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This past July, Facebook's excellent iPhone application joined similar apps for BlackBerry and Palm to bring core Facebook features to mobile socializers in a distinctive Facebook wrapper. Curiously, there's no official software for the Windows Mobile platform, and no word that a program is in the works. In fact, Facebook has kept mum to my inquiries, and Microsoft's Windows Mobile team responded with evasive PR nonsense.

That doesn't mean social butterflies of the Windows Mobile breed are left in a lurch. Two software companies have stepped up to bring their own freeware versions of Facebook to … Read more

Benjamin Ling, the former Googler who was hired by Facebook last year and sparked a barrage of blog speculation about Google employees moving on to the next cool company, may be going back to Mountain View. Earlier this week, Facebook confirmed that he was indeed leaving the company.

Valleywag reported on Thursday that Ling had been spotted at the Googleplex, and the Gossip Girl-ish nature of that post was backed up by a report from Kara Swisher that she'd heard he'd be returning to Google to work on YouTube. More specifically, he was re-hired to help monetize the … Read more

A class action lawsuit filed earlier this week targets Facebook and eight of the participants in Beacon, its ill-fated advertising product that shared information about third-party site activity with the social network. The set of 20 plaintiffs, mostly residents of Texas, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday. Named as defendants are Facebook, as well as current or former Beacon participants Blockbuster, Fandango (owned by Comcast), Overstock.com, STA Travel, Zappos, Hotwire (owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp), and GameFly.

A Facebook representative told CNET News on Thursday that the company had … Read more

ServiceNation, a relatively new nonprofit that hopes to engage more Americans in volunteer and service work, has earned the seal of approval from Facebook.

The social network will provide the organization with advertising deals, technical help, and support for ServiceNation campaigns on Facebook. In return, ServiceNation has selected Facebook as a primary tool for online organization and communication.

The nonprofit was kick-started earlier this year by four existing organizations: City Year, Be the Change, Civic Enterprises, and Points Of Light. Its inaugural "summit" is set for September 11 and 12 in New York with a keynote by California … Read more

There's been another victory on the water for ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss--even as their court case against Facebook continues to peter out unfavorably.

The identical twins, representing the United States in the men's pair (M2-) event of the Olympic rowing races in Beijing, placed second in their Wednesday semifinal to advance to the grand final.

At the 500-meter mark, a quarter of the way through the race, the Winklevosses were in fifth place out of the six boats. But they powered through crews from Germany, Serbia, and Italy to cross the finish line just less than … Read more

You can now filter the items in your Facebook News Feed depending on what you're hoping to check out, thanks to a cool new drop-down menu. Previously, you could sort the list by a few Facebook mainstays: status updates, photo-related updates, and "posted items."

The filter additions, originally reported late last night by TechCrunch, are events, groups, fan pages, several applications that differ by the member (my filter offers me the option to search by the "Bumper Sticker" application, which I have never installed but which I guess a fair number of people on my … Read more

Benjamin Ling, who was recruited from Google to lead Facebook's developer platform product marketing team, plans to leave his job at the social-networking site, the fourth key executive to depart in recent months.

Ling's departure, which was reported by VentureBeat's Eric Eldon and BoomTown's Kara Swisher, was confirmed by Facebook in a statement Tuesday.

At the Graphing Social Patterns: East conference in June, Ling confirmed that Facebook would be launching a widely rumored payment system for application developers, but declined to provide a time frame at the conference. Before joining Facebook last fall, Ling was the … Read more

As twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss power toward Wednesday's semifinal in the rowing events of the Olympics in Beijing, their longstanding court case against Facebook is winding down.

A San Jose, Calif., judge ruled late last week that ConnectU, the start-up that the brothers founded with Harvard classmate Divya Narendra, must transfer its stock to Facebook as part of the settlement acquisition by Tuesday, despite the claims on behalf of ConnectU that Facebook failed to disclose its true valuation when negotiating the terms of the settlement. The start-up's founders alleged fraud on Facebook's part, and claimed that … Read more

ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss pulled through in a repechage (second-chance heat) on Monday on the Olympic rowing course in Beijing, where they're representing the United States in the men's pair event.

The identical twins, best-known in the tech world for being two-thirds of the Harvard-founded start-up that foisted an intellectual-property suit upon Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, had failed to immediately qualify for the semifinals in their Saturday heat. They'd placed fifth and needed a third-place finish to qualify. But the repechage offered another chance for them to earn a shot at the semifinals, which take … Read more