But there was an official announcement that dropped just days before the IPO: Games would start appearing in the main news feed.

Only one month before, Facebook began including games in the mobile news feed. If you're already feeling annoyed, remind yourself that this is nothing new. Remember when sponsored stories began appearing in the news feed?

In Zynga's IPO filing, it noted overreliance on Facebook. But it's not a one-way street here. Facebook & Zynga are intertwined, and at times it's nearly impossible to tell them apart.

In the risks section of Facebook's S-1, it explained that Zynga is responsible for about 12% of Facebook's revenue, and is also important in terms of direct advertising revenue and payments. Zynga is also the largest provider of Facebook games, accounting for 80% of Facebook Credits revenue.

Adding Zynga games to the Facebook news feed isn't the only change that Facebook announced on Monday, January 30. Games will also appear as a Timeline unit so that you will be able to see your own and other peoples' gaming achievements. There is now an app request on the main site, too. If you want to view game activity as its own news feed, you can do that to - just select the friend activity news feed under Apps and Games. Games.com's Joe Osborne notes that this news feed is similar to the Google+ Games Stream, as the two continue competing for gamers' eyeballs, time and money.

Facebook relies on Zynga apps for revenue. The Facebook news feed is one of the most heavily trafficked and viewed aspects of the entire social network. If Facebook wants to keep Zynga happy, why wouldn't it include games in the main news feed? Besides, games are already popping up in the mobile news feed. It was only a matter of time before games began appearing on the main site news feed.

If you've read this far, you've probably already downloaded the app for your iPhone, Android, BlackBerry or Windows phone, and are contemplating not reading the rest of this because you're too busy salivating over your next meal. Get ready for the complete food-pornification of Facebook, curated by you.

FoodSpotting is calling itself a "Pandora-like interface for discovering and rating dishes around you." Except the difference here is that Pandora would never spam your Facebook Timeline like FoodSpotting has the ability to do.

Eating is Social. Period.

Despite all our whining about food porn on the Web, there's something charming about FoodSpotting. As a user, I do want to know what my smart, interesting FoodSpotting friends are eating, why they're eating that, and if I should eat it, too. Eating is one of those inherently social activities. And the FoodSpotting app isn't creepy like many of the other 60-or-so Facebook social apps. The social aspect of food might overshadow the negative impact food porn photos could have on the social Web, and specifically Facebook. But do you really want your Facebook kingdom to look like this?

Photos courtesy of AmateurFoodPorn and Shutterstock.

The news ticker debuted before Facebook launched Timeline. Perhaps that was part of the user pushback on it, another part being the fact that many of the same stories appeared in both the news feed and the news ticker.

Seeing interesting music selections from friends pop up on the news tick make it easier to discover new music. That is a very different experience than seeing annoying updates about which links friends have "liked" or commented on. Publishing activity from open graph apps - such as "watch," "run," shop," "cook" - to the news ticker makes a lot more sense than seeing the mundane moves of your friends. In the meantime, if you're one of the lucky users, you can now hide your ticker.

In the age of social media, our Facebook profiles can become a virtual house of mirrors. Yet this concept isn't new.

Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai (1948) is a typical film noir. Man (Michael) meets mysterious woman (Elsa). Michael learns that Elsa is a manipulative femme fatale who is already married, in this case to a gentleman named Arthur Bannister. Despite many warnings that this chick's bad news, Michael pursues her. There's a bizarre murder scheme that Michael somehow involves himself in, with the hope that he'll get the girl, Elsa. Of course, nothing goes as planned - and in the end, somebody's gotta die. In this case, it's Arthur Bannister, Elsa's husband. The film ends with the famous surreal shootout inside a hall of mirrors, the Magic Mirror Maze. Elsa is mortally wounded after killing Bannister. (To be sure, in classic Hollywood films of the 1940s-1950s, mirrors are "generally seen as symbols of mental disorder and more specifically fragmented personalities, sometimes to the point of multiple personality disorder," according to HistoryofEconomics.com.)

In the myth of Narcissus, the hunter who was renowned for his own beauty starred into a pool of his own reflection. He continued gazing in it for too long, not realizing it was a mere image. Because he couldn't leave the pool, feeling too entranced by his own reflection, he eventually died.

As Facebook continues rolling out new apps and uses for Timeline, users can once again relive their self-obsession of adolescent years gone by. So go ahead, create a movie of yourself, reinvent the past with a photo scrapbook, and stare into your self-contained pond of never-ending beauty. Just don't start shooting at someone (yourself?) while inside a house of mirrors.

"With these mirrors, it's difficult to tell," says Bannister, as Elsa fires off shots, "...but killing me is killing myself, but you know I'm pretty tired of both of us."

Images via TotalFilm.com and Wikipedia.

For more stories on social media and self-obsession, please visit Jon Mitchell's story, "Path, Timeline & Worship of the Self."

Laura Skelton, owner of Prix-Prix, told me about Pinterest months ago when we met up one chilly Chicago morning for brunch. "Have you tried Pinterest?" she asked me with a glint of excitement in her eyes. I shook my head no. "Try it out, but be careful, you'll get addicted." I am always wary of that caveat because I do end up getting addicted. I decided to stop by just to see what was up. I registered for an account and then left. Everything looked too pretty. Then, a few months later, I started receiving a slew of notifications: "So and so is following you on Pinterest." It was around then that Pinterest blew up.

AdAge's David Teicher wrote about how Pinterest is driving traffic to sites like design magazine RealSimple. But more importantly, he writes, "the true potential in Pinterest may be in its ability to impact purchases, which is why retailers like Etsy, Nordstrom, and Lands' End have taken to developing a presence on, and strategy for, this new platform."

We've written about how Facebook is trying to make social commerce work. Or, in less market-y terms, how Facebook is trying to become a mall. The launch of Timeline social apps seemed like a step in that direction, as it included fashion and shopping apps from Fab, Oodle, Pose and Lyst.

Still, Pinterest is showing increasingly strong signs that it is a more effective as a social commerce platform. New data from Monetate show that referral traffic from Pinterest to the websites of five specialty apparel retailers jumped 389% from July-December 2011.

Only 1% of Facebook "fans" engage with brands. Will this change? Right now you can buy donuts and earn Facebook credits through a new loyalty program from Plink. Last year Facebook announced integration with eBay.

Still, Facebook wrongly conflates the social graph with the interest graph, assuming that if your friends like it you will, too. Facebook is organized around the social graph first, whereas Pinterest is focused on the interest graph. Sure, your Facebook friends are probably all on Pinterest, but the true focus of Pinterest is not social. It's interest. Users organize around interests, making Pinterest a natural space for shopping. The visual focus doesn't hurt that, either. Facebook is too focused on the user experience and social, which ends up making it a difficult space for shopping. Plus there's that whole, you know, user distrust over Facebook's long-standing privacy issues, including EPIC's latest request that the FTC look into Facebook Timeline's possible privacy violations.

For more on how businesses are using Pinterest, check out this story by ReadWriteWeb's Dave Copeland.

Today 1000memories launched the ShoeBox Facebook app, which gives you an opportunity to scan paper photos from the past and post them to Facebook. It brings back those "pre-Internet photos from the past."

"A Facebook Timeline-integrated app (such as ShoeBox) which lets you post photos into the past, represents a recreation of an autobiographical memory," says Dr. Ash Nadkarni of the Boston Medical Center's Department of Psychiatry. (She co-authored the study "Why Do People Use Facebook?") "There are several facets of this activity that could influence our perception of our memories -- specifically by triggering memory bias, a cognitive bias that enhances or impairs the recall of a memory."

If this photo belonged to you, and you wanted to put it into the year 1981 on your Facebook Timeline, you could use ShoeBox to do that.

"It's easy to forget that Facebook is only seven years old, which means most of our photos and memories are not online yet," says 1000memories co-founder, Rudy Adler. "We built ShoeBox to finally get these photos from our past out of the closet and online where they can be enjoyed by everyone."

These photos might be enjoyed, but how will sharing them affect the memory you have of what actually happened?

"Sharing photos into your past plays on a type of memory bias called rosy retrospection, the remembering of the past as having been better than it really was," says Dr. Nadkarni. "So, as a result, a person may wind up remembering their first date as having been much better than it really was."  

Posting old photos could also trigger an egocentric bias, explains Nadkarni, which recalls the past in a self-serving manner. "When a person posts and views a picture of their college graduation--they may remember their exam grades as being better than they were."

Another bias that posting old photos could trigger is the misinformation effect. "Misinformation affects people's reports of their own memory," Dr. Nadkarni explains. "So, if a friend posts a comment to your wall about a photo of the two of you together at your high school prom as 'great party,' you're more likely to remember it as such, even if you'd actually had a so-so time."

Facebook Timeline wants us to upload those photos, regardless of any cognitive bias they could trigger.

After installing the Facebook ShoeBox app, you can connect with Facebook friends or e-mail address book contacts. You can also download the ShoeBox iPhone app to start scanning, or just upload photos directly from your computer to Facebook.

The makers of ShoeBox want to help you dig up--err, remember--your past. Because without it, how can you truly be yourself on Facebook?

Flickr image via Alan Denney.

I know what you're thinking. But as much as we (and I) have issues with Facebook's feelings about privacy and data, sharing intrinsically makes us feel connected. Here are five frictionless sharing apps that do so in a non-creepy way.

FoodSpotting, that wonderful little app that lets users share what they're eating and where they're eating it, is a natural fit for Facebook social sharing. If you're a foodie who is friends with other foodies on Facebook, chances are you're already discussing food. Just think about the number of Instagrammed food photos that you already see in your Facebook news feed. Sharing pictures of what you're eating isn't weird, and sharing them with your Facebook friends will not only expand your visual food vocabulary, it might help you connect with other like-minded foodies. The FoodSpotting social app also makes finding Facebook less cumbersome, since you're already on the network.

Foodily: Another Harmless Food App

Food is social. We have people over for dinner, we get invited to dinner parties, people cook us food when they want to apologize or just get to know us. The Foodily Facebook app just makes sense. Why not share what you're cooking with your Facebook friends? Let's say you have some buffalo burgers in the freezer, and you're sick of Googling recipes or using the Epicurious food app for your iPhone. You're wondering what friends are cooking, or maybe you just want to share what you are cooking. Do that with the Foodily app. You can also follow different recipes for the same food. I just followed Buffalo Burger, for example, which brings up an impressive selection.

Where I've Been: Show Off Your Worldliness

Unless you're super paranoid about your friends know where you've traveled and lived, this app's won't feel creepy. It's not weird to learn about peoples' life experiences. What's weird when it comes to location on social networks is knowing where your friends are at all times. Not only is that unnecessary, it's also rather stalker-ish. (And it's why I stopped checking into places on Facebook and using Foursquare.) Would I tell a somewhat new-ish friend that I once lived in Nicaragua? Certainly. Would I tell that same person via a Facebook share? Probably. It's an experience that I'm proud of. The "Where I've Been" social app on Facebook makes those types of experiences easier to share with a broader group of people.

Pinterest Friends Facebook

The pinning craze is on, and it's dominated by women ages 25-44 years-old. Pinterest is 80% women and 20% gentlemen. Thinking along those lines, a Facebook Pinterest app might actually help diversify the Pinterest audience by bringing in more Facebook boys. Or it could go the other way: Women who are already using Pinterest will install the Facebook app, and just double-share what they're pinning to both social networks. Regardless, the creepiness factor here is pretty minimal. Pinterest is an image-sharing service that people use to curate and cull together their favorite images from the Web. It's like Tumblr but slightly more personal.

Pinterest has been quite a hot button topic around ReadWriteWeb: Jon Mitchell argues that Pinterest actually tackles sharing better than Google+. John Paul Titlow admits to passively using Pinterest for sharing over the past few weeks, curating images that relate to the "future of music," which is one of his beats. Dave Copeland wrote "A Guy's Guide to Pinterest," which argues that the site isn't just for the ladies. I can't help but wonder if the Pinterest Facebook app will prove all my colleagues wrong, especially when it comes to the crossover audience of Facebook and Pinterest.

Social Movie Watching: Rotten Tomatoes

As social TV becomes less of an idea and more of a reality, sharing what movies you want to watch really isn't strange at all. The Rotten Tomatoes app is pretty unobtrusive, too. Sign in using your Facebook account, then connect to the site. I don't mind sharing the movies I'd like to see with my Facebook friends. Just the other day, a friend had posted a clip from the John Waters movie, "Female Trouble," and I commented on it. That turned out to be an interesting Facebook conversation about John Waters' films. Would I do the same thing about a movie I found on Rotten Tomatoes? Certainly. Sometimes "liking" something is just a conversation starter.

Users have seven days to clean up their profiles before their Timeline goes live, transforming the bulletin board-like profile into a visual scrapbook of their lives.

With Timeline, users have the option to add a second, bigger magazine-esque "cover photo" in addition to the profile photo. The profile photo has changed in size from a rectangle or square to a thumbnail that resembles a driver's license photo. Social apps, which automatically share a user's activity, are one of Timeline's key features.

Users can choose to hide posts from their Timeline, change the date, or add a location. They can also narrow the audience for posts both past and present.

With Activity Log, users can go back and perform more granular privacy settings to past posts. This also gives a clearer overview of all the posts at once, which is something you definitely could not do on the "old" Facebook profiles.

Last week, Facebook rolled out 60 new Timeline apps for food, fitness, entertainment, shopping, fashion, ticketing, job searches and more. Music streaming service Pandora and "read later" app Instapaper did not join the rollout.

Facebook's Timeline rollout began in New Zealand on December 6, and to the rest of the world on December 15, 2011.

Not every user is excited about switching over to Timeline, which brings up additional questions about privacy. EPIC sent a letter to the FTC, asking it to further investigate possible privacy breaches and Timeline.

Aviary will now compete with the likes of Instagram, which recently began allowing users to publish their images directly to Facebook. Previously, the hipster-fun Instagrams lived only in Instagramland, never seeing the light of Facebook day.

The bigger question here: Will users trade in the über-popular mobile social Instagram for a Facebook photo editing app? Probably not. But at least now there's another way to add that retro tint to your photos without ever leaving Facebook.

With the IntoNow iPhone app, you can identify the shows your friends are watching by analyzing the audio signal. Then you can share those TV shows with your Facebook friends.

Trident is not a bubblegum app. It's yet another apps for seeing what shows your friends are watching, liking and commenting on.

The U-Verse social TV app integrates directly with the Facebook Platform. You can share what you're watching and what you "like."

Zeebox is a social TV app with a slightly different twist. Instead of just seeing what your friends are watching and liking, you can also post those shows directly to your Facebook Timeline.

The Snapstick app for Facebook Timeline is designed for playing and watching video, listening to music and surfing channels with your friends. Web content is streamed directly to your TV.

With the Xbox app, you can share game achievements with friends, which seems more useful than just dumping them into the crowded Facebook news feed. You can also share shows, music and pictures taken with their Kinect device.

The Slacker Radio app is similar to frictionless sharing music services Spotify, MOG and Rdio. You discover and listen to music with friends through Web or mobile devices.

Earlier this week, Kodak launched two Facebook-integrated cameras and two apps; could these two moves save Kodak from its tenuous pre-bankruptcy state?

Facebook and Mercedes-Benz announced a new Facebook app that allows drivers to access Facebook friends and restaurants that their friends have "liked." The new feature will be available in the 2012 SL-Class Mercedes this upcoming spring.

With integration of cars, cameras, music, TV and games, will Facebook become your one true login?

Six months ago, the Mercedes-Benz engineering team began developing a Facebook app. The new product offers a way for drivers to access Facebook friends who are close, or nearby restaurants that their friends have "liked" on Facebook. The feature will be available in the 2012 SL-Class Mercedes this spring as part of the mbrace2 telematics system, which includes cloud-based apps, traffic and navigation assistance, speech recognition and Internet browsing. mbrace also features a smartphone app, which allows drivers to send information to their vehicle before actually stepping into it.

Kodak announced Facebook integration into two new cameras, along with two new Facebook apps especially for creating photo albums from profile photos.

Mercedes-Benz is not the only brand to announce Facebook integration at CES 2012.

In another step toward the future of social TV on Facebook, DirectTV is slated to unveil a Facebook social TV app, which allows users to share what they're watching and add commentary.

Kodak also announced two Facebook apps: With My Kodak Moments you can create photo books from Facebook albums. Kodak Photo Collage Print is an app for creating print collages out of Facebook photos.

With iPhone apps like Postcards on the Run and Cards for the iPhone 4S, users snap a photo with their iPhones and send out a real paper card.

This suggests that there's still a market for smaller collectibles like postcards from friends.

The same could apply to intimate Facebook photos of friends - online or offline, a picture is still worth a thousand words. But do you really want to take that Facebook photo offline?

When the company began trading on NASDAQ this morning, the public offering kicked off at the high end at $10 per share. Forbes reports that shares did not see a customary first-day trading pop. It has, however, sold 100 million shares at $10 each. Zynga is valued at $7 billion.

A few days ago, analysts predicted that Zynga would under-perform, and that shares were priced too high for a company with such a high-risk business model. Sterne Agee analyst suggested a $7 target. Within the first 10 minutes of trading, it dropped below its initial public offering price.

In its developer agreements, Facebook promises Zynga that it won't make any Facebook games. If it does, Zynga can bolt. In its initial filing, Zynga noted that almost all of its unique monthly active users were from Facebook. But Facebook will not flat out buy Zynga because Google is a Zynga investor - and Facebook certainly doesn't want to pay off one of its main rivals. That's why Zynga is keeping its options open.

In October, Zynga launched Project Z, a social network designed for games and discussions about them. It's hosted on Zynga's own site, and was designed as a way to gain a bit of independence from Facebook. One month prior to the announcement of Project Z, and one day after Facebook's f8 conference, Google launched Zynga's CityVille on Google+, hinting at another node of independence from Facebook. Google had been building a game platform for a year or more prior to the CityVille Google+ announcement. Some analysts believe that Google Plus games will rival Facebook.

Zynga launched its first Android social game in November 2010. A few months later, it launched the hit Words With Friends for Android, again shifting the focus away from Facebook dependence.

Even still, Zynga's mobile games are tied to the social graph, and Project Z uses Facebook Connect.

There's no doubt that Facebook Timeline will eventually go live for iOS apps. But for now, Facebook seems to be mostly focused on its HTML5 web app project. The fact that Timeline mobile isn't going live for iOS anytime soon is proof of that.

Why Has Facebook Delayed Timeline For iOS?

At f8, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that all of Facebook's features, including Timeline, would work on the mobile web. Facebook updated its Android app last week, and it features a UI that looks a lot like Facebook's iPad app. Facebook will continue shifting to HTML5, converging its platform into a single UI. Indeed, Facebook Timeline does work on the mobile web.

Besides, Facebook and Apple have a history of bad blood that dates back to Apple Ping days. Facebook was supposed to integrate Ping, but it never did. Then Facebook integrated social music service, Spotify. When Apple released the iPhone4S, it baked Twitter, not Facebook, into iOS5.

Given this history, there's no reason for Facebook to rush the Timeline update to its iOS apps. But will this situation echo the long wait for the Facebook iPad app?

PayPal and Facebook want to bring together the world's biggest social network, and the world's largest online payments company - and e-cards may be the bridge to making that happen.