When Peter Chapman was arrested in October of 2009 for the kidnapping, rape and murder of seventeen year-old Ashleigh Hall, traditional print and online media were there to point the finger at Facebook and other social networks, slathering a huge serving of blame across Facebook in particular and social networking in general. When the thirty-two year-old was convicted this week of those crimes, the media again sprang into action.

One of the changes we DIDN'T like with Facebook's February redesign last month included the removal of the feature where you could create your own custom Live Feed lists of updates from your favorite Facebook applications and games. For Facebook users who use a great deal of applications and rely on keeping up-to-date, particularly users who do a lot of social gaming, it was a feature that was sorely missed.

Fortunately, you can still create a customized feed of any application you like on Facebook using a little bit of trickery and some good old copy-and-paste.

The general reaction to the news this week that Facebook has been awarded a patent for their “News Feed” technology can’t actually be printed here for reasons of decency. Let’s just say it’s a four-letter word that sounds a lot like “Fuuuudge.” Except it’s not fudge. It’s not fudge at all.

Facebook users can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. Effective March 1st, 2010, Facebook has terminated notifications sent by applications, providing your notifications feed with some much-needed relief from serial spammers. But is disabling Application Notifications really enough to quell the growing concerns of Facebook users that Facebook cares more about applications than users?

With facebook growing to hundreds of millions of users and, if they have their way, they will get 1 billion users and maybe more. With such a large population on the social network, we are certain to get a percentage of bad attitudes, bad behaviour, 'bad apples' and even criminals.

Quite possibly the most common complaint among Facebook users is the huge amount of useless information that ends up in our News Feeds from applications – specifically from “spammy” games like Farmville that gain new users primarily by sending notifications out to friends walls. It’s a big enough problem that many users have left Facebook, seeking less intrusive social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter.

Yesterday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, facebook revealed their very aggressive mobile strategy to the world.

Here a couple of highlights:

Facebook has redesigned their homepage - AGAIN. In case you aren't keeping track, that officially means that Facebook's homepage gets a redesign more often than Barbara Walters' face, which is actually scarily often.

To those who've claimed that Facebook is single-mindedly geared toward turning a profit and nothing else - Facebook just served up a big helping of "sorry, you're wrong" when they announced today that they're releasing the PHP transformer they've been working on for months as open-source. It's called "Hip Hop for PHP" and it should prove fairly useful for a small group of dedicated PHP developers who've traditionally had a lot of trouble making PHP applications scalable.