"Hey, people are talking about that terrible, morally reprehensible thing you wrote about Neal Pollack's four-year-old in their Facebook status updates," I told Josh last Friday. "Wow, cultural relevance!" he said. "Yes, that is how we're measuring that these days," I told him. It was funny (or not) because it's kind of true! The person who'd updated her status to defend Pollack—"[Person] is wondering why it's acceptable to pick on small children on gossip websites"—later changed her status to "[Person] is going to write more 'blind item' status updates so more people will post on her wall," and we can see why—she netted 6 new friends from the whole deal! So that's one kind of Facebook status update: The blind item. What are the other kinds?

In 2005 Facebook bought the Facebook.com domain name for $200,000. Now, Facebook has gotten ahold of Face-book.com via a ruling from the World Intellectual Property Organization. So, how much did it cost them this time? Aside from its own lawyers fees, just $1,500 to the WIPO dispute resolution service. [The Register]

"Not so well-kept secret in the Valley is that Google is freaking out because a lot of its folks are vesting soon and these greedy, restless bastards are looking for the next Big Score and right now that's looking like Facebook. So lots of Google talent is going to be streaming out the door to Facebook and all the free bus rides in the world aren't going to keep them locked in." — Forbes editor Dan Lyons, posing as Apple CEO Steve Jobs. [The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs]

In recent Harvard graduates Greg Atwan and Evan Lushing's The Facebook Book, a chronicle of "the Facebook Generation" which sold last week to Abrams for around $50K, there should be an entire chapter about Harvard couple Daniel Hass and his lucky girlfriend Aleksandra Kuczmarska. Except there shouldn't be, because that book should not exist. Anyway, Daniel, like Modern Bride of the Year Heather Warnken before him, thinks the Internet should pay for his romantic fantasies.

According to Mike Lazerow, the founder of Buddy Media, creator of Facebook application AceBucks, his company's virtual-currency service is just misunderstood. The "boo birds" just don't get it. Lazerow & Co. aren't competing with PayPal, Facebook's own rumored micropayment system, Beenz, or Flooz. Acebucks is not a payment processor and its not an online currency that translates into real goods or real money. So what the hell is it? It's a "loyalty program." In other words, it's a frequent-flier program — without the free plane trips, though. Remind us why Peter Thiel, Mark Pincus, Howard Lindzon, and other net bigwigs invested $1.5 million in this company?

Tech satire is all the rage. Forbes editor Dan Lyons parlayed Fake Steve Jobs into the book Options. Now two Harvard grads, Greg Atwan and Evan Lushing, have received "in the range" of $50,000 to lampoon everyone's favorite social network in The Facebook Book, to be published next spring. [The New York Observer]

Last week we posted that an eBay auction had set the value of Facebook applications at around $2,000. With another application having been successfully auctioned, the valuation has soared. I Am Hungry, an application that allows users to express their need for food and find other friends with grumbling tummies, fetched $20,100! While I Am Hungry boasts more than 250,000 users, compared to the paltry 134 users of Logbook, it still hasn't cracked the top-100 list of applications. It also happens to be a stupid application. And it drew, predictably, equally stupid bidders.

The Mirror columnist Richard Hammond on having a Facebook account: "As far as I can tell it's a sort of cyber-exercise in filing and admin. It must be a colossal pain in the backside to have to run one of these things." That might be the best analysis of Facebook we've ever seen. [The Mirror]

100,000 people have joined a Facebook group to support the monk-led protests against Myanmar's junta. Sadly, the government has disconnected the country's Internet connections so we doubt they're providing much in the way of moral support. [IHT]

Why should Microsoft invest $300 million or more in Facebook? Apparently because Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, spotted in the Seattle area earlier this week, is nicer than Bill Gates. And nice people deserve money! That's Fortune writer David Kirkpatrick's theory, anyway. [Fortune]

Britain's Telegraph thinks members of the French government should be concerned, ashamed, and appalled by their children's Facebook profiles. Prime minister François Fillon's son belongs to groups focused on the morphology of merde, as they say, and drinking excessively. Kids these days! He also appears in ill health with two women! The horror! President Sarkozy's daughter Jeanne-Marie has the sheer, unmitigated gall — or Gaul? — to be friends with her mother's ex-lover. And Nicolas Barnier, the son of the environment minister, poses with "erotic drawings" and firearms. I'm shocked. Rather than the stodgy Brits being appalled on behalf of the French, maybe these French politicians are too busy to care about children behaving like children on a childish website. Or maybe they just recognize that crap, drinking, women, sex and guns are nothing to be embarrassed about.

Widget-maker RockYou may be willing to spend millions on Facebook applications, but bidders at eBay are a little more discerning. Michael Zhang was first to auction a Facebook application on eBay, and the bidding on his Logbook app closed yesterday. Logbook documents movies, music, and books and ties into Amazon's affiliate-marketing program as a source of revenue. It's less popular and viral than spraypainting your friends' walls — on the other hand, there is the potential for actual revenues — an unusual feature for Facebook's hangers-on. So how much was the winning bid for Logbook?

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Could it be that Sky Dayton is feeling a little lonely? EarthLink, the company he founded, refused to participate in the latest round of financing for Helio, the upstart wireless carrier he now heads. In a keynote speech at Technology Review's EmTech conference, he touted his company's service not as, say, letting you make calls and surf the Web, but "connecting you to your community of friends." So it's a social network! Ah, but a social network that requires buying a phone (as much as $295) and signing up for service ($85 to $90 a month, on average). No wonder Dayton's ersatz social network, cleverly disguised as a cell-phone company, only counts 140,000 users, and is losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Somehow I don't think Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sweating over this one.

"Um, hey, this is really awkward, but I actually only accept friend requests from other Muslims. Allah commands it. Sorry, man." That's Slate's recommended way of deflecting unwanted friend requests on social networking site Facebook. Nice, except if you're a Muslim! More advice: "What about work colleagues whom you don't want in your personal business? There is no easy answer to this. Basically, you're screwed." Seriously. Related: people, I do not want to be a fucking pirate or vampire or your "tickle friend" OK? [Slate]

The way people talk publicly about Facebook's application platform, you'd think Jesus used it to invite his apostles to the Last Supper. But some industry insiders quietly say they're not at all impressed with the applications people have developed. "None of the most popular apps actually do anything," a high-ranking Yahoo developer recently told Valleywag. It's hard to disagree: "Top Friends"? "Food Fight"? But Facebook's cornucopia of uselessness may gain some measure of utility on Friday. Friendvox, a new Facebook instant-messaging tool, is going into beta then, according to Blognation UK. It turns your roster of friends, instantly, into a buddy list, and lets you exchange messages without the tedious back-and-forth of Facebook's built-in email system. It's a great idea — so great that we're sure that Facebook will, in short order, steal this idea for itself and build IM functions into the site.

Facebook has overtaken MySpace in the United Kingdom, a media stronghold for the latter's parent company, News Corp. As one might write on Rupert Murdoch's Facebook wall, OMG embarrassing!!! [Mashable]

Facebook's platform has captured the hearts of Valley developers and the wallets of Sand Hill moneymen, but still has yet to prove it can make a buck. The question, five months after the Facebook frenzy began, is how much is a Facebook application worth? For an answer, let's turn to widget powerhouse RockYou, the startup known to users for its horoscope application and to backers for an intellectual property scandal which almost cost backer Sequoia Capital its investment. Here's what they thought one high-profile app was worth.

Investors in Parakey, a hot startup founded by Firefox creators Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, were paid in cash, not shares, when Facebook bought the company. While they doubled their money in the $4 million sale, the cash payout means they were shut out of Facebook's future growth, which has left some of them quietly grumbling. [TechCrunch]

"lame you took my song dedication off ;" — the urgent message Facebook spokesprofile Brandee Barker left for CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook profile, at 1:16 in the morning Monday, shortly before kicking off a week filled with Facebook news and rumors. [Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook profile]

New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo has written an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, calling on him to increase policing of sexual predators on the site. From all appearances, though, the police who performed an undercover sting operation on Facebook need a refresher course on the site's privacy tools, which allow users to refuse messages from strangers and report abusive users. [Internetnews.com]