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Believe it or not, the annoying Farmville game that has been plaguing the lives of millions has been dethroned as the number one app on Facebook. Woo hoo!

As a man who is addicted to Facebook games, even I hated the constant barrage of Farmville requests that filled my Facebook feeds every day. Phrases, an app that allows people to post quotes and quizzes on their feeds, recently passed the iconic Farmville with 8.1 million active users before stopping the app in the United States.

Last month, Phrases had 54.4 million users, beating out Farmville’s 53.9 million, but Farmville still dominates daily usage. Phrases had about 5.1 million users and there is no word on plans to reinstate the American version anytime soon. So how was Phrases able to beat down Farmville? Facebook changed its format.

At its height, Farmville, by Facebook game giant Zynga, had almost 84 million users, but recently, Facebook stopped posting Farmville and other game requests on people’s feeds, and its users dropped to the current 53 million status.

Fame in the world of the Internet can come quickly, burn brightly and fade back into obscurity in a matter of seconds. With the emergence of online culture, memes and other must-see images and videos have the potential to spread like wildfire across the Web, passed through social networks on and off the Internet. The same could very well be said for Internet success. If the dot-com bust of the late 1990s taught us anything, it’s that a company has to be quick to adapt to changing expectations and demands in order to stay relevant for long.

Such a phenomenon explains the dramatic rise and fall of MySpace. Before the leviathan that is currently Facebook, MySpace seemed to be the Internet darling of the 2000s. With millions of users picking up pages, only to abandon the site in favor of the more streamlined world of Twitter and Facebook, the Web site is currently home to countless abandoned profiles. This week, for the first time in a long while, MySpace redesigned its template altogether, an announcement that didn’t drastically change the world in the way it once might have.

The focus this time around? Music and other media.

This Friday, The Social Network, a film detailing the rise of Facebook and its online empire, hits theaters everywhere. While some of the early reviews have been touting it as an excellent film, with Rolling Stone even granting the flick four out of four stars, the quality of the acting and directing are secondary to the remarkable nature of the story. Facebook has become a defining part of the 21st century, with millions of users utilizing the service to stay in touch with friends and family. But what if, in addition to your pictures and status updates, your network was also capable of knowing where you were at any given moment? This question, it seems, is no longer hypothetical. Facebook Places provides information to your friend list on your location, something that has some users excited and others understandably nervous.

Facebook isn’t the first company to jump on board this type of social networking. Google Latitude has been on the market for the last year for free. A Latitude-enabled smartphone kept track of your location using a GPS, broadcasting it at any given point to others in your friend group also using Latitude. While the idea had potential, the small number of users turned it into another obscure Google service offered up by the company. Additional ventures into the area have been made by startups such as FourSquare. The service, which currently has about 3,000,000 users, incorporates elements of location-based social networking as well as reviews of local businesses and hot spots. Thus far, however, only 4% of Americans have even tried such a service, according to an article at Safe and Savvy.

While Mark Zuckerburg’s social networking masterpiece certainly increases the ease with which we can interact with our friends, the drawbacks of such continuous contact could be emerging. A recent study, performed by Professor Paul Kirschner of the Open University in the Netherlands found that students who use Facebook while studying for an exam, even if its only intermittent use, score nearly a full letter grade below students who abstain while cramming for the big tests. The results might not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the social networking site, a prime way to procrastinate amongst college students.

The numbers certainly don’t lie though. Researchers in the United States looked at 219 students, spanning ages 19 to 54. Facebook users scored a grade point average of 3.06, a solid B average. On the other hand, those who didn’t use the site come test time scored an average 3.82, approaching A territory. Additionally, members of the study who don’t use the site at all recorded a staggering 88% more time spent studying outside of the classroom. Clearly the relationship between the two is documented, although one should certainly keep in mind that correlation doesn’t equal causation.

Professor Kirschner’s findings are going to be published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior later this fall. He was quoted in The Telegraph UK explaining his take on the results. “While people may think constant task-switching allows them to get more done in less time, the reality is it extends the amount of time needed to carry out tasks and leads to more mistakes.”

The ability to multi-task while studying is certainly tempting to any student, and the availability of the Internet anywhere on most college campuses can make Facebook an always-present distraction, much moreso than other aspects of student life.

The ongoing struggle over Facebook privacy is only part of the story. Here in 2010, the Internet is beginning to show its age. No longer is it a plaything or a resource used only by tech-savvy businesses. It’s become a part of our everyday lives. It makes a situation like with Facebook all the more important.

There is serious information available on the website, information that shouldn’t be accessible by everyone on the Internet. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the ongoing battle of Net Neutrality. At times misrepresented by the media, Net Neutrality is a key battle to making sure the internet remains universally accessible.

Here is where Diaspora comes in. Initially conceived as a project by four NYU computer science students, the idea has taken off. The students, Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, posted their mission statement online, but noted that they would not be able to complete the project without funding from the Internet.

In fact, without $10,000 of donations, they project would be canceled. Since then, a staggering amount of donations have poured in, giving the four a budget of well over $200,000. The light is clearly green for the Diaspora design team.

There’s been a growing controversy involving Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg and the status of Facebook’s seemingly ever-evolving stance on user privacy. Over the past year, users of the social networking site have seen the terms and conditions of their use modified several times, including once earlier this year where backlash forced the company to re-think it’s position. Well, with the most recent wave of Facebook redesigns comes a whole new host of issues. Namely, people are unwittingly sharing their information with the Internet, thanks to the “Share with Everyone” option on Facebook. While it could easily be interpreted as sharing with everyone in your social network, the answer, unfortunately, is that the whole world is exposed to this information.

This initially was an issue that was known only by a few, but suddenly, the whole world has been exposed to the website Openbook, which conducts searches of open Facebook profiles for all sorts of embarrassing stuff. Anything you’d like to search can be typed into the Openbook search engine, which then rifles through those poor souls who have their profiles set to open. All sorts of secrets are revealed, including people voicing complaints about work, significant others, and even the most intimate details of their personal lives.

Openbook, which had been circulating through websites such as Reddit and Digg earlier this week, officially went mainstream today thanks to a brief posting on Huffington Post, prompting even more attention on the Internet. The website states that its goal is to call attention to the security deficit on Facebook, hopefully to encourage enough of a reaction out of users in order to promote change. While it’s possible to better-secure your profile on Facebook, the average user seems (based off of search results…) to think they are entirely safe.

As always, when using a social networking site such as Facebook, discretion is the better part of valor. While setting your privacy settings to their most restrictive is a good way to protect yourself from unwanted profile views, users need to take responsibility for the things they are posting online. If you don’t want the entire world to know about it, why would you post it on the Internet? Such is the difficulty with the 21st century. The Internet never forgets, so make sure you’re not telling it something that will be embarrassing down the road!

For today’s tech roundup, we’ve got a variety of news involving all sorts of nifty gadgets! While this week was a bit of a media cool-down following the release of the iPad, there were still some important stories to go around, and one even involves Apple!

But first, on the larger end of the gadget spectrum: electric, high-speed trains! On Wednesday, United States lawmakers in California and executives at General Electric started a partnership designed to bring bullet trains to the Bear Republic. But it turns out they’re getting some help from a rather unlikley source: the Chiense Government! Don’t believe me? An article from the New York Times spills all the details, including the licensing of federal Chinese technology to GE to aid in the manufacturing of electric locomotives. The California High Speed Rail Authority was impressed by China’s recent prolific development in the realm of high-speed rail: they opened a staggering 1200 miles of track in 2009, all of it capable of running engines at 215 miles per hour.

And in another bout of legal ridiculousness involving the internet, a 16 year old boy has filed a harassment complaint against his own mother after she changed the passwords to his email and Facebook accounts. Lane New said in a written statement that his mother had posted several slanderous things on the social networking site regarding his personal life. While neither he nor his mother would identify said slanderous things, a victory for the teen would likely reinvent the parent-child dichotomy the world over! A possible end to curfews everywhere?

This week we’ll be taking a look at some of the most interesting tech stories from the last few days (there was no shortage of exciting news from the realm of technology and gadgets). In an article on CNN.com, Internet analysis firm Experian Hitwise announced a new winner for top-traffic. The new king of the web? Social networking site Facebook, with 7.09% of all Internet traffic for the week ending March 13. Does this mark a significant change in the Internet landscape? It’s hard to tell for the time being, but it’s worth noting that over the last year, Facebook’s web traffic has gone up a staggering 135%.

Content-Aware Update to Photoshop

In an interesting YouTube video, Adobe Photoshop manager Bryan Hughes shows off what is an excellent new update to the much-used image editing software. While in the past, removing objects out of the background of pictures has been a tedious process, the new Content-Aware option uses some nifty technology to easily edit just about any picture. Â Check out the video for a great demonstration of this feature, it promises to make image manipulation easier than ever (which is a good thing, right?)

In case you didn’t catch it earlier, a 25 year old unemployed Frenchmen was arrested this week for hacking into several Twitter accounts, targeting several celebrity accounts (such as Brittney Spears) and even finding success with the account belonging to President Barrack Obama. There are some stiff legal repercussions ahead of him, as hacking in this type of context carries up to a two- year prison term in France, and it’s likely he will get the maximum sentence, given the political target of his crime. The kicker?

How is it so easy for people to disclose information online? When I was younger, I had no problems sharing photos, personal information, and gossip on my MySpace page. Now, I’ve deleted my MySpace, pulled a lot of personal details from the webosphere, and I do my best to regulate what ends up online. I have a facebook with about 900 friends, but I rarely use it. I’ll share a few photos and post on a wall or two every couple of weeks, but ultimately, no matter what I do, I’m well aware that someone else is watching.

The New York Times published an article discussing some new statistical research with online data mining. Certain tools have been developed to monitor patterns of behavior to predict personality traits. Imagine this scenario: an employer can predict what you will do based on a detailed record of what you have done online. Ack.