Facebook App | featured news

Last spring, the future for Viddy, a video-sharing Facebook app, seemed as sunny as southern California's skies. Based a block away from Venice Beach, the 30-person startup impressed prospective investors with skyrocketing user growth figures and won funding from them at a $370 million valuation. The tech press hailed it as the "Instagram for video," potentially ripe for a billion-dollar-plus buyout. Justin Bieber wanted to invest — and the pop star eventually did just that.

Airtime, Sean Parker's new social video chatting service for Facebook, launched today with an event that totally unraveled into a complete fiasco. But what might rankle more than a rocky launch is the revelation Airtime will take “snapshots of users periodically to ensure site safety,” according to an Airtime spokesperson quoted in Forbes.

The new app is similar to Instagram, the photo-sharing app Facebook is in the process of buying for $1 billion. The acquisition, however, has not yet been completed, and Instagram's employees did not work on the Facebook app. Facebook has said it expects the Instagram app to close sometime this year.

Facebook took another step toward its goal of being a platform for developers Wednesday, by announcing that it will launch its own App Center, a single location for the platform’s many applications. The company also announced that it will begin supporting paid apps, a program that it is offering to developers in a beta test. (Right now, developers can have in-app payments on the network, but all applications have been free to access.)

“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.

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.

Two versions of Pac-Man are now available n Facebook free of charge, compete with your friends' high scores in the Pac-Man Facebook games.

U.S. student Devin Valencia, the first member of her family to graduate from college, hopes others will do the same with her prizewinning idea for a Facebook application for finding financial aid.

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.

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.