It’s time again for our weekly recap of the latest Facebook news stories! While Facebook didn’t acquire any companies, or surpass any significant milestones this week, there was still plenty of news for the fast growing social platform. We also have the second volume of the This Week In Facebook video series being produced by my sister. The video is jam packed with YoVillians, burglars, and a game of Risk so check it out!

Protests In YoVille
This week was a volatile one for the world of YoVille, as the much beloved widgets factory was transformed into a Sweets Factory.…

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NEW DELHI — India’s federal cabinet Thursday approved the release of 40 billion rupees ($826.4 million) to state-run banks as a subsidy to offset revenue losses arising from the grant of cheap short-term farm loans. The funds, already provided for in this fiscal year’s budget, come at a time when loan demand for winter-sown crops usually picks up. “For this year, the government has decided to continue the ongoing interest subvention scheme with the provision of interest subvention at 2% to the banks on their own funds,” Information and Broadcasting Minister, Ambika Soni, said at a news conference. State-run banks…

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Want 67 Terabytes of local storage? That’ll be $7,867 but only if you build it yourself. Blackblaze sells online storage, but when setting up their company they found the only economical way was to build their own storage pods. Lucky for us they followed the lead of other companies and decided to share how they built their own storage farm using some custom, some consumer, and some open source components.
Each pod is a standalone HTTPS-connected storage unit with 45 hard drives in it. Nine SATA port expanders connect to 4 SATA controller cards on the mainboard. The system…

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Today Zynga, the leading gaming company on Facebook, blew past the 100 million monthly active users level through their network of games. Much of the support has come from FarmVille which is not only the company’s largest game, but also the largest application on Facebook by an extremely large margin. FarmVille should also become the largest application ever on the Facebook application within the next day or two, surpassing the “How Well Do You Know Me?” application’s previous record of 35,554,755 monthly active users.

Based on daily active users, the application is already the largest ever by a large number.…

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FarmTown users have been going crazy this afternoon as the application has become inaccessible to millions of users around the world. FarmTown is currently the most popular game on Facebook according to daily active users and it continues to grow at around 2 percent, or upwards of 300,000 new users per day. So what are the users doing while Farm Town is down? They are refreshing the application to see if it’s back up of course!

While millions of users have found a great way to be unproductive during the day, Zynga is hoping that some of those users come…

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The RepRap project has been working on bringing 3D printing to the masses by creating a extrusion printer that can also make the majority of its own parts. For the most part, these print ABS or HDPE plastics which are strong and recyclable. In order to create these replicating printers, similar machines called RepStraps are built out of either laser-cut parts or machined elements. They are functionally equivalent to RepRap printers, but are not made of printed parts. [nophead] documented his RepStrap, HydraRaptor, that is based off a milling machine. He had already printed a set of RepRap parts,…

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In the past few days, Zynga, the leading Facebook platform developer, quietly released a new game called “FarmVille”. If you’ve played Farm Town at any point in the past few months then you won’t need any education about how to use Zynga’s version of the game as it’s almost an exact duplicate. The only feature the company needs is the ability to import the game from Farm Town over to FarmVille and they’ll have come up with a great tool to take over the users.

Zynga has been repeatedly accused for stealing game ideas from other developers. The developer behind…

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Last night I received literally 100 emails from users about Farm Town, the game which has continued to surge in traffic over the past month. While the application was only down for about three hours, we literally received upwards of 100 comments on a previous post we made about Farm Town traffic exploding. The game is extremely addictive which makes it understandable why so many users would be up in arms over the application going down.

What’s not as clear is how Farm Town continues to experience tremendous growth. Over the past month I’ve continued to received messages from Farm…

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