The past week was a busy one for Facebook. As the company continues to expand both through acquisition and through organic growth, we will continue following it. As we post a fair number of stories each week, and also don’t post every single Facebook story from around the web on this blog everyday, I thought it would be valuable to list those stories that were most important. As such, here are the top 10 stories from the past 7 days starting with Monday August 10th:

1. Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
This was probably the biggest story of the week. Facebook acquired…

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This afternoon Facebook is announcing an extended set of features for developers including a new Inbox API and Notification API. The first announcement is a big one: “The Inbox API allows you to access your users’ messages, once they grant your application the new read_mailbox extended permission.” That means we could soon see a ton of new applications built around managing users’ Facebook inboxes. The one downside of this new feature is that applications cannot currently send messages.

What’s Being Added?
As part of the new inbox, attachments can be created using the same model used for developing publisher attachments…

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Ubisoft has announced at E3 that Assassin’s Creed II which will be released on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC on November 17. The PlayStation Portable iteration, titled Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines, is scheduled for release on the same day.
At Sony’s E3 Press Conference, Ubisoft Montreal’s Patrice Desilets stated that the PS3 version of Assassin’s Creed II will connect with its PSP cousin. Players will unlock six new weapons in Assassin’s Creed II when they link Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines to their PS3. Ubisoft has also revealed that Altair, the protagonist from the first Assassin’s Creed, will feature in Bloodlines.…

One of the questions we get from publishers most often is “How do I make sure updates to my feed are delivered to feed readers as fast as possible?” We know this is important to our publishers’ businesses and we are constantly making improvements to our back-end systems to minimize the time from when you publish a post to when it appears to subscribers in feed readers.Recently there have been a lot of developments around the so-called “real-time” web. The promise of the real-time web is distributing new information as quickly as possible. This encourages users to engage in more…

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In a strange turn of events Facebook has switched the “Kisses” page name to OraBrush, the brand who initially acquired the page. The process has been an interesting one as Facebook began randomly disabling the publishers for generic Facebook Pages. Now we are hearing that large generic Pages are being converted back into the brand names but that’s based on a number of variables, some of which were provided to us off the record.

We have reached out to Facebook for clarification on what appears to be an updated strategy but have not yet heard back. I will be updating…

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Facebook has sent out a notice to members of the press about a webcast this afternoon (1 PM EDT) about upcoming changes to Facebook’s privacy. So what is the exact subject of call? Nothing has been said except for “upcoming privacy changes”. We’ll be covering the event live but we are expecting it to simply be more details about Facebook’s new granular publisher controls.

There has been a lot of miscommunication recently about the new features which is why Facebook is holding an event to provide more details. I’d also expect more information about Facebook’s planned roll-out of Facebook profile…

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There’s a new feature within the email notifications area of Facebook which enables users to receive an email every time somebody “Connects to me as a fan”. We first heard about this new feature last night and were able to confirm it this morning. Just yesterday we wrote about how Facebook Pages have become your friends, which is another step in the merging of profiles and Pages. The combination of profile fans and the new granular publisher controls will help complete the twitterfication of Facebook.

Facebook has been in an all out war with Twitter for the past few months,…

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This afternoon Facebook updated some users’ friend confirmations to include two check boxes. One asks you to select whether or not you’d like to have that user’s info displayed in your news feed and the other asks if you’d like to receive SMS messages. It’s a subtle change but what’s becoming increasingly clear is Facebook is trying to streamline the communication process after integrating all of Twitter’s functionality within their site.

Today’s latest move was to include privacy options with all items posted from the Facebook publisher. Interestingly enough, a lot of their other services do not yet have this…

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