Facebook is headed towards 500 million monthly active users, judging by where its long-term growth trends are taking it now. Yet recent privacy changes have sparked what appears to be a bigger outcry than ever before. Some users have very publicly said that they’re going to deactivate, delete or minimally use their accounts

For months, the Federal Trade Commission has been considering whether or not to block Google’s acquisition of Admob for $750 million, which was announced back in November.

Last week, as the outrage grew over the privacy implications of Facebook’s new ambitions to spread its tentacles deeper into the Web , Michael offered some advice to MySpace. This is MySpace’s moment to shine, he argued : MySpace, the once great social network that still has scores of millions of active users, should be reworking their policies and products at a feverish pace to provide the perception of giving users fair and easy to use privacy controls along with a promise never to change those controls without their express permission. YOUR DATA IS SAFE WITH US is how the messaging would read.

Apple hates Flash. Adobe “ loves ” Apple.

The group buying craze is now officially in overdrive. There are so many group buying sites—Groupon, LivingSocial, BuyWithMe, SocialBuy—that it is hard to know where to go for the best deals.

A couple years ago when Twitter was having major scaling issues, engineer Alex Payne was able to work through them to help create the Twitter API . That API, of course, is now one of the most important on the web. And now Payne is moving on to a new challenge.

Despite a lot of attempts over the years, Yahoo’s embrace of social feeds has been slow and painful. Yahoo doesn’t want to become another social network. It couldn’t if it tried (and it has tried).

Last Friday, we wrote about 4chan founder Christopher “Moot” Poole’s stealthy startup, Canvas Networks, which just raised $625,000 in funding. Poole has revealed the names of the investors in the round, which are impressive to say the least

I have just about every song by The Beatles in my iTunes collection. As the best-selling artists of all time, I suspect a lot of people do. Of course, not one of those songs was actually bought through iTunes, because none of them are available through the iTunes Store.

In a minor news feed design change that appears intended to make stories more diverse and Facebook-focused, the company has begun grouping news feed stories from other apps and sites together. For example, instead of seeing five tweets from friend who import their messages via the Twitter app to your feed, you’re now more likely to see only one, along with a link beneath it that says “Show 4 similar posts.” If you click on the link, the others will be revealed.