The Financial Times is reporting that “a British businessman has been awarded £22,000 ($44,000) in damages from a Cformer school friend who created a fake profile of him on the website.” The defendant had been sued by Mathew Firsht, the victim of a libelous act. According to the Financial Times, a group had been created called “Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?” in addition to a profile which contained “false claims about his sexuality, religion and political views.”

Creating false profiles of other people on Facebook has been a normal thing since the launch of the site four years ago. Users may want to think twice from now on since doing so could result in a pretty large fine. In this case it appears that the victim actually knew the defendant prior to the case being filed. In fact they were actually friends at one point. For those that are unaware of the people creating the profiles, having the identity of an offender revealed would require a court order.

Last year there was an entertaining video posted on College Humor about the creation of fake profiles resulting in a war between friends. While this is a joke video, fake profiles on Facebook are routine but this new suit sets the ground for future lawsuits. We could soon see libel cases sweeping through courts as users try to protect their own online identities.

Yesterday Brad Stone reported that Hasbro has filed a lawsuit against Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla, the developers behind the popular Scrabulous application. Just last week the company launched the legitimate version of Scrabble on Facebook. The application has attracted over 8,000 active daily users so far but it will be a long road before the application is competing directly with Scrabulous.

Hasbro stated, “We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property, and we are pursuing this legal action in accordance with the interests of our shareholders, and the integrity of the Scrabble brand.” Does this mean we will soon see the end of Scrabulous? Probably not anytime soon. Back in January there were reports that Hasbro was already suing Scrabulous but no agreement was reached and it became unclear whether or not anything was going to happen.

By last week the company launched the official version of the application and there was no signs of an ongoing dispute between the Scrabulous application developers and Facebook. It appears that with Hasbro realizing how challenging it will be to beat Scrabulous directly so rather than just try to compete in the open market, Scrabulous is going to try and use the law for protection. While it’s not necessarily a bad strategy, it is unclear why Hasbro has waited so long to file a suit.

I’m sure we will be hearing more about this over the coming weeks. For now, Scrabulous is still up and running. We will have to see if it is going to stay that way.

Yesterday Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Connect and with it the opportunity for sites around the web to easily integrate into the largest “social graph” on the web. The pre-f8 hype along with MySpace’s Data Availability initiative and Google’s Friend Connect program ended up muting much of the buzz that was intended for Facebook Connect. Whether or not it was buzzed about, Facebook Connect could have a substantial impact on the future of the web as Om Malik points out.

I agree with Om and I think that Facebook Connect could truly be game changing. As many industry thought leaders were saying last night at f8, Facebook Connect is the alternative to OpenID.

Read more on the Social Times.

How valuable is that little search box at the top of Facebook? Microsoft definitely thinks it’s worth a lot and has now entered a partnership with Facebook to provide search according to Searchengineland.com. The partnership will bring Microsoft Live search results to the Facebook site. Two days ago I was talking to a fellow f8 attendee about the potential for search on the Facebook site. We were discussing what most people are searching for on Facebook. Are users just searching for people or are they searching for brands and other keywords?

Based on this new Microsoft search agreement, in which few details have been revealed, it is clear that Facebook and Microsoft realize the real potential with search on the site and given their enormous traffic there is a good chance that Facebook could become a search force to be reckoned with. Currently search is the most profitable technology on the web and it’s an area that Google has continued to dominate. Microsoft is the third largest search provider on the web and this partnership with Facebook could give Microsoft a substantial boost.

When Mark Zuckerberg spoke at the post-keynote press event yesterday he emphasized that he is still not focused on monetization. Instead, it is critical for the company to continue to build out the mission of Facebook: “Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” In the process of making the world more open and connected it is assumed that a revolutionary and previously unknown monetization model will reveal itself.

Honestly, it’s the same strategy that Google used and soon enough they became the most profitable internet company in the world. Whether or not the monetization problem is solved, it looks like Facebook will have at least one more revenue source for the time being. Based on the history of the Google-MySpace agreement, there’s a good chance that this search agreement will turn out the same way.

Today’s f8 was one marked by hype, speculation and confirmation of news which had been written about for the past few weeks. Just over one year ago Facebook announced their platform and today they announced that they are extending it to the web. Last year there weren’t as many attendees at f8 and there wasn’t a mini-industry of companies vying for attendees’ attention. It was a bunch of people that took a risk and decided to launch applications and try to build businesses.

It was the event which inspired me to launch this blog and while I wasn’t at the first one, I think a little piece of all of us covering the space hoped that something big would come out of f8 today. By no means is it right to downplay the changes that have been made. For the first time we saw the potential of applications that truly benefit the users. Visual Bookshelf was demoed with some great capabilities including the ability to interact with an application on a user’s profile without having to add the application.

We also saw samples of Facebook Connect in action. Will other sites embrace the new service? Potentially, but now it is completely left to the market to decide the fate of Connect and competing offerings. The crazy entrepreneurs that set up businesses just over one year ago continue to push forward with building out their businesses. What their businesses are in the long-term isn’t really known but they will continue to push on.

At f8 you have everybody from individual developers to sizable businesses with large coffers stuffed by venture capitalists. There were small developers that have been pushed to the limits on resources and the reality is beginning to set in that they are locked into the Facebook platform. While the next shiny object (the iPhone) is gaining their attention, it is unfortunately out of reach for many. This year around there are even mature businesses that have been in the internet space for years but are just now entering the Facebook market.

Developers and entrepreneurs came from around the globe to hear what revolutionary new product or service Mark Zuckerberg would be announcing. Unfortunately this time around it wasn’t a new platform that’s ready for launch, providing new businesses with millions of new users. Instead we found a more cautious and more wise company that is now focused on improving the overall experience for users. For many of us (myself included), I think that the reality set in that you can’t revolutionize industries once a year.

It takes time to build businesses and while starting is quick, expanding is not as easy and takes a lot of hard work. Even for Facebook it sounds like they aren’t sure what the future holds. From the tone of Mark Zuckerberg after the keynote, the payment system appears anything but certain. I can understand their concern. Does Facebook want to have a payment system which is simply used to build a virtual gifts economy?

There are a lot of uncertainties and complete unknowns at this point. One thing is clear though: most of the people at f8 today are along for the ride and the ride is not going to be a short one.

Mark Zuckerberg, Benjamin Link and Chamath are available for questions. Mike Arrington first asks when they plan on launching the payment platform. Mark Zuckerberg reponds “I wish I knew.” Eric Eldon of Venturebeat asks about how they are selecting applications which they end up shutting down. According to Ben Ling it is based on a history of violations. Jesse Stay asks, “When can we start working with the iphone integration?” Robert Scoble asks about improvements to the messaging capabilities. Mark Zuckerberg says they will.

Someone from InternetNews.com asks “How does Facebook make money?” Mark Zuckerberg says that they aren’t currently focused on monetization and instead are focused on building out the platform and reach. Mark Zuckerberg gives a relatively non-answer to one of the questions and says he says there will be a decentralization.

Journalist from Forbes asks whether or not Facebook will be joining OpenSocial. Mark Zuckerberg says he’ll comment on that when they have something to say. The Forbes journalist asks a question about Facebook’s actions against clone sites. A Facebook communications person says they are not supportive of imitation but instead innovation. Vasanth from Alley Insider asks about the Open Web Foundation. ABC7 asks about whether or not they see Facebook moving further into business networking. Mark Zuckerberg says that applications will eventually help people share in a business context as well.

Someone from Vator.tv asks if they plan on taking a cut of any virtual goods revenue coming through the site. Mark Zuckerberg says all of the questions regarding monetization says that they haven’t figure out the optimal way yet. Scoble asks if we are going to see a significant increase in the number of things that can be imported into the site. Mark says they will be adding to that over time. Robert Scoble follow-up with a question about something related to data swapping inside and outside of Facebook but Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to understand.

I’m live at f8 at the Design Center in San Francisco, California. Mark Zuckerberg is prepared to take the stage in five minutes. I will be posting video and audio of the entire keynote which you can also access via http://www.visualwebcaster.com/Facebook/. Stay tuned for live updates.

1:35 pm- Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage, “Hi guys!”

1:37 pm – This year we will be talking about new products as well as way that developers can build cleaner and more engaging applications. We tried to start articulating our mission 6 moths ago. I was travelling through Instanbul on what some bloggers called “my vision question”. I had the opportunity to clear my mind and stop thinking about all the products we were trying to develop. I met a Turkish entrepreneur and got to be “fully present and focus on the sharing that was going on”. I took two things away from that experience: the first was that I want to build a product that people can feel like they are with themselves. The second is to help people share more.

1:38pm – The most important information is that which is not out there. We need to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” In the world we’re building it we are helping people be more “good to each other.” We want the community and ecosystem to be aligned with us.

1:40 pm – A while back when we were a small group of people we began focusing on how we can help people share information with each other. The last year has shown that a lot of people are sharing this movement. Let’s take a look at the results. He is showing a graph with a hockey stick chart that shows that they had 24 million people one year ago and today they are at over 90 million users.

1:42 pm – A lot of this growth is now international. Today 68 percent are international and we have one person in Greenland. Almost 40 percent of people in Canada are on Facebook. Mark is now going over the translations application and says that it took two weeks to translate Spanish and less than 24 hours to translate in to French. The site is now in over 15 languages. We are now opening the translations tool to applications so that developers can leverage it to translate their apps in to foreign languages.

1:44 pm – We started with a small base last year and today we have over 400,000 developers building on top of the platform. More than half the developers are outside the United States. He is now going over all of the Facebook developer garages around the world. We have 4 developer garages going on right now in Berlin, Paris …

1:46 pm – I’d like to share some interesting statistics. Let’s compare iLike and MySpace music. Now let’s compare Causes and Al Gore. The Causes application has more supporters than Al Gore’s alliance for climate change.

1:47 pm – Another good example is Zynga versus Las Vegas. Zynga has 4 times more people playing Texas Hold’em than Las Vegas has hotels. There has now been a lot of investments in this space including more than 30 companies. Zuckerberg mentions D.C. based Living Social’s funding, Flixster and Zynga. There has been more than $200 million invested in this ecosystem and if you add it up it is a multi-billion dollar ecosystem.

1:49 pm – Mark Zuckerberg is now showing an abstract graph of “user connections”. More emphasis on sharing.

1:50 pm – One of the most powerful ways of sharing is through feeds. In an environment where people are constantly sharing, users can rely on feeds to view what’s really going on. We call this the “virtuous cycle of sharing”.

1:51 pm – The most powerful system today is newsfeed.

1:52 pm – Within four days last year, iLike had millions of users. We will discuss a new feed we have created shortly. We’ve also had a lot of lessons in the past year.

1:53 pm – As happy as I am with the growth of the past year, there are a lot of mistakes that we have learned and things that we need to do differently. I know that we don’t want an ecosystem of applications that are simply trying to build themselves virally. We need to work with developers to build these type of applications and align incentives. If we want to have an ecosystem that supports sharing, we need to build a more elegant solution. Over the past several months we have been working with a number of developers to help build the new platform. We had three goals:

1. Give people more power tools to share.
2. Reward applications that help people share.
3. Simplify the site

1:55 pm – Under the new system, the applications that help people share the most and are engaging will be the ones that succeed. What we are launching is called a full story. He is simply providing an overview of the three types of feed stories available in news feeds. Zuckerberg is now going into a more detailed overview of feed items. Not very exciting. Zuckerberg is now showing the profile publisher and the profiles page. You can view a detailed overview of the Facebook Profile rather than listen to his entire overview

2:01 pm – “Storytime.” This was a monumental job getting this new profile out. Zuckerberg is showing the Bill O’Reilly video of him flipping out. You can view the video here. O.k. this is the cue for the demo.

2:03 pm – We’ve updated the homepage newsfeed to have different types of stories. “Top Stories”, “Status Updates”, “Photos”, “Posted Items” and “All Stories”. This part is still in development. He’s highlighting how he can interact with the Visual Bookshelf application on someone’s page without ever adding the application. He is also demoing that visual bookshelf from within the feed.

2:09 pm – We are going to see the social networks decentralize and have the sharing of social applications across the web. I think we are at a turning point in the industry. Mark says that this was similar to back when Apple and Microsoft were decentralizing the stack. We fully expect that over the next few years, the good applications and the way people share are going to come from other people in the ecosystem. This is going to be less about the site Facebook.com and more about the experiences people are having. Every application that is built is a way for people to share a new type of information that wasn’t shared before.

2:11 pm – Today we are going to talk about Facebook Connect. It’s our version of the Facebook platform for the rest of the web. The first goal is to build the same kinds of apps across the web. Second, to enable peopel to share information across the web and finally to be able to control your information across the web. All you need to add is the “Facebook Connect button”. Once they are connected, you can view all of their information that was available in Facebook. All their profile information, photos, etc. The privacy controls are coming with it. In addition to all this information they can bring their connections and friends with them.

2:14 pm – We enable you to send us hashes of user emails to us and it can help maintain all of peoples connections through Facebook. In addition to information from Facebook, they will be able to share information between sites and within their profiles. We’ve paid a lot of attention to making sure that the information that people share, people have control over it. We have a number of tools that are available to people on Facebook, available to sites including fb:comments, fb:invite, etc.

2:16 pm – I’m going to have other people come up and share what they did. The first is Joe Stein from Digg. Joe starts talking. “All of the 90 million Facebook users can build the Digg army with the click of a button.” I’m going to show you photos now of what this experience will be like. You don’t need to register for a Digg account. I no longer need to do email verification or complex registration forms.

2:19 pm – David Recordon from Six Apart is up next. Today millions of people interact with a movable type site at the same rate. We’ve developed a commenting system that enables Facebook commenting on blogs. This integration also takes available of dynamic privacy. For example some users don’t wish to share their photo and it won’t display. This took us a day and half to implement.

2:21 pm – Next up is Mike Phillips from Citysearch. We’re going to be launching a new site soon and sharing information is one of the big pieces of the puzzle. What could be more helpful, more trusted than reviews and recommendations from your friends and your networks. Most important is the “My Friend’s Favorites” tab which shows all the trusted content from their friends on Facebook.

2:24 pm – Thanks to those three and all of our launch partners from Facebook Connect. Those are a couple of big evolutions for us today. The developer keys for Facebook Connect are available today and then there will be a beta period before they launch. Next year I hope that when we all come together that we will be able to point to a large community and a good number of really meaningful applications within Facebook and outside of Facebook via Facebook Connect. Mark asks the developer platform employees to stand up and then all of the people that will develop an application to stand up.

2:27 pm – Thanks to everyone that helped build the platform and enjoy the rest of the day. Now there is a pretty entertaining video that is documenting f8 and Facebook.

2:30 pm – Following Zuckerberg in Ben Ling. Thank you for choosing to invest and build on the Facebook platform. We’ve seen over 13 ad networks launch that help people monetize. We’ve seen a substantial amoung of venture capital and we’ve seen help from application development companies. We’ve also seen classes launch about Facebook platform.

2:32 pm – As Mark alluded to, we had a vision. Today I am pleased to announced our guiding principals for great applications:

1. Meaningful
2. Trustworthy
3. Well designed

What does meaningful mean? It means they should be social, useful, expressive and engaging. A good example of a useful application is the carpool application. A fifth of people at Cornell use the application. The grafitti application is a good example of an expressive application. When they ran this campaign for the BMW one series there were over ten thousand designs built in the first week. A good example of engaging applications is Playfish.

2:37 pm – The second piece is about being trustworthy. It is important for us to build a safe and trusted ecosystem. We will provide them with important privacy controls. Applications should also be secure, respectful and transparent. I don’t want an application sending out messages to my friends without me knowing. Finally, applications must be well designed. They should be clean, fast and robust.

2:40 pm – We encourage all developers to use these principals to build great applications. One of the things that we’ve engaged the community in is a set of guiding principals. Where we haven’t been doing a great job is on the online forums. We will be working on making this better. We are now working on incorporating feedback from developers. We are going to:

1. Partner more closely with developers
2. Keep ecosystem safe for users, fair for developers
3. Help you create more, better apps

The platform team, we spend a lot of time learning from these things. We would like to work together with the developers now. We will begin providing you with tools and partnerships. We have partnerships that will help you develop, host and scale. We are launching a new and improved developer website. We thing people need some capital to help get started. That’s why we launched the fbFund. Today we are pleased to announce the intial winners:

Challenge, Cconnected weddings, Podclass and a number of others. We encourage other developers to apply to the Facebook fund. We are announcing a new competition. We are giving out up to $2 million over the next 2 months. We will be giving $250k for each application. Today I’m pleased to announce two new programs:

1. Facebook Verification Program – Being trustworthy is extremely important so what we will do is enable applications to apply to be verified that the application is trustworthy. There is a badge that will display in the application directory and the application about page. Developers will now have more trust, more visibility and they’ll end up with more users.

2. Facebook Great Apps Program – Great application embody all 10 of our guiding principles and they advance the mission of Facebook (“Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”). These applications will have a history of adherence to our principals. How does this benefit developers and users? User’s receive a more integrated experience. They also get more content from great applications. Developers get increased visibility early features and Facebook feedback. Today we will announce iLike and Causes as inaugural partners.

2:52 pm – Going forward we would like to articulate how we will build a safe and fair ecosystem for developers:

1. Clear principals – We will be enforcing based on the principals. It is impossible for us to list out how an application is deceptive.
2. Transparent process – We are going to make efforts to make the process significantly more transparent.
3. Consistent implementation – We hope to establish a fair and safe platform for all developers and users

Finally we are making the world more social with Facebook connect. There are 5 major pieces:

1. Authentication
2. Identity
3. Friends Access
4. Dynamic Privacy
5. Social Distribution

This fall were announcing Facebook conect for the iPhone which is a coco platform. As part of Facebook connect I’d like to talk about the Open Web foundation.  Tomorrow David Recordon will be announcing the Open Web foundation.  We will support and contribute to it.

This fall we will launch the full version of Facebook connect for users.  Now we are starting the hackathon.  Thanks for coming!

If you want to view live video of the Mark Zuckerberg keynote today at f8, Facebook will be streaming it online. We of course will be live blogging and posting video of the keynote as well. The keynote will be taking place from 1:30 PM until 3:00 PM Pacific Time. You can view the webcast by visiting visualwebcaster.com/Facebook. You should probably register on the site early as there will be a lot of people visiting the site to view the keynote live.

As I mentioned, we will be providing live, up to the minute coverage of the event so be sure to stay tuned to this site as well.

Today I will be attending Facebook’s f8 event in San Francisco. Me and the SocialCash team will be providing video coverage, live podcasts and live blogging. There is a lot of speculation about what will be announced (as I mentioned yesterday). A lot of industry insiders that I spoke to last night don’t think that Facebook will be making any massive announcements today and will instead be discussing the benefits of the new redesign, announcing five winners of the first FB Fund and talking about Facebook Connect.

Others are hoping for big announcements that will help transform the businesses that they have spent the past year developing on the Facebook platform. A little over one year ago, Facebook announced the launch of the platform and now we have a mini-industry built around it. Just last night, Zynga gaming network announced that they had raised $29 million, led by Kleiner Perkins. Nobody knows what they’ll be doing with their massive war chest but they are now officially a serious force to be reckoned with.

As more funding pours into Facebook application companies, the industry awaits to see what is announced today. With all the anticipation, something big has to come out of this event. If you haven’t noticed, there is something else that has been attracting developer attention: the iPhone. While the iPhone doesn’t currently have the user base that Facebook has, the potential offered by mobile is something that no entrepreneur can ignore.

Whether or not big news comes out of f8 today, we will be providing up to the minute news about what is going on. If we don’t have it, chances are good that it simply isn’t happening! Stay tuned throughout the day for updates on what’s going on.

Definitely not! There is however a ton of speculation as to what Facebook will be announcing. Facebook is under a lot of pressure to produce as the company slowly constricts developers with restrictive new policies and according to Kara Swisher, there will be a new “preferred” status for select partners. The first two partners according to Kara are the Causes application and iLike. If in fact true, we may soon see more backlash from the developer community. Unfortunately we won’t know all the details until tomorrow.

Facebook is expected to announce a number of things including the official launch of the new profile, Facebook Connect and the potential for a number of other things including:

• Payment platform – There has been a lot of buzz that Facebook would be announcing a payment platform but it’s looking like Facebook won’t be making that announcement tomorrow unfortunately. While it is known that a payment platform will be launched eventually, it will most likely not be tomorrow.
• New Mobile Platform – Facebook rolled out the second version of their iPhone application within a week of the iPhone app platform launching. Is there a third mobile version which empowers developers to build more robust mobile applications? No details on this but there is definitely a lot of speculation.
• Extended API Features – Nobody has mentioned this yet but where are the APIs for Groups, Pages and Events on Facebook? So far nobody has mentioned this but I think access to these two things would have substantial implications. At this point, this is just a guess!

So all we have is speculation at this point about most of what will be announced. One things is for sure thought: tomorrow will be a big day for Facebook. We will be on the scene giving up to the minute coverage so stay tuned! In the mean time, what do you think Facebook will be announcing?