Over the past month, Facebook has shown itself to have a quicker trigger when it comes to banning applications from its site for rule violations. It's part of the reason, observers say, that venture capital for Facebook-app startups is slowing down. The punished include apps from major developers RockYou and Slide. But they also include guys like developer Dan Abelon, who saw his popular SpeedDate widget booted from the platform for a couple hours earlier this month. Abelon told Inside Facebook what other application developers should do to make sure the same doesn't happen to them. The bullet points — which paint a picture of Facebook as a fairly ruthless enforcer — are below, trimmed to give widgetmakers more time to call those VCs who suddenly all seem to be on vacation all the time.

Facebook will not launch a payments system for its platform application developers at the upcoming F8 conference. Inside Facebook says though Facebook engineers are working on a system, it just won't be ready in time — even though Facebook began asking developers to participate in a payments beta test last December. Silicon Alley Insider offers a stranger explanation: The Facebook payments system hasn't come out yet because Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg "hasn't bought in to the idea completely."

Here's a good way for Facebook to keep its demographic young: IT security firm Sophos reports that early on during Facebook's beta test of a new user-profile design, the site revealed its members birth dates, even if members had set that information to private. That'll keep the Olds who turn 43 every year off the site. Facebook needs to be very careful when it comes to privacy — the site would like to figure out a way to target ads based on user's personal data, and wants to make sure users are comfortable inputting accurate information. And Facebook is being hypocritical: When Slide's Facebook Top Friends app revealed users' birth dates, Facebook temporarily kicked the app off the website. Of course, we won't hold our breath waiting for Facebook to suspend its entire website. But maybe it could back down from its holier-than-thou pose that the platform is a level playing field and Facebook is just another player? Yes, please.

They can't say they didn't have it coming. But widgetmakers are angry all the same about Facebook's decision to clone Slide's Top Friends application as a feature in its latest redesign. "It would be insane for a new developer" to begin creating new apps the platform now, says an executive at one of the many Facebook-applications firms watching the story. The exec says the VCs widget startups pitch for funding know it, too, and are closing their wallets. He blames Facebook's "new regime," including new COO Sheryl Sandberg and recently-appointed flack-cum-platform director, Elliot Schrage:

The co-editors of Ivygate published an LA Times op-ed yesterday arguing that kids today are embarrassing and otherwise undermining themselves by oversharing online, but also arguing that social judgements about these gaffes are softening. Perhaps they spoke too soon: One of the editors, Jacob Savage found his appearance on the show America's Election Headquarters had been cancelled after allowing Fox News Channel producer Virginia Grace to "friend" him, thus unlocking a profile that listed him as "very liberal."

Can a PR guy run an operating system? Silicon Valley's gut reaction: No way. And yet that's what Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has done in appointing Elliot Schrage, her handpicked flack, to run Facebook's platform. The platform, when it launched a year ago, was hailed as the world's next Windows; by opening up its friends lists and other features to outside developers, Facebook would surely become the next Microsoft, ran the standard line of punditry, in an age when the pundits were in love with Facebook. That, more than anything, surely stirred Microsoft to invest $240 million in the company. But in one very short year — or a very long one, rather — Facebook's platform has gone from selling point to PR headache.

If you're the application developer and they're the platform owner, you have to know death can come at any moment: Create a popular, simple application, and the platform owner might just rip you off in their next release. It's happened to Max Levchin's Slide, maker of the popular Facebook widget Top Friends. With its latest profile redesign, Facebook now allows users to specify which friends they'd like to display to profile visitors. (See how Facebook's version works in the image above and you'll note that with the friends I've selected, my goal is to intimidate profile visitors with my powerful connections.) Before you feel too sorry for Slide, note that this is a feature MySpace has long offered. Slide, seeing that Facebook lacked it, promptly cooked up Top Friends, which filled the void. Top Friends is Slide's second most popular application with nearly 1.5 million daily active users. On the strength of those user numbers, Slide has raised $50 million in a recent financing round, and is opening an ad-sales office in New York. We asked for Slide's reaction. They were surprisingly chipper!

I got some good news on the Facebook front last night: I am now friends with one Robin Gunningham of Bristol, UK-also known as Banksy, the formerly undercover world-famous street artist who was outed as Gunningham yesterday. (Or was he? No official confirmation yet, although the case is strong). Gunningham's Facebook page sports the same schoolboy picture that appeared in the Daily Mail's investigative story. And it has further evidence that he is, in fact, Banksy-unless the whole thing is part of a clever hoax, or the product of a third party with ulterior motives. Words and photos straight from the guy who might be a legend, after the jump:

The much-anticipated and long-delayed redesign of Facebook's profiles are live. Click through to see yours. We'll continue to harp on Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for his poor interpersonal social skills, but we have to credit him for an outstanding job with the redesign. We're relieved to find the new profile is both clean and rich with big pictures, videos and comments. Ugly apps designed by less aesthetically aware third-parties are gone from sight. Even moving the user photo from the left to the right side of the profile somehow works. Not everyone is a fan. When we told one widgetmaker "looks pretty good," he responded "if you like FriendFeed." "Or Tumblr," we joked. It's funny because it's true — we do like Tumblr.

Widgetmaker RockYou acquired Pieces of Flair and Speed Racing, applications which, according to Facebook's directory, see about 432,042 and 190,441 daily active users. Terms of the deals weren't disclosed, but an industry insider says RockYou probably paid $1 million for Speed Racing and $2 million for Pieces of Flair. RockYou's most popular Facebook application, Super Wall, continues to lose traffic ever since Facebook turned off Super Wall's ability to send notifications to Facebook users.

Amanda Hudson allowed teenage daughter Jodie Hudson to throw a birthday bash at the British family's £4.4 million ($8.7 million) villa in Spain, but when pictures like this of underage drinkers passed out on the floor and accounts of stolen jewelry appeared in Blighty tabloids, the elder Hudson brought suit, alleging defamation under the U.K.'s strict libel laws. The fishwraps will hide behind local "fair comment" provisions, which indemnifies the retellers of factual accounts — the problem is, the accounts posted by daughter Jodie and friends to social networks like Bebo and Facebook may have been less than strictly factual. And, of course, the photos are protected under copyright provisions. Which may mean that British hacks might have to factcheck anything gleaned from websites. I can only hope this is one legal precedent that they don't export to the colonies.

As a commenter points out, Robin Gunningham, the man the Daily Mail says is in fact supersecret street artist Banksy, has a Facebook page! And among his friends: Peter Dean Rickards-the photographer who took the only known picture of Banksy, in Jamaica. Well that's not how you leave no clues about your identity, dude. [More about Rickards and the famous photo at Animal NY]

With Diane Greene ousted as the CEO of Silicon Valley software company VMware by a jealous man and replaced by testosterone-laden former Microsoftie Paul Maritz, there's not a single woman running any of the Bay Area's largest 150 companies by revenues. We'd be less despondent about this if the up-and-coming women didn't have us so down.

Why would Google confess to the many problems it has had selling ads? The problems, Google ad-sales exec Tim Armstrong admitted to the Wall Street Journal, extended far beyond YouTube, where Google's bureaucracy compounded advertisers' hesitation to place commercials next to the site's free-for-all video content. Armstrong didn't point fingers, but he didn't have to: Everyone in the Valley knows that Sheryl Sandberg, the high-ranking Google executive who recently defected to Facebook, oversaw Google's automated online-advertising systems.

Some 150 Chicago-based interactive agencies told survey-taker William Blair & Co. they expect Internet advertising revenues to grow 16 percent over the next 12 months. That's down from the 19 percent predicted in William Blair's last survey, AdWeek reports. Said Digitas exec Dave Marsey: "Advertisers are holding back until they see what's going to happen over the next few months."

Facebook has a Craigslist-like marketplace where users can buy and sell things. Or, at least, for now it does. Product manager Jared Morgenstern launched the marketplace in May 2007, but Facebook hasn't updated marketplace listings since the middle of last month. AllFacebook's Nick O'Neill wonders if that means Facebook plans to phase it out with its upcoming site relaunch. If so, it's going to be great loss for all those Facebook users depending on "Natural Techniques You Can Try @ Home To Re-grow Lost Hair."

Responding to Facebook's latest iteration of its soon to be launched site redesign, user Josh Taylor Cross from Canterbury High School writes: "Please don't. Like...really....DONT." The cause for alarm? You might want to sit down. Facebook's latest mockups show profile pictures moved from the left side of the page, where they've been since founder Mark Zuckerberg first created TheFacebook.com, all the way to the right. Will society survive?

Traffic to RockYou's popular Facebook widget Super Wall declined from 2.1 million to 600,000 daily users over the last few days, as Facebook blocked the widget from sending users notifications and messages, claiming RockYou had violated Facebook's privacy policies. RockYou CTO Jia Shen told Inside Facebook the allegations and their punitive response are "slightly debatable":

Facebook users will be able to "start exploring" the site's controversial new redesign on July 14, founder Mark Zuckerberg's flacks announced yesterday, through one of their typically annoying Facebook updates. (Have they never heard of email in Palo Alto?) A full, official launch will come a week later, in time for Zuckerberg's keynote address at the company's F8 event, a gathering for developers. Facebook had originally announced it would launch its redesign in early April, but that was before independent Facebook-application makers got a look at the changes and completely freaked out.

There's desperate — and then there's "paying $15 billion for second-place has-been social network MySpace" desperate. Not even Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, under pressure from a mixed-up Microsoft, angry shareholders, and crazy-old-coot corporate raider Carl Icahn to do some kind of deal, is that desperate. Yang is taking so much heat for blowing merger negotiations with Microsoft, botching the company's reorg, and losing top talent that he's probably going to lose his job come August 1, when the company holds an annual shareholder meeting. But despite all that, a source close to the company told Reuters that Yang refused a bailout deal with News Corp. that would have combined Yahoo with MySpace because "News Corp. sought a value of as much as $15 billion for those assets." At long last, we're happy to credit Yang for a smart move!