Apps, Social Networking | featured news

“OMG! A big Zynga group hug to OMGPOP, talented creators of Draw Something,” tweeted social games titan Zynga Wednesday. Apparently, in this universe, a “big Zynga group hug” translates to $180 million, the price that All Things D claims Zynga paid to acquire the makers of the most popular mobile Facebook app.

One of the big, enduring questions of the technology world: “When will iPad users get their very own Facebook app?” The answer is —now. Facebook is releasing an updated version of its iPhone application on Monday afternoon, one that’s also designed to fill out the larger screen of the iPad. Like the previous iPhone version, it’s free.

Users and privacy advocates have expressed concerns about Facebook’s planned redesign, the way the change will affect third-party apps and the network’s general approach to privacy. Third-party apps will be fully integrated into a user’s profile page, with updates about activity on each app. That means that users won’t actively click to share updates from apps — the apps will add that information to a user’s page automatically.

A boom in apps has fed longstanding tensions between Twitter and the developers over whether they are partners or competitors.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the social network has plans to “launch something awesome” next week. There’s no official word on what will be announced, but we suspect it’s going to be the new iPhone photo-sharing service that we saw just last week.

Social gaming company RockYou has named Chief Operating Officer Lisa Marino as its new CEO. as the company seeks to get on track after a rocky transition from other businesses.

What if you could see the cellphone photos taken by everyone within 150 feet of you? Would you be hesitant about potentially seeing yourself captured in one of those photos or would you be smiling as your inner voyeur jumps in joy?

Citizens of the cyberworld breathed a collective sigh of relief Thursday, when Facebook banned a new app that notifies you of relationship status updates for others -- an app widely described as a cyberstalking tool.

This is a historic moment for social games. “FarmVille,” the hit Facebook game among all hit Facebook games, is no longer the top app on the social network. For the first time since claiming the top spot more than a year ago in August 2009, FarmVille has fallen to second place in terms of monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData.com. Coming in at no. 1 now is the app “Phrases.”

A Facebook engineer said that some applications were passing along personal data in a violation of policy.