ReadWriteWeb

Facebook announced this morning that it is launching a new feature, the Friendship Page. The Friendship Page will display public Wall posts and comments between two friends, photos in which both are tagged, Events they RSVP'd for together and other information. You'll be able to see Friendship pages between yourself and a friend, or between any two other people in which you have permission to view both peoples' profiles. In other words: you'll now have a special page that displays all the things you've done with each particular friend.

This feature is a great example of the kinds of things that are possible when rich social graph and user activity data is cross referenced and analyzed for patterns. There are countless different ways this could be done - but Friendship Pages aim right at the heart of why people use Facebook, for the connections it facilitates between family and friends. As with other changes made to Facebook, though, it's logical to ask: will this surface friends' activities that were always publicly available but become controversial once they are centralized in one convenient place?

Despite the fact that he is perhaps one of the world's most famous gangsters, Al Capone wasn't first imprisoned for bootlegging, racketeering or the gangland execution of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre. Instead, Capone was first imprisoned for tax evasion. Whether you're a law abiding citizen or a tax dodging criminal, there's something eerily omniscient about the taxman. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article by Laura Saunders, our all-seeing state revenue agents have increased their power to catch tax evaders through Facebook, MySpace and Google.

Remember Spock? Over a year ago there was a lot of buzz around this vertical search engine for people, but now that excitement has worn off. Instead of searching for people on Spock or other similar people search engines, most users simply turn to old standbys like Facebook or LinkedIn. But don't count Spock out just yet. Their new service, scheduled for launch in a couple of months, will transform them from a simple people search engine to a full-on public record search tool for only $1.99 per month.