Following its meeting with developers yesterday, Facebook announced some change s to people’s homepages today. As expected , one of the biggest changes is an attempt to fight application spam. Notifications from apps that you sign up for are being curtailed so that you can opt to only see those notifications that your friends explicitly send to you. That should get rid of all those random updates about Joey sending some virtual bananas as a gift to someone else you don’t care about. Facebook will also allow users to specify which applications may contact them via email and for what purposes, much like when you register for any Website and they ask you if they can send you marketing newsletters. Applications, however, will be easier to access. An “Applications” link will appear in the left-hand navigation column. Clicking on that will show you all of your Facebook apps. And in a sign that shows the growing importance of social games in Facebook, “Games” will get their own link in the left-hand dashboard, even though they are a kind of app. Games are special that way. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Just hours ago, Apple made an announcement that has developers everywhere dancing down their collective, metaphorical street: In-App Purchase is now good to go in free applications . This, of course, comes just months after Apple essentially told a room full of journalists that such ideas were nonsense – that free apps should always remain absolutely free. Still – hindsight is always 50/50, or whatever that saying is. There were really just too many advantages to allowing it to let it pass by any longer. Freemium applications! Upselling! It made In-App Purchases seem less tacky to the user! Hurray. But there’s one major factor that isn’t quite so obvious; one issue that this, to some limited extent, solves: piracy. Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch > > Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

ToyBots CEO Shervin Pishevar , fresh off his TechCrunch50 debut , apparently wasn’t too pleased with my post yesterday calling him and his company out for not dreaming big enough . My chief complaint – that ToyBots should be building the next multi-billion dollar superhit toy, not messing around with an unproven platform solution that no one may ultimately use, but that many may ultimately copy. So he stopped by today to tell me that ToyBots will indeed build their own toy or toys, and to show me his super double secret stealth prototype – a very lifelike dog-type thing, only smaller. And it’s certainly cuter than this scary thing. Pishevar says of the device: “We’ll be bigger than Facebook.” The video is below: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

It’s a day late, but social game site (and Zynga -antagonizer) Playdom has finally responded to our request for comment on the lawsuit and temporary restraining order they got hit with earlier this week (all the legal documents are here ). The statement, emailed to us earlier today, is short and sweet and contains very little information at all: This lawsuit comes as no surprise given Zynga’s penchant for litigation. We do not believe in using unnecessary litigation as a business strategy, and we are troubled to see an industry as bright and promising as ours weighed down by such tactics. We have no interest in Zynga’s “Playbook” or “secret sauce.” Our strength comes from our 111 talented people, and we will defend ourselves vigorously against this distraction. The lawsuit stems from seven former-Zynga, now-Playdom employees who may or may not have taken a few proprietary documents with them to their new jobs. Among the documents Playdom is accused of stealing is the fast-becoming-legendary/mythical “Zynga Playbook”: “The Zynga Playbook is literally the recipe book that contains Zynga’s “secret sauce,” and its contents would be invaluable to a competitor like Playdom,” says Zynga in the lawsuit. Did Playdom steal it? All they say is they have “no interest” in the document. It seems to me that the only way they could know that for sure is if they’ve read it. I mean, if the New York Times had a playbook, I sure would be interested in it. Unless I’d read it and found it uninteresting, that is. So I’ll ask again, Playdom. Did you steal the Zynga Playbook? And if you did, can I have a copy? Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Facebook has submitted v. 3.0 of their iPhone application to Apple, Joe Hewitt says via Twitter: “Just uploaded Facebook for iPhone 3.0 to the App Store for review. ” Hewitt also says he’ll post screen shots and more detais on this Facebook page for the iPhone app next week, and that he’s looking forward to getting started on v. 3.1 tomorrow. We’ve been tracking 3.0 since details first became available in July. A list of some of the much needed improvements is here . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.