Facebook lawyers won't let Think Computers founder Aaron Greenspan use the company's name to market his new self-pubished book, Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era . These lawyers say it would violate Facebook's trademark. So Greenspan has petitioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel Facebook's claim to the name. The suit rehashes Greenspan's old arguments that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole his idea.

What a coincidence: Sheryl Sandberg seized responsibility for PR when she left Google to join Facebook as COO last month. Like clockwork, there's an organized publicity campaign to buff the executive's image. Take this sycophantic utterance from Christopher Cox, Sandberg's head of human resources: "It was like Sheryl came and kicked everybody in the ass and said this is going to be hard. And then gave everybody a hug." That's what Cox told Fortune, at any rate. He privately confessed to colleagues that he "felt sick after saying that." Sheryl, you should give Cox a raise: An HR chief who's so ready to fib for you is golden.

Facebook today removed the choice between a "thumbs-up" or "X" icon it used to give users for each item in their News Feed. The icons let them vote for or against each item, and in the process train Facebook on which items to display. Taking this feature away was not a good idea. Just today, a prominent ad executive singled it out for praise.

Suspended John McCain campaign aide Soren Dayton is still obsessed with Barack Obama. This time around he's formed a Facebook group calling Obama an "elitist" for suggesting that small town Americans "cling to guns or religion" out of bitterness in a speech given earlier this month San Francisco. There's even a handy Shepard Fairey-esque "Snob" icon you can change your profile picture to! No word on whether Dayton is actually back with the McCain campaign — maybe he read Valleywag's suggestions and realized that distancing himself from the party gave him that much more freedom to run wild with insinuation.

In the month since San Francisco-based social network Hi5 launched its platform for independent applications, users have installed widgetmaker RockYou's applications 2 million times. The most popular third-party application on MySpace only has 100,000 installs. The difference? Hi5 links to its application directory from user profile pages and allows application makers to send notification messages to users. Those simple interface elements allow Hi5 users to see which applications their friends are using, which then prompts them to add them, too — the main factor in their spread. MySpace is still working on those kinds of tools, reports VentureBeat. Facebook built those types of innovations into its platform nearly a year ago.

Facebook flack Meredith Chin said the company would roll out a new profile design by early April. Didn't happen. And it won't until later this spring, Facebook developer Pete Bratach writes on the company's developer blog. "We're still iterating on the design, making sure we get it right," Bratach explains. BoomTown reports that third-party developers are greatly relieved by the delay. "They really have to roll this out perfectly," one told Kara Swisher. "It really is the biggest thing since Beacon, and you know how that went." (Poorly, and ruining more than a few Christmases by disclosing people's online purchases to Facebook friends.) But we disagree that Mark Zuckerberg should try to "roll this out perfectly."

Ticketmaster, the event-ticket retailer whose monopolies on venues and exorbitant fees are legendarily evil, has somehow garnered nearly 157,000 fans on Facebook. And by "somehow" I mean "created thousands upon thousands of fake accounts." At least that's according to the East Village Idiot, who did some digging and turned up some obvious fakesters, like the hilariously misspelled "Stebe Jobs." Look for Stebe to accumulate thousands of fans of his own as desperate Apple fanboys friend the account to show their undying faith in the real Jobs's techno-cult.

If time flies when you're having fun, the inverse is true as well. Ex-Googler Sheryl Sandberg joined Facebook as COO only two weeks ago and "It feels like she's been here six months already," one Facebook exec told the Wall Street Journal. Sandberg has introduced employee performance reviews, new recruitment procedures, and management-training programs. Suddenly, the place sounds a lot less fun for its 550 employees than it did when Lesley Stahl from 60 Minutes visited Mark Zuckerberg at the offices last fall. It may be good news for Facebook's investors, though.

O, hai! Had no idea that you, 23-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, were on the list of Forbes' richest people. But your net worth is... $1.5 bil? Forbes helpfully lists which of the men on its Rich List are bachelors. But don't get too excited: the thing about the rich is that they tend to be squirrely. And they'll make you sign a prenup, which is always a total bitch. Forbes has a slideshow of the billionaire bachelors, and as they saying goes: the odds are good, but the goods are odd. [Forbes]

A reader writes in to let us know that Facebook application developers have been receiving user complaints about their applications returning errors like the one above. The critical new bug was first reported yesterday morning. The company didn't respond until this afternoon. Interestingly, it's not affecting all of Facebook, just third-party applications running on the platform API. Yet another reason investors and potential employees should be wary of startups that depend on the company for users and traffic.

OMG <3 <3 <3 [Earlier: HuffPo Blogger Wonders Where the Ladies Are]

The official site for parodying the Internet makes up Facebook apps that seem truer than the real ones. My personal fave is the Fat Girl Escapism Quiz about fantasy author Neil Gaiman. [Something Awful]

Several years ago, old-time tech blog Slashdot started a subscription service. Rather than pay a monthly subscription fee, the site lets you pay $5 to load 1,000 pages ad-free and get a few other small bonuses. I've given Slashdot a total of $25 over several years to cover the cost of my subscriptions. Facebook users by and large don't click on the site's ads. With its low CPM rates, Facebook doesn't make much money on me — but the bottom-of-the-barrel ads grate on my eyes. Zuck, let's save us both the trouble. Let me pay some small amount, maybe $20 a year, to remove every ad and "sponsored post" in my News Feed.

New York State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky wants to fine online advertisers for using consumers' private information without their consent. Jim Halpert, top flack for a coalition formed by Google, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook and others said such a law "is unnecessary, most likely unconstitutional, and would have profound implications for the future of Internet advertising and the availability of free content on the Internet." Unimpressed, Brodsky told the Wall Street Journal, "These guys want the unadulterated right to invade the privacy of the citizens of this state and we're not going to let them do that," he said. "This is why we have governments, not just corporations." That's right — god forbid anyone privatize the government's vital job of invading your privacy

Last week saw news that a Saudia Arabian man murdered his daughter because she was using to Facebook to chat with a boy and that merchants in Dubai sold AMD processors to Iranians who built them into Iraqi roadside bombs. But let's be clear, the place where Silicon Valley meets the Middle East isn't all honor killings and distributed warfare. For example, there's this piece of spam I got my in inbox today.

23-year old British lass Laura Michaels set up a group on Facebook called "I Need Sex." She asked interested men to contact her and responded to the ones she was interested in. Laura claims that she slept with more than 50 of them. Michaels said she didn't care what other people thought of her: "I was satisfying my own desires by setting up the group." The paper tries to pin the blame Facebook for this behavior. (One wonders how we procreated before Al Gore invented the Internet.) As it does with all social activity, Mark Zuckerberg's creation merely makes sex more efficient.

Facebook Chat launched in beta earlier this week, available first to students at Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and MIT— schools known for their brilliant graduates who go out and change the world. Or at least make a lot of money. Or write nasty things about the people who do. Also: Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and MIT were the first schools to make Facebook popular, having been the first networks allowed access Mark Zuckerberg's creation. So we have that to thank them for too. Harvard's Alexander Konrad begins to earn our forgiveness, panning the new feature in the Crimson.

The New York media is predictably offended by Facebook's "People You May Know" feature. To anyone without Asperger's syndrome, the notion of an algorithm suggesting social relationships is offensive. But to Silicon Valley's elite, this is progress. Forming friendships is inefficient and time-consuming; mapping the social graph is a task well-suited to be offloaded to servers. Which, unlike the Starbucks lattes you may purchase in the pursuit of actual friendships, constantly decrease in price. Sure, I thought Facebook was a little off when it hinted I might be friends with Jimmy Wales, but the service is barely out of beta. Other suggestions, like Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, who I met casually once at a bar, is a perfectly suited addition to my list of Facebook "friends." Thus my faith in Mark Zuckerberg's ever-improving software remains unshaken. (Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman)

A judge last summer called the ConnectU founders' claims that Mark Zuckerberg had used code written while employed by them to create Facebook "tissue thin." Yesterday, in the final ruling before Facebook's lawyers decided to settle, a higher court disagreed and rejected Facebook's call for a dismissal. According to the appeals court ruling, Facebook's defense arguments were "either unavailing, or inadequately developed, or both. We reject them out of hand and, for the reasons elucidated above, we reverse the order of dismissal." Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, unwilling to go on with the case, chose to settle.

Another day, another New York Observer trend piece, which like most journalism, has basically been reduced to a long diary entry. (Full disclosure: We used to work there!) This week Gawker alum Doree tackles Facebook's new "People You May Know" feature, in which the social networking site mines your friend list and then matches people up with other friends on your list. It's the cyber equivalent of being at a party and the host awkwardly pushing you over to someone and saying, "Have you met Donna?!"