The only good thing about the deadline for this week’s TechCrunch round-up falling on Christmas Day is the absolute certain fact that you won’t be reading the results. After all, with the holiday season in full swing, no one in their right mind will be reading TechCrunch. I certainly won’t.

Safe in that knowledge, I can pretty claim anything I like. That this week’s top story was Mark Zuckerberg being eaten by zebras, for example, or Al Qaeda investing in Twitter. Hell, I could probably claim that Spotify is profitable and it would still pass entirely without remark. Who would know? Just me and Google’s spider.

But I’m a professional – which is why I only missed my Christmas Day deadline by 24 hours – and as such I take seriously my responsibility to bring you this week’s top stories, regardless of whether you care or not. Hell, I’ve even come up with a festive theme in a vain attempt to keep you reading. Even though I know you’re not.

Here we go then…

On the first day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you….

One billion dollar exits
Sarah rounded off her South American research trip by profiling Wences Casares and examining the difference between billion dollar exits and what it means to feel “success”.

On the second day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Two out of every ten companies suffering from “stealth disease”
Vivek tells stealth start-ups: Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets.

On the third day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Three years of Crunchies
The first tickets to the third annual Crunchies sold out very quickly, but there’s still plenty of time to vote for the winners across 18 categories before voting closes on January 6th.

On the fourth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Four screenings of Avatar
Or at least that’s how many Arrington has attended since the movie launched this week and he described it as ‘The iPhone Of Movies’.

On the fifth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Five hundred and fifty million dollars
Over half a billion dollars; the price that Yelp turned down when they walked away from selling to Google.

On the sixth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Six-ty thousand nooks will be shipped by Barnes & Noble this year
…despite issues with shipping pre-orders.

On the seventh day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Seven million more dollars raised by ChaCha
….despite issues with their entire business being a joke.

On the eighth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Eight million dollars raised by Livemocha
…in a round led by August Capital to allow the online language-learning community to build new partnership deals and work on product development.

On the ninth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Nine ‘rock-star’ names associated with WePay’s new group payments services
Levchin, McClure, Conway, Y Combinator…

On the tenth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Ten IPO Candidates for 2010
….and, from Europe, ten disappointing tech stories of 2009.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Eleven billion valuation for Facebook
Up from the company’s $10billion valuation earlier this year.

And finally. On the twelfth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Twelve (at least) religions that I’ve certainly offended by suggesting that the entire world stops for Christmas. I look forward to the comments. Not that I’ll be reading them – after all, it’s Christmas!

Have a good week!

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

• Facebook To Increase Enforcement Of Anti-Scam Rules
• Zynga’s Newest Game: FrontierVille

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.

In our original post we showed a financial connection between these ads and Facebook. Apps take the money from the ads and then aggressively buy ads on Facebook, effectively giving them a cut. So slow enforcement against even the top apps when they are so blatantly violating the rules is both unacceptable and suspicious.

Facebook says they are building out teams and technologies to address the problem.

We’ve witnessed a remarkable effort this week by industry players to clean up the ecosystem, even while Facebook has been silent on the issue. MySpace, Zynga and RockYou all took steps to eliminate scams.

Which is remarkable when you think about it. Anyone who doesn’t engage in scammy behavior right now is at a monetization disadvantage. There are real similarities between this issue and steroid use in baseball. As long as the MLB didn’t really enforce steroid use among players, it was a competitive necessity to take the drugs, and so many more players took them than otherwise would. What we saw this week was the equivalent of the MLB staying silent while a group of the most popular players admitted to steroid use and promised to stop using it from now on.

If Facebook is serious about stopping app offer scams, it will all be a lot easier in the future for developers to abstain. Hopefully, this is the start of a much cleaner Facebook.

But if they continue with their arguments that Facebook is no dirtier than the rest of the Internet, and resist outside pressure to clean up their community, we could quickly be back where we were just a week ago.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

• Watch Out Foursquare, Facebook is Poised To Dominate Geo
• This Week On TechCrunch: Zuckerberg eaten by zebras, Al Qaeda invests…