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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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Developed and powered by Vitrue, the new page puts the App Store inside Facebook — making it easy to search for apps, share them with friends, find out which apps are hot right now and which are deemed “essential” by the iTunes editors.