After being subject to more than my fair share of blatantly horrendous Myspace profiles, you could say that I had a bad attitude towards Facebook’s rather “open” Application Development policy.  So I’ve been staying on top of the rather fast-paced Facebook application space and enjoy seeing little loopholes like this (below) being addressed promptly and professionally.

I’m beginning to understand why Myspace is on Facebook’s coattails.

 - - - - REF: FACEBOOK APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT UPDATE - - - - -

New report link for forced invites

Tonight we rolled out a new link that shows up on the multi-friend selector that allows a user to report that an application is forcing them to invite friends. For applications that follow our policy against invite looping, this should not be an issue.This link brings up a dialog that allows the user to remove the application or just report the experience and continue using the application. The link will show up next to the skip button when a user ends up at the request page twice in a short period or after clicking skip.

As you may have read, Microsoft Corp. recently placed a $44.6 billion takeover bid for Yahoo, Inc, which was declined by Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. Along with the rest of the cyberspace geeks and investors, I’ve been watching this situation closely over the past weeks.

This morning, to my suprise, Microsoft took things to the next level with a rather slick move. The New York Times reported that Microsoft plans to inact a proxy battle with Yahoo this week in an attempt to lure the Yahoo’s shareholders into Microsoft’s camp. This means that if Yahoo doesn’t enter talks with Microsoft, the company will seek to nominate a new batch of directors to Yahoo’s board – and toss out the old board in the process.

According to the New York Times article, this tactic is expected to cost Microsoft about $20-$30 million, which is a less costly alternative to raising their bid.

Exciting times. I’m going to grab some popcorn.