Amazon.com doesn’t give away free gift cards on Facebook. Posts promising them were going up on the social network some 15 hours ago and in all likelihood the scheme may revive itself using a different address — whatever you do, don’t click on them.

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J.D. Bauer, author of pro-environment children’s book The Trinity of Superkidds: Quest for Water, has a Facebook page with 3,773 friends at the time of this post. Problem Number One: Author Bauer is really Charles Kembo. Problem Number Two: Kembo is a convicted serial killer.

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Will Facebook pull in more profits than Amazon this year?

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So, good old Bob in accounting is finally retiring, and a bunch of people in the office want to pass around an envelope and collect money for a group gift for him. Or you could do it much less conspicuously on Facebook and have fun while doing it.

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The hacktivist group Anonymous is calling for hackers to attack Facebook this November 5. Both a written version and a video of the announcement appear beneath this post.
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It’s about time that one of the earliest pioneers of online commerce opened up shops on Facebook. Today Amazon’s subsidiary Quidisi has opened up a few stores selling household items on the social network.
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SharesPost sent out an email saying that Facebook common stock closed at $25 a share in the private marketplace’s most recent auction. That’s almost 20 percent higher than the last known transaction, which occurred on SecondMarket.

Assuming Facebook still has 2.5 billion shares outstanding, the SharesPost closing price of $25  a share would make the social network worth a record high of $59.4 billion.

That value is closing in on Amazon’s $79.8 billion and Google, Inc.’s $189.1 billion, although by the time you read this, share prices of the two publicly traded web companies may well have moved, taking total market capitalization with them. Now imagine how Facebook’s share price would move once the company went public.

In the mean time, qualified investors have to wait until January 10 for the next SharesPost auction — unless SecondMarket schedules one earlier. That date is just one day before the Ninth Circuit Court begins hearing oral arguments for the Winklevoss appeal of their $65 million settlement with Facebook.

Here’s what SharesPost disclosed in an email about the last auction and the next one:

SharesPost’s affiliated broker dealer has completed a sealed bid auction of 165,000 shares of the Common Stock of Facebook, Inc. for certain qualifying SharePost members. A clearing price of $25 per share was established. Qualifying SharesPost members who are interested in participating in the next auction as either a buyer or a seller should contact Tim Sullivan. We anticipate launching our next Facebook auction on January 10, 2011.

The response from the SharesPost community to the auction was substantial and the auction was significantly oversubscribed. As a result, when marketplace dynamics warrant it, we anticipate holding auctions in the new year for the shares of Facebook and other companies represented in the SharesPost marketplace. SharesPost’s unique ability to transparently and efficiently provide investors with access to investments in leading growth companies, both directly and via pooled investment vehicles, benefits our 40,000 registered buyers and sellers of private company shares and the issuers of those shares.

Readers, what do you anticipate in the next auction of Facebook shares? Do you think the company is overvalued yet? While we’re at it, is it comparing apples-to-oranges to derive a nearly 20 percent increase in the private stock’s value based on SharesPost and SecondMarket transactions?

In another sign of the growing maturity of social shopping, Facebook users can now give Amazon gift cards to their friends on the social networking site.
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Amazon is using Facebook Connect to offer its users social recommendations for online shopping.
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