Want to be informed when someone updates their profile, or adds a photo, or does anything on Facebook? Well, soon you, and all the Facebook stalkers out there, will be able to do so with a new button called “Subscribe”. As you can see on the image above, it offers users to be pinged when ever those they subscribe to do something on Facebook. What do you think? Useful, or plain “Stalker button”?

Popularity: 1% [?]

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has filed lawsuits against Google, Apple and Facebook via his company Interval Licensing LLC, which holds a number of patents related to the web. The patents in question (via Mashable):

• United States Patent No. 6,263,507 issued for an invention entitled “Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data.”
• United States Patent No. 6,034,652 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
• United States Patent No. 6,788,314 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
• United States Patent No. 6,757,682 issued for an invention entitled “Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.”

As you can see, they’re pretty vague and Allen can pretty much sue every tech company and website out there.

UPDATE: It turns out that Paul Allen has sued quite a few companies besides Apple, Google and Facebook. The list now includes: AOL, , ebay, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube.

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According to a new rumor, Facebook is looking to use CPUs based on the ARM architecture, rather than the usual Intel and AMD x86 based processors.

The advantage of using ARM CPUs is that they’re a lot more power efficient, however, they’re a lot less powerful in terms of computational power, so it’ll be interesting to see what Facebook does — if it does anything — with the ARM CPUs. Facebook is currently constructing a nw

Popularity: 4% [?]

Location based stuff is very in these days, with Foursquare and a few other services making a name for themselves. Now Facebook has launched their own service, called Facebook Places. It basically works like other location services, where you can add your location, tag friends in locations and so on. Naturally, this brings more privacy concerns, and Facebook has already added privacy options for the new service.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Facebook has acquire small startup Chai Labs, which offers people and companies to make simple, search friendly websites. The acquisition price is rumored at $10 million.

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According to eMarketer, ad sales on Facebook will reach a massive $1.3 billion dollars this year, compared to “just” $665 million in 2009. EMarketer also reports that Facebook rival MySpace’s ad sales will decline this year from $400 million in 2009 to $347 million.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Facebook has acquired several social networking patents — 18 to be exact — for over $40 million. The patents cover everything from friends, friends lists, news feed etc. One can speculate that Facebook acquired the patents in order to protect itself against lawsuits, and the company will most likely acquire more patents in the future.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Well, actually it’s $99 million: The Spanish Facebook clone Tuenti has sold to Spanish telecom giant Telefonica for $99 million. However, Telefonica managed only to acquire a 90% stake, with the remaining 10% still split among the founders. Tuenti was launched a few years ago and has raised just over $1 million in funding so far.

Popularity: 7% [?]