An anonymous tipster has confirmed the long-whispered rumors that Amazon will offer a Kindle that isn’t white. A mystery unit, described by our tipster as “exactly like a Kindle DX but black,” was being photographed at a Seattle coffee shop (with a 5D mk II, he or she notes) and Mr/Mrs Tipster had the presence of mind to snap a picture before they put it away.

After three full days, our first TechCrunch Disrupt conference is now over . By all metrics it was a big success — and that includes on Twitter. The #tcdisrupt hastag was a Trending Topic in New York City (where the conference was) basically the entire time it was going on.

Can we get better government through game mechanics? We are about to find out

Over six months after announcing its plans to acquire leading mobile ad network AdMob , Google has finally closed the deal. The news comes a week after the FTC unanimously approved the deal, after holding it up for months as it decided whether or not to block it on antitrust grounds. When it finally reached a decision, the FTC pointed to Apple’s recent entry into the mobile ad market with iAds as evidence that there would still be plenty of competition in the nascent mobile advertising space (an argument that we made before, as did many others)

Today, Facebook is releasing its first official SDK for Android, offering developers on Google’s mobile OS an easy way to tie their Android native apps to Facebook Platform. As AllFacebook noted last week, this SDK is actually more advanced than the iPhone SDK because it features Facebook’s Graph API, which was unveiled at its f8 developer conference last month.

Last October, when Facebook laid out its Platform Roadmap for the next several months, it announced that the dimensions of custom tabs on Facebook Pages would be changing from 760 pixels wide to 520 pixels wide in “late 2009/early 2010.” As we’ve been covering since, this is a pretty important change for all agencies and Page managers to be aware of, because this means that all Pages that have created custom tabs (either application tabs or landing tabs designed around promotions) will need to be updated to fit the new width. If not, they might look broken or poorly designed.

In what may very well be considered the geekiest sort of fandom possible, I consider myself a fan of Matias Duarte. As I’ve written before : “Wherever this guy goes, awesome user interfaces follow.” He and his team at Danger built a tremendously usable interface for the Sidekick, his work at Helio (especially the stuff that went to waste at the end , never to be seen by the public eye) was incredible, and then.

Yesterday, Facebook announced and started rolling out simpler user privacy controls. Afterward, I sat down with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to get more of his thoughts on Facebook’s approach to this round of privacy changes. Several of Mark’s comments shed interesting light on the ways Facebook approached the privacy issues it has been facing in recent weeks.

Until a month ago, developers on Facebook’s platform were not allowed to retain user data for more than 24 hours (even though many did, anyway). Then Facebook said at its f8 developer conference in late April that it would let them store user data indefinitely — provided they continued to follow its policies around data retention

Geo-messaging startup BlockChalk raised $1 million in seed financing from an impressive group of investors, including Delicious founder Joshua Schachter , Lotus founder Mitch Kapor , the Founder Collective, Battery Ventures, Harrison Metal, Josh Stylman, Tom McInerney , and David Liu . Schachter, in particular, has been investing heavily in geo startups (he is also an investor in Foursquare, SimpleGeo, Square, and Plancast)