The progressive activists at MoveOn.org have launched a protest against the Facebook ads that tell your friends what you're buying online. Since the story broke on News.com, Facebook PR has responded. And MoveOn has responded in kind. Skip the canned statements and check out MoveOn's protest page on Facebook and bearing witness to the awkward situations users claim Facebook's ads have put them into.

Don't like what you see in your Facebook news feed? You can now vote on it. As we first reported two weeks ago, Facebook is letting users vote items up or down. The final interface, a choice of "thumbs-up" or "X" icons, differs from the "plus" and "minus" design Facebook had been testing internally. While a user's voting will initially just change what he sees in his own news feed, Facebook could easily turn the vote results into a Digg-like discussion board. The new thumb icon just makes the potential rivalrly more obvious. After the jump, a full example from my own news feed.

A code-savvy tipster tells us we had it right: The hated "is" in Facebook's status update is going away. This is according to a jargon-ridden post in Facebook's developers news feed. The post is a confirmation that the "is" will soon join "thefacebook.com," the Facebook guy and user privacy in Facebook's graveyard of cute inconveniences buried on its way to world domination.

Interfax China reports that Facebook is in negotiations to buy Chinese social network Tianwang.com. This comes after Facebook denied a Times of London report that it was in negotiations to buy Zhanzuo.com for $85 million, saying that the company was not in talks. In the latest article, Zhanzuo agrees — sort of. A spokesperson tells Interfax "we will not sell out and we have stopped talking with Facebook." Facebook denies acquisition talks were ever started. Maybe Facebook and its Chinese counterparts they were just sharing privacy best practices? In any event, we think all of these deal rumors off the mark. What we hear Facebook is really looking for in Asia is a strategic investor to complete its $500 million financing round — you know, the one for which Microsoft already chipped in $240 million. (Photo by ford)

Facebook got you down? Don't even think about targeting the Zuck for physical retribution. A source familiar with the matter tells Radar the Facebook CEO added new bodyguards to his entourage recently. "He's been getting lots of death threats of late," the source said.

Another puff piece about Google executive Marissa Mayer, this time in the November issue of C Magazine, a Santa Barbara-based lifestyle rag. The frighteningly robotic Mayer feigns humanity by naming her favorite products and services: LaBelle Day Spa in the Stanford Shopping Mall; Cafe 150, which just so happens to be a Google cafeteria; and her pastry partnership I Dream of Cake, which made her 32nd birthday cake, pictured above. Oh, and she's a fan of Facebook, calling the rival social networking site "a great way to find people." C editors apparently didn't bother to look up the definition of "random play".

Don't worry, you'll still be able to poke anyone you like, but soon Facebook will stop forcibly conjugating "to be" for you. Right now, Facebook's "status" feature automatically places an "is" in front of whatever you declare your status to be. For instance, "Aleksey Veyner is a douchebag."

LinkedIn will launch a developer program similar to Facebook's platform on December 10. According to the company's PR firm, the new program will allow "select" third-party developers to build "business applications for the Web." We're just glad that In the details that follow, the words "social graph" are nowhere to be seen.

Call Google's OpenSocial intiative a PR scam if you want. Executives from social network Plaxo don't care — because for them, it was a successful PR scam. Take a look at the chart they provided CNET. Since Google announced its "open" alternative to Facebook's developer platform and included Plaxo as a launch partner, growth at Pulse, Plaxo's social network/address book hybrid, took on hockey-stick dimensions.

Facebook has a status update tool which allows users to announce to the world what they're doing. It's similar to the status message on an IM account, or the answer to Twitter's "what are you doing?" question, but with one difference: The word "is" is automatically inserted between the user's name and the status message, grammar notwithstanding. AllFacebook reported and Epicenter noted that the "is" magically disappeared overnight, so users could go about writing statuses about how they "need to sleep" or "can't wait to go home for Thanksgiving" without worrying about proper verb usage. But this morning, the innocuous article has returned, raining strife and confusion down on the almost 100,000 members of the Remove the "is" from the Facebook status (Official Facebook Petition) group. So, what's the story? Is "is" or isn't "is" automatically added? According to Facebook PR, they "don't have anything new to report on the 'is' in the status message." We're stumped. What is going on?

Staten Island, home to that one thrift store we went to once, is sometimes called "the fifth borough." But not on popular social networking site "Facebook.com", which, according to the Richmond County Young Republicans Club, doesn't recognize the hellish fake-tanned monster island as a town or city.

Alan Burlison, a Facebook user in the U.K., tried to delete his Facebook account — and found that traces of his data remained on Facebook's servers, in apparent contradiction to British privacy laws. Alerted by Channel 4, a U.K. TV network, government officials promised to investigate. Facebook retains the data in part to make it easier for people to reactivate accounts after deleting them. (One can just imagine how the whims of emotionally fragile college students prompted this policy in the first place.) Sadly, this isn't the real privacy scandal to investigate. Why are no government officials looking into Facebook's big problem with internal privacy abuses by its own employees?

A Facebook spokesperson tells us the Times of London is full of it. Earlier today, the British newspaper reported that Facebook had purchased Chinese social network Zhanzuo.com for $85 million, but according to Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker, "No offer has been made and no acquisition of any company in China is being considered by Facebook." Funny thing is, the Times even goes so far to quote a spokeswoman in its story — but doesn't specify where she works. "We do not know who the spokeperson is that they are referring to in the Times story and were never contacted by the paper to confirm the accuracy of this story," says Barker. So how did this rumor start, and who's this mysterious spokesperson? No answer yet, but we'll let you know what we hear.

Tonight, Facebook-app developers invade enemy territory in Mountain View. Or Google tries to seduce developers over to the dark side, take your pick. For more detail, check today's Valleywag Calendar.

Over the weekend, Google admitted it used private information about Facebook users to target advertising, AllFacebook reports. Google sells advertising to Facebook application developers, which Facebook permits. Google's mistake was "allowing" these developers to redirect information from user profiles through Google's AdSense system in order to serve relevant advertising. That's a violation of Facebook's terms of service. The irony?

Facebook has purchased Chinese social network Zhanzuo.com for $85 million, according to reports. Facebook has yet to confirm the news, though an unnamed PR flack told the Times of London that Zhanzuo's chief executive Jack Zhang and Mark Zuckerberg know each other and that official news should be expected by the end of the month. Zhanzuo.com has 7 million active members and is reportedly popular among students. Meanwhile, now we have at least one theory why Facebook feels comfortable allowing employers to spy on their employees' private profiles. Facebook could just be preparing to operate in the People's Republic of China, where your privacy really is an illusion. Update: Facebook denies the report.

Facebook might not have much of a choice as to whether or not it wants to participate in Google's OpenSocial initiative. Who's Mark Zuckberg got to blame for getting dragged to a party he was never invited to? Developer Dan Lester who's built a new Facebook app in beta called OpenSocket. It's not that great: He's got a long list of limitations on a post to announce the beta. But it looks like apps written to Google's standard will find a way onto Facebook. Which means what, exactly? You can throw a sheep on Facebook and have it land on MySpace?

Last month we told you that Facebook employees can see your profile even if it is private. Now we hear that they are willing to share your private profile with your boss. All he has to do is ask. A poster on the AR-15 Forums, a firearms-enthusiast website, says her bosses asked Facebook for permission to see her profile — which is normally set to private for everyone but her friends — through something called Administrators Access. (That may be the same internal feature, also known as "super," we wrote about earlier.)

Academics Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison published a paper titled "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship." Onekey point they make is that Facebook is only the latest in a long line of social networks stretching back 10 years. Which means we only have another 90 years to go before the next media revolution. After the jump, Boyd and Ellison's timeline.

Quietly useful social network LinkedIn outgrew Facebook from October 2006 to October 2007, according to numbers from Nielsen/NetRatings. In that year, Facebook grew 125 percent to LinkedIn's 189 percent. Too bad LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye, who's been hinting at an eventual IPO, can't come close to matching Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Steve Jobs impersonations. Proclaiming your company will change media for the next 100 years will get you laughed at on Valleywag. Laughed at all the way to a $15 billion valuation.