Since the launch of Apple’s music-based social network yesterday, Cupertino has had some problems with Facebook and vice-versa. The New York Times is reporting that the two have become “frenemies“, since the two could not reach an agreement with Ping being based on services on top of Facebook.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs called the deal’s stipulations “onerous”, and that Apple’s original idea was to build Ping off of Facebook. But that deal, obviously, did not work out, and we now have Ping. However, Apple still left some connectivity to Facebook, so you could add your Facebook friends to Ping.

But once the service went live, Facebook pulled the plug on Ping’s API. Sources for NY Times said that that the Apple service, which is included inside iTunes 10, had the “potential to send so much traffic Facebook’s way and cause ‘site stability’ and ‘infrastructure’ problems”.

“We’re working with Apple to resolve this issue. We’ve worked together successfully in the past, and we look forward to doing so in the future,” Facebook said in a statement. The social network did not specifically say what the “issue” was.

Throughout the disagreements, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has created his own account on Apple’s social network. He is connected to another Facebook exec, Bret Taylor, and is the only “Mark Zuckerberg” account to be connected to another Facebook executive. So the likelihood of the account actually belonging to Zuck is high.

Apple, of course, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with Bill Gates, has filed suit against 12 major corporations over technology he claims to have patented.

The companies: Google, Facebook, eBay, Apple, Yahoo Inc., AOL Inc., Netflix, Office Depot Inc., OfficeMax Inc., Staples Inc. and YouTube, a subsidiary of Google.

All four patents are for technology innovated more than 10 years ago by a software company that Allen owned. Interval Research Corp was financed for about $100 million by Allen during the Dot Com bubble, and was shut down soon after.

The second patent,which allows a website to offer suggestions related to items that the user is viewing, is a feature on Amazon, but Amazon has not been listed. (Maybe for being Seattle-based?) Microsoft, the company that Allen co-founded with Bill Gates, is also missing from the list of companies being filed upon.

The other patents are for technology that enables ads and stock quotes (among other things) to flash on screen, and provides links of related news stories for readers who are viewing a topic.

No doubt that the reason Allen and his firm, Interval Licensing LLC, are suing is from the success of NTP Inc, who won the suits it had with Apple, BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion Ltd, and Microsoft in 2006.

One result was RIM settling out of court with NTP at the price of $612.5 million. So maybe Allen has a chance?

There are just some people who Facebook suggests through the People You May Know tool that you really don’t even want to think about, but if Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is one of them: too bad. You can block whoever you want, but not if it’s Zuckerberg.

The website BlockZuck.com used to tell users how to block the Facebook Chief Executive Officer, but the website has now been updated to reflect the new error message that users receive after trying to block Zuckerberg.

The error message? “General Block failed error: Block failed.”

You would think that with all of the privacy concerns over Facebook, that the social media company wouldn’t allow one single account to access all of the website’s 500 million user profiles. But they do.

Regardless if Zuckerberg is the boss or not, he shouldn’t have access. What do you guys think? Is this a big deal, or is it not? Go ahead and give us your opinions in the comments!

Facebook has finally launched its “check-in” service, called Places, that will allow its users to share their location with other people. The service has been in development for quite some time, as it was a well-known secret that the social networking giant had been working on a direct competitor to Foursquare.

Places is aimed to help Facebook users find the whereabouts of their friends and to disclose the location of themselves. Places is not developed from scratch, however, it includes tools developed by Foursquare and another geolocation site, Gowalla.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes that Places will bring in additional advertising revenue from his site’s 500 million users. Borrell Associates indicate that Facebook could earn as much as $4.1 billion in annual ad revenue by the middle of the decade. Zuckerberg also noted, at the Places launch party, that his company could produce an advertising component for the geolocation service.

Services that help Web users share their whereabouts and find nearby friends could generate as much as $4.1 billion in annual ad sales by 2015, according to Borrell Associates. The features can help marketers more easily target customers — say, by reaching shoppers when they’re close to making a purchase. In the future, Facebook may include an advertising component to Places, Zuckerberg said at an event in Palo Alto, California.

Services like Foursquare and Gowalla aren’t out of the clear, however, as Places “lessens the need” for users to depend on alternatives. “Facebook’s entry doesn’t mean the immediate death of other location-based services,” Michael Gartenberg, an analyst for the Altimeter Group, said. “It will, however, put much more pressure on them to evolve.”

The service is, currently, only available in the US and on a mobile device. iPhone users will be able to use the “check-in” service on the new Facebook app expected Thursday, and other smartphone users will be able to access Places through the touch.facebook.com website.

The rollout begins immediately.

Facebook is about to finally receive the geolocation “check-in” feature that the social networking empire has been developing for some time now. Sources tell CNET that the service is slated to debut within weeks.

Those sources have also said that Facebook has partnered with Localeze, the company that works with Twitter on its “Places” service. The company allows Twitter users to mark their tweets with their current location. (For example, if I tweeted from my apartment, the location under the tweet would read “from Longview, TX”)

“We cannot comment on any future deals, however can say that we anticipate having a few significant social announcements in the coming weeks/month,” a Localeze spokesperson told CNET via e-mail.

Facebook isn’t saying much about the new service either. “We are working on location features and product integrations, which we’ll be launching in the coming months, and we’ll share more details when appropriate,”  Larry Yu, a spokesperson for Facebook, told the news website.

All that is known is that the geolocation service will take form within an application programming interface (API) for third-party companies to take advantage of on the Facebook developer platform. This will allow, and integrate, other “check-in” start-ups, like Miso for instance, into the largest social-networking service.

Facebook currently has over 500 million daily active users.

Facebook launched a new service called Facebook Live, which allows users to access a live video stream of the Facebook office. In a statement, the social media company said that it will use the new service to be a “window” for users to check out upcoming features, events that Facebook will be participating in, and occasionally celebrity guests.

The application takes a few ideas from other popular video-streaming services, like Ustream and Stickam, with integrated chat that is intertwined with the News Feed. The video stream will be embeddable as well.

The new application is partnered with Livestream, which I’m sure we will see a lot more of due to the partnership. It will be interesting to see how long Facebook sticks with its video channel, and if the service is meant to be something more than just a Public Relations move.

[via ithinkdifferent]

Google has been making an effort to enter the social-network scene with its service rumored to be called Google Me. In response, VentureBeat reports that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has put Facebook’s HQ on “lockdown” for the next sixty days.

The Facebook HQ will be open and unlocked on weekends, so that staff will have a chance to revamp the website’s Events, Photos, and Groups features. Rumor has it that Zuckerberg even has a neon sign that says “Lockdown” hanging on his office door.

Facebook employees are familiar to the term “lockdown”, according to David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect. He wrote that in the early days of Facebook, Zuckerberg would repeatedly slam his fist on the desk when an employee would try to leave the HQ. Zuckerberg would shout: “No! We’re in lockdown! No one leaves the table until we’re done with this thing.”

Google Me is a rumored Google-developed social-networking service that has been partnering with Zynga and other social gaming developers. Not much is really known, but obviously Facebook is taking the initiative.

Facebook would not comment on the rumors.

It is a little early to be talking about milestones for Windows Phone 7 devices, but there are already over 3,000 devices across the world. Microsoft has already planned to give all 900,000 of its employees a free device, and must have been feeling generous when it decided to pass on its devices to persons who Long Zheng describes as “developers, Microsofties and a handful of U.S. journalists”.

Zheng, who writes the blog istartedsomething.com,  discovered the numbers when he uncovered a Facebook application that was made to connect Windows Phone 7 devices to the popular social-networking website.

According to sources close with The Wall Street Journal, Google is currently in talks with several developers of popular online games to create a “broader” social-networking website that could compete with Facebook. Google recently took stake in Zynga Game Network Inc., one of the developers that is negotiating with.

It is uncertain when Google plans to launch the gaming offering, and the plans are not finalized, but sources close say that the games and its developers will have something to do with a social-networking project that the Mountain View, California company is working on.

Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt declined to comment, or confirm, the development of a new social-networking service or the social games that it would include, rumored to be called “Google Me”. “The world doesn’t need a copy of the same thing,” Schmidt said when asked if the new Google service would be anything like Facebook.

A spokesperson for Facebook said that the social-networking company wouldn’t comment or speculate on Google’s new venture, but said that Facebook has expected new efforts in the social-networking scene, and “looks forward” to the competition.

Facebook announced, on Wednesday, that the social networking website now has over half a billion users accessing the website. 500 million worldwide users is a lot of traffic and activity for any website. Facebook hit 400 million active users in February, and has also noted that reaching one billion active users is inevitable.

Alongside this announcement, Facebook is also launching Facebook Stories, where users can write up their experiences using the social networking website. Some of the stories include:

• Ben Saylor, a 17-year-old high school student, who turned to Facebook to organize a community effort to rebuild the Pioneer Playhouse, the oldest outdoor theater in Kentucky, after it was damaged by floods in May.
• Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who, during his time in office, would go jogging with 100 of his fans from Facebook.
• Holly Rose, a mother in Phoenix, who credits a friend’s status message telling women to check for breast cancer with her being diagnosed in time to treat the disease. She used Facebook for support during treatment and became a prevention advocate herself.

Facebook was created in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and his friends. Membership was exclusively for Harvard students, and the site gradually opened for other Ivy League schools, with the site eventually opening up for high schools and then anyone over the age of 13 in 2006.