With Firefox browser plugin TimesPeople, the venerable gray lady will now allow registered users to connect, adding "friends" and recommending articles to each other. You can follow recommendations through a drop-down menu that presents a feed of recommended articles from other users, or subscribe via RSS. It's not a social network, strictly, but a social layer. And while I poke fun at the times in the headline, there's certainly one way this could be used to drive revenue — by targetting ads based on a reader, and a reader's contacts, interests as determined both by the user's demographic information from their registration and the topics they browse. And unlike Facebook, advertisers don't have to worry about advertising against content they might deem unacceptable. Unless the Times starts doing photo essays of keg stands and college-age women experimenting with homosexuality.

Intimate look at the New York Times alert! The paper has launched a social networking feature called "TimesPeople," which is a little like Facebook for Times employees (and the public!). But without any of Facebook's drunk pictures or other interesting features. Pictured, what editor Bill Keller is up to: not a damn thing. The only useful aspect of TimesPeople is that newsroom brown-nosers can track the Times in-crowd by keeping tabs on Keller's list of friends. He only has seven now, but one of them is Batman:

Oh, Internet, you were supposed to be our faithful servant, but you keep throwing up new and dastardly ways to torment. Or to delight, if you're a naughty kid whose parents are too cheap or poor to afford a swimming pool! Resourceful Brits are using the aerial images from Google Maps to identify gardens with pools: A notice goes up on Facebook, everyone brings booze, and you've got yourself a partay!

LinkedIn's $1 billion valuation certainly seems low only when compared to the stratospheric $15 billion Facebook is worth on paper. One reason why is because, frankly, college kids are sexy — as the VCs in the announcement infomercial prove irrefutably, business professional who use LinkedIn are not. So if you're going to announce a new round of venture capital with a video on YouTube, why not make it a music video? The kids love music videos. Hence, Valleywag presents "The Upside" featuring Jeffrey "Sand Hizzy" Glass, David "D-Cup" Sze, David "Dollar Billz" Cowan and Mark "Make Money" Kvamme over beats from EPMD. Recognize.

Who owns the most annoying applications on Facebook? It seems incredible that anyone would want to take credit for Vampires, Zombies, and Werewolves, three of the most useless and yet most used applications on Facebook. And yet Blake Commagere, their developer, and RockYou, the company which markets those apps, and is happy to take credit for them when raising venture capital, are getting ready to deploy lawyers to settle the question over their ownership, we hear. Adonomics, the Facebook-app measurement firm, somewhat questionably estimates the three applications' value at $6.5 million — but attributes their ownership to Commagere.

If you ask an investment banker, the only way Microsoft is going to compete against Google is to acquire a dying 1990s Internet brand. Gabelli & Co. analyst Christopher Marangi now wants the company to acquire AOL from Time Warner. He writes:

ConnectU founders Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra have hired new lawyers to argue their suddenly renewed case that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea for his site. The parties agreed to a settlement in February, but last week ConnectU cited new evidence and asked a judge to let it out of the deal. Now, the New York Times reports one of ConnectU's new lawyers is stock fraud expert Sean F. O’Shea of O’Shea Partners in New York. Speculates the Times's Brad Stone:

In Rolling Stone magazine's continuing efforts to be hip and with it, Claire Hoffman was granted dozens of column inches to detail the rise of Facebook, especially including the allegations that co-founder Mark Zuckerberg essentially stole the idea and reneged on promises of coding help to other Harvard students when he realized that he might have a business success on his hands. The list of aggrieved parties is long, starting with Harvard which punished Zuckerberg for invading other student's privacy by creating Facemash to the ConnectU founders and even Facebook's original co-founder, both of whom have sued Zuckerberg for various improprieties. But what does it all boil down to?

Facebook will hold its second annual F8 developers' conference on Wednesday, July 23 in San Francisco. That means we'll watch Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg take another shot at his reported goal of impersonating Steve Jobs's keynote addresses. Funny thing is, Jobs isn't actually a very stylish public speaker. Check out the end of the 60-second versions of his last two keynotes below. His speeches are stuffed with frilly adjectives. Jobs only does so well because his keynotes are full of highly anticipated announcements. Zuckerberg doesn't — can't — do grand reveals.

Facebook has removed the "Wall" from its redesigned profiles. Early screenshots of the redesign featured a separate tab for the popular feature, but the latest shots show the Wall, where other users can leave comments on a profile, with the user's News Feed — now just called the "Feed." Users will be able to filter the Feed to see only Wall posts. Facebook-app developers, already exasperated by the redesign process, tell us they don't like the idea. Says one: "Mixing in 'X wrote on Y's FunWall" along with more personal messages from friends may deteriorate the quality of the new Wall/Feed feature as a whole." Put another way? Widgetmakers don't like losing their privileged position in the News Feed. Full screenshot of the new look, below.

Somebody created ten fake Facebook profiles of varying descriptions, built them up to 200 friends each, and is now selling them on eBay to anyone who cares to take them over for undercover marketing purposes. Yet another reason to make friends in real life instead. [Ebay via Adrants]

An eBay seller going by the handle pseudopr415 is offering 10 Facebook profiles, each with a minimum of 200 friends, for sale in an eBay auction that closes June 14. The seller writes: "I currently am testing the waters, and would like to see if any marketers are interested in using these." Facebook makes a lot of noise about how its users trust the site so much, they'll often supply their cell phone numbers, email and home addresses for their friends and contacts to see. Access to that information could be worth plenty to spammers as well as identity thieves. The product description pseudopr415 created — including a five-step fake profile plan, descriptions of the characters he's created for the 10 profiles and, in case you have any questions, an email to contact the sneaky bastard — below:

Chinese Facebook clone Xiaonei claims 15 million unique visitors and $430 million in venture from backers like Japan's SoftBank. And while it sports Facebook's trademark white-and-blue, it's not our favorite foreign-language knockoff. That'd be Hainei.com, yet another Chinese imitator from Xiaonei creator Wang Xing. As our glorious leader said it best:

Microsoft will debut a Facebook for the enterprise called TownSquare at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston today. Microsoft Office Labs launched the product to 100 Microsoft employees in January and about 8,000 have signed up since, Office Labs GM Chris Pratley told Computerworld, which described TownSquare as "strikingly similar to Facebook.com." Similar? TownSquare does all the tricks Facebook's news feed does, updating users with changes their contacts made to various networked documents. So why did Microsoft stop at ripoff and not go for a complete copy? You'd think for its $240 million, Microsoft could of just "pulled a Zuckerberg" on some of Facebook's code and called it a day.

Spending on display advertising — banner ads and other graphical Web come-ons — increased 8.5 percent in the first quarter over last year to $2.92 billion, reports ad-measurement firm TNS. At the same time, the Internet's "reach" — a rough measure of media consumption and, therefore, advertising inventory — has grown 66.6 percent since April 2007, according to ZenithOptimedia. Shall we do an exercise in basic economics, folks?

Ian Schafer, CEO of marketing agency Deep Focus, got to play around with a redesigned version of his Facebook profile and has this bad news for social media marketers to report:

Ryan Shyzer runs a blog called FacebookTalk.com. It's the seventh result for a Google search on "contact Facebook," and Shyzer gets a lot of emails meant for Facebook customer service. Shyzer, who responds to the emails under the pseudonym "Goob," gets to have a lot more fun than real Facebook customer service. For example, in the email screen capture above, a worried father emails "Goob" to ask him:

A year ago this summer, Priscilla Chan graduated from Harvard and moved to Palo Alto to live near her boyfriend, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. But before she did, Chan and Zuckerberg, pictured, held a series of "negotiations" over how often she would get to see him, according to Sarah Lacy's book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. The final contract, according to Lacy:

He won't sell, but can Mark Zuckerberg successfully carry Facebook through to an IPO? That's what the latest matchup in our tournament to find tech's worst entry-level job comes down to. Otherwise, the key responsibilities for Facebook's user operations analysts and MySpace customer support specialists are very similar. Even the pay is roughly the same. A tipster tells us Facebook pays its customer service reps $34,500 per year — though that number might be higher now that Facebook stopped handing $600/mo. housing subsidies. Readers figure MySpace pays $37,000. So what's it going to be? The slightly lower-paying job at the risky startup with higher upside or a gig at News Corp.'s shiniest Web toy? Vote in our poll below.

Despite the rumors, we all know widgetmaker RockYou isn't really worth $400 million. Not with the way ad buyers feel about spending on social media. We hear RockYou's latest investor, Doll Capital Management — which funded the company with another $35 million today — didn't value the company at $400 million either. "I believe the round was priced at $250 MM, and definitely not higher than $300 million to $325 million," an executive familiar with the deal says.