Makers of Facebook applications have seized control over the social network's latest redesign. So who are these mighty developers capable of bending the stubborn Mark Zuckerberg to their will? Among others, the makers of "You're a Hottie," which tops the "Recently Popular" list in Facebook's "Just For Fun" application category — the most popular on the site, according to this handy reminder from FlowingData. Here's CLZConcepts.com pitch for their popular app:

Musicians can promote their work through Facebook's Musician Pages. But before allowing them to upload music files, Facebook requires administrators to submit scans of their driver's licenses, to keep on file in case claims of copyright infringement come up. Last night, one of these administrators, an employee at Ping Pong Music, discovered Facebook had posted his license publicly on EMI artist This World Fair's page. He took a screenshot, which we've included below.

In order to demonstrate how easy it would be for an malicious developer to create an application that steals private information from Facebook users, BBC television series Click created such an application themselves. Then they set up some spooky lighting and filmed a dude using two computers. "ID theft is a serious matter," the narrator intones. Check it out in the clip.

Skits about the Internet are always about a 7; finally here comes, eh, I'd say a 9. The British comedy troop (troupe?) "Idiots of Ants" presents a "What would Facebook be like in real life" sketch with actual jokes.

Eygptian woman Esraa Abdel-Fattah created the Facebook group "6 April: A Nationwide Strike." On April 7, she disappeared for 16 days. After her mother bought an ad in the newspaper Al-Masry Al-Yom pleading for her daughter's release, the government finally obliged. But Abdel-Fattah learned her lesson. "I have not heard about any coming strike nor do I want to hear about it," she told Al-Ahram, a weekly paper. Her uncle, the weekly also reports, said Abdel-Fattah agreed to get rid of her computer. The Egyptian government is now said to be deciding between blocking Facebook entirely or continuing to use it to spy on its citizens.

Updated mockups reveal that Facebook has added a new tab to its soon-to-be-released user profiles. It's a small but telling detail that illustrates how the obsessively controlling Mark Zuckerberg has ceded power to independent Facebook-app developers. In his original plans for Facebook's redesign, Zuckerberg planned to integrate the Wall — the place where public messages from other users are displayed on user profiles — with Facebook's News Feed, which is where Facebook serves ads between "stories" about other users' activities. This integration was a way for Facebook to finally serve ads in the Wall, a placewhere users spend a great deal of their time on the site.

A tipster writes:

Masayoshi Son is the kingmaker of the Asian Internet. His latest coronation: Xiaonei, a Chinese social network whose name translates to "on campus" and whose look and feel closely mirrors Facebook's. Son's Softbank and other investors have put $430 million into Xiaonei's parent, Oak Pacific Interactive, in a deal which values OPI at more than $1 billion. This has to worry executives at Facebook, which has raised less money — albeit while selling far less of the company to investors than Xiaonei has.

Seems comments made by Kevin Eyres, managing director of European operations for LinkedIn, were optimistic in pegging ad rates at a $75 CPM. To a degree. A customer who's bought advertising on LinkedIn wrote in to let us know that last fall they negotiated a campaign to run ads against the social network's "premium content" for a $12 CPM, $3 less than the listed $15 rate. The company is now charging $45 for that same inventory, they report. A quick look at the rate card shows that the $45 price point is for vertical banner ads targetted to IT and small business professionals. Custom targeting goes as high as $76.50 per thousand impressions. Good thing to know that you can bargain down those rates 20 percent. And it's still an order of magnitude more than any other social network has been able to charge. While Facebook charges less than a dollar for slutty come-ons, LinkedIn keeps it strictly SFW. After the jump, what the company refuses to allow in ads on the site.

Facebook's redesign — originally planned for early April, but delayed due to objections from widgetmakers like RockYou, Slide, and Zynga — is no longer a Mark Zuckerberg production. Third-party developers have hijacked it. A source close to the redesign process tells us "Facebook has made some changes to the original design, reflecting developer concerns." Below, screenshots of Zuckerberg's original plans for the redesign, annotated with the objections Facebook-application startups raised.

Facebook holds an annual Games Day intramural event for its employees and, just like gangs in Oakland, the teams identify themselves by their colors. Yesterday, a tipster spotted Facebook's red team sitting around on the streets of Palo Alto, visible for all to see. Facebook's white team is much sneakier. For example, the entire team is at this very moment standing right behind you. Take a look. Gone already? Don't be embarrassed. These guys — Babak Hamadani, Blaise DiPersia, Dale Dwelle, Navid Mansourian, Pedram Keyani and Ryan McGeehan — move fast. Just ask the Facebook engineer at the end this clip, Chris Putnam.

Spotted in an alley behind the offices of SocialText were a group of Facebook employees participating in a team building exercise:

Congratulations, Facebookers! Notorious New York nobody and Silicon Alley wantrepreneur Julia Allison plans to grace your "Facebook Prom" with her presence. She twitters:

Remember that one funny show on Current? Super News, the animated series that brought you Perez Hilton's giant vagina, has an episode about Facebook, MySpace, and Second Life. A little dated but still funnier than that Internet Party skit. My favorite bit is site founder Tom's first principle of MySpace: "Skanky pictures of skanky people doing skanky things."

Can you imagine a photo op that Julia Allison wouldn't attend? What happens in Vegas goes instantly to Valleywag, Allison knows, and so she flew to Las Vegas to attend Randi Zuckerberg's bachelorette party. Zuckerberg, whose wig-and-sunglasses disguise did not deter the Web's paparazzi, is a budding Web video star, Facebook's marketing director, and, unlike younger brother Mark, an actual Harvard graduate. In what's surely a first, Allison, the tech-obsessed TV personality, managed not to hog the camera; she's in only one of the shots. Facebook's Meagan Marks also appears sporting what looks like a freshly acquired head wound. A slip and fall on the dance floor? Our informants are investigating. In the meantime, enjoy the evidence of Zuckerberg's bacchanal. A warning: If plastic sex toys offend your coworkers, one photo may be unsuitable for office computers.

Serious Business founders Siqi Chen and Alex Le created the Facebook application Friends For Sale, which has over 550,000 daily active users. On Friday, the pair announced they'd landed $4 million in a first round of funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners. The investment gave the company a "healthy double-digit" valuation, according to Inside Facebook's Justin Smith. (For Chen and Le's sake, we hope there are another six digits after those two.) "We're already profitable, and the investment is going to help us get a head start," Le told Smith. Impressive, if true. Smith recently compiled a list of the CPMs, or cost to display an ad 1,000 times, Facebook developers earn on their applications. The average came in at $0.92. One app earns as much as $4.78 per thousand views and another just $.04.

The blokes over at Stupid Business Ideas were trying to come up with just that — a new, stupid idea for a business — when they brainstormed the concept of AdAid. But when they actually looked up the domain, they found that it redirects to social network Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has a soft spot for charities, if proto-application Causes is any indication. So perhaps the company is looking to Bob Geldof to sign up a roster of superstar celebrities who will sing songs and give heartfelt lectures in the hopes of guilt-tripping corporations into maintaining their ad budgets through a possible recession? I don't know, but I'm willing to bet $20 that Moby is composing an original song for the event already. (Illustration by Stupid Business Ideas)

Morgan Stanley managing director Benjamin Fried will replace Google's departed CIO Douglas Merrill, News.com reports. Besides making sure Googlers using Linux, Vista and Mac OS X can continue to work together, Fried will likely resume Merrill's role as evangelist for Google's enteprise software products. His background in Wall Street's risk-averse IT community should help Google's credibility with wary CTOs. On the ultimate frisbee field, however, Fried looks to be more a liability. He loves the sport, News.com reports, but he's got bad knees. In other words, put your money on Facebook continuing to drink Google's Jamba Juice.

A soldier from an elite unit of the Israel Defense Force will be spending 19 days behind bars after posting photos of his base to Facebook, reports Ha'aretz. Those photos have presumably been taken down. But I turned up dozens of photos posted by soldiers in the IDF goofing off with their units, brandishing weapons and, in the case of the photo above, standing next to a multimillion-dollar American jet fighter — even though the Israel Air Force specifically ordered its members to remove any photos posted to the site. It looks like Facebook's problems with privacy aren't limited to accidentally letting your boss see you taking hits off a bong, but could potentially lead to military intelligence leaks as well.