There’s a certain type of man that wears cufflinks. Don Draper, for example, wears cufflinks. But he’s also a fictional character set in the 1960s. In the real world, these days, it’s usually the well-off that wear them. Basically, you need to have enough money to not care about spending hundreds of dollars on buttons.

But CuffLinks.com appears to be going for a new crowd with its latest design. The “Facebook Me” cufflinks are $50 and feature yes, the Facebook logo on them. They are approximately 3/4″ by 3/4″, are “Rhodium plated” and feature a “Bullet back closure.” One cufflink features the Facebook “f,” the other reads “me.” Classy.

In July of last year, I wrote about The New Apple Walled Garden. The post was about the irony of developers and advocates who were otherwise open standards and open source champions being absolutely pro-iPhone, a platform that is closed and proprietary in every sense. Since that post, the horror that was foreshadowed by some has been realized – rejected apps, rejected apps, rejected apps. We documented the troubles here at Techcrunch and the overall response was nothing more than long comment threads, complaints, and a few wise people changing their minds. The complaints to date are from some bloggers and a small number of application developers, incidents that Apple are able to write-off as being minor, as they have a dedicated fan base and growing market share to fall back on. That was, until yesterday.

Yesterday, a high-profile iPhone developer became fed up with the nature of the platform and decided it was time to call it quits. Joe Hewitt of Facebook not only pronounced that it was time for him to move onto ‘other projects’, but had the courage to state that his reason was because of the closed nature of the iPhone platform and his frustration with the approval process.

“For every dev that leaves iPhone in frustration, 1000 new ones join up. iPhone is an unstoppable train regardless of how much we complain.” – Joe Hewitt in a tweet yesterday.

How right he is.

Facebook’s VP of Communications Elliot Schrage has just left us a comment on our post from yesterday explaining that while Hewitt may be moving on, Facebook “has a great team of engineers taking over iPhone related development.” May an entire team blossom, apparently.

This was inevitable, particularly after this video surfaced. Sacramento based law firm Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP is investigating complaints about unauthorized charges imposed social network users who were mislead into accepting offers of dubious quality. Among those being investigated: Facebook, MySpace, Zynga, RockYou, Offerpal Media, SuperRewards and many others.

It’s ScamVille, the lawsuit. And we’ve spoken to one other law firm considering a class action claim against these companies.

Will users be vindicated and get their money back? Maybe part of it. A recent class action settlement against WebLoyalty for post transaction marketing scams led to a $10 million settlement, just a tiny fraction of the total revenue pulled in by these offers. The law firms are the ones who get a payday.

This is all kinds of awesome. For its upcoming 10th anniversary edition of David Fincher’s film Fight Club, Fox has created a website that uses Facebook Connect in one of the best ways I’ve ever seen. Once the site loads up (it takes a little while since it’s Flash-based), you simply hit a button to Connect and you’re off. The result is a mash-up of scenes from the film along with random pictures of you on Facebook.

It also pulls your name, and other details from your Facebook profile such as your career. For example, at one point, it flashes the following message to me, “you are squandering your potential as a writer.” Interesting.

As of next Tuesday, November 17, you’ll be able to access Twitter and Facebook on your Xbox 360. The software update is free, like previous updates, and also includes Last.fm and Zune video compatibility. “What are you doing?” “Losing to 12-year-olds in Modern Warfare 2 over and over again! Not fun.”

The idea, I guess, is that you’ll be able let your friends know just how much fun you’re having while playing the latest game, or streaming the latest Netflix release, without having to go through the trouble of whipping out your phone or walking over to your computer. I see it as a convenience and nothing more. It may also mean that there’s nothing you can to do stop Twitter’s worldwide dominance.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know anyone other than my grandparents who use use print calendars any more. Launching today, Personera, hopes to bring print calendars into the Web Age by combining the old with the new. The company is offering the world’s first print calendar that is personalized with the birthdays of your Facebook friends, upcoming events, and photos.

Personera’s service allows people to use their Facebook accounts to log in through Facebook Connect, and make all of their social network content instantly available for product personalization. Users are able to choose a theme, automatically add their friends birthdays and events each day, and drag and drop their favorite photos into the monthly layouts.

Some leaked screenshots from Sony show a PS3 running with what looks like a native Facebook client configurable. There’s also a new photo browser and the ability to change the color of your gamercard, but at those features I make a dismissive gesture— thusly. A Facebook app would be handy, though a constant stream of status updates from heavy players might be lead to mutings by less gaming-orientated friends. “Devin found a new item!”

There’s one small picture of Facebook on the PS3 (yes, that’s all there is), and it’s not even of a client. It’s a user accounts configuration screen that happens to include Facebook. So it’s not much to look at, but it was traced to Sony UK’s site, so we’re pretty sure it’s legit. Sony “doesn’t comment on rumor or speculation,” obviously, so we won’t be hearing from them, but it would be ridiculous to think that a all-in-one entertainment device like the PS3 wouldn’t have Facebook on it eventually.

“My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies.” – Joe Hewitt

Facebook developer Joe Hewitt, the man behind the immensely popular Facebook application for iPhone, has just tweeted that he’s done with the project:

“Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project.”

We reached out to Hewitt for more details, and he attributed his decision to quit the project entirely on Apple’s tyrannical App Store approval policies:

Israeli facial recognition tech startup Face.com made quite a splash when it launched Photo Finder, its first Facebook app, back in March. It soon followed suit with a new app called Photo Tagger, a tool that is capable of finding photos of people that were uploaded to Facebook albums even if they remained untagged by users.

The auto-tagging app was only available in private beta so far, but today the company is debuting the public version of Photo Tagger. It’s free of charge, and it’s awesome.

A high-drama and high-stakes ScamVille exchange over the weekend left Zynga in the penalty box. Facebook put their newest social game, FishVille, on ice for advertising violations. In response, Zynga said they’d pull down all advertising offers until further notice.

Zynga’s now saying that the game will be live again at midnight tonight. 875,000 users flocked to the aquarium game in its first two days, so I’m sure they’ll be glad to see it back.

And so far Zynga has lived up to its recent promise. All offers, including legitimate ones like virtual currency for Netflix subscriptions, have been removed from all Zynga games.

I’m doing this just because no one really believes the stuff we get hit with here at TechCrunch every day. None of this ever gets posted. But I’m on a roll today, so why not.

And no matter how crazy the message, we do try to respond as helpfully as possible. We’re here all week, so feel free to email with any further relationship/legal advice requests. In fact, I’m thinking of starting a new once-a-day crazy email from the inbox series of posts.

We’ll update with any further response from Sarah.

From: Michael Arrington
Date: November 9, 2009 1:54:16 PM PST
To: Sarah
Subject: Re: sueing facebook??????

Maybe it’s time for a new boyfriend.

On Nov 9, 2009, at 1:42 PM, Sarah wrote:

Hi my name is Sarah and I have a quick question. My boyfriend got kicked off of face book for sending too many messages is there any way to get him back on if not then he is kicked off for at least a month. please contact me as [email removed]. please it is very important

Last week Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said that they would take steps to remove scammy advertising offers from their social games. There have been a couple of missteps since then, and Facebook responded by taking Zynga’s newest game, FishVille, offline.

Zynga insists they are serious about cleaning up the industry. And today Pincus has announced that the company will remove all offer advertising from their games.

This isn’t a meaningless action. Offers account for 1/3 or so of Zynga’s rumored $250 million in revenue.

All offers will be removed by the end of today, says Pincus, “until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves.”

The blog post also discloses that Zynga is an investor in DoubleDing, an offer provider that competes with OfferPal and SuperRewards. DoubleDing was serving the mobile offers that popped back onto Zynga on Friday.

Pincus’ blog post:

Zynga’s most recent Facebook game, FishVille, has temporarily been taken offline by Facebook for advertising violations.

FishVille will remain suspended, Facebook tells us, “until Facebook is satisfied that Zynga demonstrates compliance with Facebook restrictions — as well as Zynga’s own restrictions — on the ads it offers users.”

This is a relatively light slap on the wrist since the game only launched two days ago and had a couple of thousand users (Update: Zynga says FishVille had 875,000 users yesterday. wow). Zynga’s other games, including FarmVille with 63 million monthly users, remain online, despite the fact that they were showing the same ads.

But this does send a clear message to Zynga and other game developers that Facebook isn’t ignoring the problem. Whether it’s a real concern over the user experience or simply embarrassment from the press suggesting Facebook is a haven for scammers is somewhat irrelevant.

Facebook has also shut down a total of four ad networks in recent months for ad violations, including Tatto Media and Gambit. Other networks, such as SendMe Mobile, which was founded by ex-CNET executives, have largely taken their place by offering similarly questionable offers that trick users into mobile subscriptions.

This is also a bit of an arms race. Zynga may be specifically filtering Facebook employees from seeing ads that violate Facebook terms and conditions, making it difficult for Facebook to enforce the rules.

And the relationship between the two companies is complicated. Facebook battling Zynga on the advertising scams. But Zynga is also one of Facebook’s largest advertisers, probably accounting for between 10% and 20% of total Facebook revenue.

Just five days ago Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said mobile subscriptions, among other scammy offers, would be removed from Zynga’s popular Facebook and MySpace games. “We have also removed all mobile ads until we see any that offer clear user value,” he said.

So we were surprised yesterday to see a screen shot clearly showing a mobile subscription ad in a post on InsideSocialGames about the launch of a new Zynga game, FishVille.

I went to the game to check myself, but those mobile ads weren’t there. I assumed they had quickly been taken down, or there was some other reasonable explanation.

They weren’t taken down though. Or rather, they were, but just for me. Other users were still seeing the same mobile ads. And the filtering was clearly directed at me, since I logged in on the same IP address with a friends account and saw the ads. I held a laptop showing the ads up next to my screen that didn’t show the ads and took a picture:

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said earlier this week that he intends to make sure his company’s games don’t include scammy offers in the future. Our full background on this story is here.

But what he didn’t say in that blog post is that Zynga has been scamming users from the beginning quite intentionally as part of their revenue model. Rather, he pointed much of the blame at middlemen offer companies: “We need to be more aggressive and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring them to filter and police offers prior to posting on their networks.”

Last spring, though, he gave a much clearer explanation to an audience at a Startup@Berkeley mixer, admitting that scamming users was part of Zynga’s business model from the start. And it was all caught on video. I think everyone sort of knew that this was exactly Zynga’s gameplan. But to hear it said so directly is just shocking.

The full 30ish minute video is here. We’ve taken the relevant section of the video, roughly starting at around the 10:40 mark, and embed it below. From the video:

I knew that i wanted to control my destiny, so I knew I needed revenues, right, fucking, now. Like I needed revenues now. So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I dont know, I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it. *laughs* We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business…So control your destiny. So that was a big lesson, controlling your business. So by the time we raised money we were profitable.

Facebook published a long blog post today about their enforcement efforts around app advertising and offer scams. And while they didn’t mention all the negative press that has hit them this week, that’s the reason for the new communication.

Facebook says that deceptive ads are a widespread problem on the Web (which is true), and they say they’ve been fighting these scams for some time (which is also true, albeit a little slowly sometimes). They point to their updated policies on third party ads on the Facebook platform from July – which are aggresively pro-user but have rarely been enforced. They also note that they have disabled two ad networks since then, and are disabling two more now.

In my talks with Facebook earlier this week they took the position that they’ve been aggresively protecting users, and they’re taking the same tone in this blog post. They say that with so many ads and so many apps its impossible to monitor the entire platform effectively. My answer was that it took me about 10 seconds to find really scammy ads on FarmVille, the most popular social game on Facebook with 63+ million monthly users. If they just start with the big guys, a lot of the problem will go away.

Over the past few weeks, it’s definitely been crunchtime as we’ve been putting together the panels and demos for our Realtime CrunchUp on November 20 in San Francisco. Get your tickets here. After much back and forth, and with the help of our Realtime Board, we finally have an agenda we are very excited to present (see below).

Speakers will include Twitter COO Dick Costolo, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, angel investor Ron Conway, FriendFeed co-founders (and now-Facebook VPs) Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. The CrunchUp will take place at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco and will kick off with a big roundtable discussion and one-on-one interviews, followed by startup demos and panel discussions drilling down into geo streams, media streams, marketing, and venture capital.

Electronic Arts has brought its very popular Spore franchise to Facebook, with the launch of a new game called Spore Islands. The game, while thematically similar to the well known PC game that was released last year, has gameplay that’s entirely different. Rather than roaming around a 3D world, Spore for Facebook is more of a stategy game: you tweak your creature and then watch how it fares against the other beasts inhabiting your island.

I took the game for a spin last night and found it to be pretty fun, though there’s a bit of a learning curve. The game is effectively broken down into two main sections: the creature builder, where you can tweak both the appearance and the attributes of your character (things like speed, reproductive rate, and over a dozen others). Once you’ve fine tuned your creature to your satisfaction, you can go into ‘observation’ mode, where you watch miniature versions of the island’s animals fight over food, eat each other, and reproduce (by way of eggs hatching). The graphics in the simulation portion are pretty basic — everything is presented in a 2D, top-down view, but they’re charming and get the job done.

A Facebook developer named Yvo Schaap has uncovered a massive security flaw present on both Facebook and MySpace that would give hackers the ability to steal all of your account data, including your photos, personal messages, and basically everything else you’ve ever put on the social networks, without you ever realizing it.
Update: MySpace tells us that in their case no private data was actually exposed, see their statement below. However, Schaap believes that MySpace is simply wrong, and that they were in fact open to the exploit.

Schaap stumbled upon the exploit and contacted both Facebook and MySpace. According to his blog MySpace has since fixed the bug, and while his blog indicates that Facebook is still working on it we’ve confirmed that they’ve fixed it as well. So what exactly could the exploit do? From Schaap’s blog:

You don’t need much time to think of all the ways this could be exploited. All what has to happen is a active session, or a “auto login”-cookie and a URL which hosts a exploiting Flash file. For example when accessed, a automatic “post update” could be made, that would lure friends of the user to access the exploit URL, and the exploit would spread virally. An more invasive and hidden exploit could harvest all the users personal photo’s, data and messages to a central server without any trace, and there is no reason why this wouldn’t be happening already with both Facebook and MySpace data.