It happened. The smarties at Facebook finally figured out how to take the "is" out of status updates. As if we could feel more lost and unmoored than we already do!

Here's an invite that certainly wasn't shared with me on Facebook: The social network is having its holiday party tomorrow evening at Bay Meadows. Bay Meadows? The San Mateo venue strikes me as about as far as you can get from the hot startup's still edgy self-image, defined by the commissioned graffiti on its walls. A racetrack clubhouse is where it's spending some of the $300 million it just raised from Microsoft and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing. Perhaps Facebook's employees are aging even faster than we thought.

Facebook engineer Charles Cheever tells Intern Memo that one of the "most interesting" aspects of interning for the social network is that "it's not unheard of for interns to be older than the full-timers they work with." So by "most interesting" Cheever must mean "soul-sucking," right?

The promised day arrives! Facebook no longer requires an "is" in its status updates, finally ceasing its assault on the English language. When, years from now, historians wonder why no great works of literature came from those born in 1981 to 1986, we'll know who to blame. But at least the damage is stops here and now.

Facebook Beacon touched a nerve when it started ruining people's Christmases. Sure, Zuckerberg has since apologized and Facebook changed Beacon to allow users to opt out entirely, but some users haven't forgotten. Like Dan Provost, an MFA student at Parsons in New York. He's claimed the domain FacebookBusinessSolutions.com. And he's created an insanely brilliant parody of Facebook Beacon. Check out the screenshots.

Facebook wasn't invited to the OpenSocial party. Now it's throwing its own. Facebook says it will allow other social networks to use the software behind its third-party developer platform as a model. "In fact, we'll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms," Ami Vora writes on its Facebook Developers blog. The big loser? Well, anyone who writes apps for social networks, pretty much by definition. But also, Google.

Developers write apps for Facebook not because it's a wonder of modern software, but because it lets them tap into Facebook's 60 million users. The result: a surfeit of zombie bites and Scrabble challenges, spread, in Valley parlance, "virally" from friend to friend on the social network. Last night, Facebook proved antiviral. A bug deleted all pending requests from friends to add an application. "Anyone else seeing that invitation acceptance numbers are down significantly over the past 7-8 hours?" one developer wrote in a Facebook forum. "Since about midnight PT, our signup numbers through requests/invites are about 40% lower than we'd normally expect." Facebook's response? An emoticon!

From the looks of things, pornographers are the only people who have really figured out how to advertise on Facebook. No worries, Inside Facebook's Justin Smith is on the case. He's written The Facebook Marketing Bible: 24 Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook. But, as you can tell from the title, conciseness is not Smith's strong point. Here are 100-word versions of its three sections.

The definitions of "facebook" submitted to Merriam-Webster are limited to logging in, viewing a profile, searching for a profile, and friending someone. But "facebook," as a word, is nearly as polymorphous as "smurf". We can think of several additional activities which the word describes far more accurately.

Advertisers have forgiven Facebook for Beacongate, Mediaweek reports. Despite the ill-thought-out introduction of Facebook's privacy-invading ads, they plan to keep their money flowing. Most even appreciate how with Beacon, Facebook tried something new and uproven. But more and more, readers are finding very proven methods of advertising all over Facebook. Sex sells, and despite rules against porn ads, Facebook's ad-review staff can't seem to keep up with the softcore stuff flooding the site. Frankly, we're disgusted amused. Here's the latest example. With apologies to Fark, we must note it's NSFW.