Facebook is holding a press event on Thursday morning at 10am PT. I’ll be there–and as an experiment, instead of liveblogging the news here on Technologizer, I’ll cover it on Twitter, where I’m @harrymccracken. See you there, I hope…

Has somebody made you so angry that you couldn’t wait until you got home so you could unfriend them on Facebook? If you have an iPhone, you won’t have to wait. As part of the new update to the Facebook app, an “Unfriend” button has been added to the application, allowing users to dump their pals on the go.

The functionality is not yet in the Android version, and the company has not said when it expects it to be. In addition, we’re all still waiting for an official iPad app–something that I’m beginning to think may never materalize!

All kidding aside on the unfriending front, there were also some other really nice additions to the app. You may remember my post on event check-ins from last month: the feature is now available within the app.

Users will also now be able to use a map to view the locations of friends rather than the standard list that the app has been using since Places was introduced last August. This makes the feature a lot more like Loopt, which has always displayed the locations of friends on a map — which just seems a logical move to me.

Do you “like” things on Facebook? Spammers like things, too, and they’re using Facebook’s “Like” function to put their obnoxious schemes and shameless missives everywhere.

Facebook assumed they were doing Facebook Page administrators a favor when they added the option to “Use Facebook as Page.” This meant that customized Facebook pages could Like, post, and comment around the site just as regular profile users do.

It didn’t take long for spammers to realizes by using their page as a profile and “Liking” others’ pages, they could spread their message and elude the Facebook police.

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I spent the last few days at the CTIA Wireless show in Orlando, and the big news at the show wasn’t big news from the show. It was, of course, the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile US. Everyone at the conference seemed to still be processing it in their minds–and I decided to ask my friends over at Twitter (where I’m @harrymccracken) for their takes as of right now.

What are your thoughts on the prospect of AT&T and T-Mobile merging? (I might quote you on Technologizer.)—
Harry McCracken (@harrymccracken) March 24, 2011

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Facebook is apparently set to expand what its users can check in to, testing out a new “check in” button for events that’s available to users of its iPhone/iPod Touch mobile website, according to AllFacebook.com. While the button is not visible to those using the app just yet, those visiting the Safari version should see it.

The social networking site hasn’t provided too much information other than that the functionality is in testing and that the company plans to include it in the next release of the iPhone app. It is not clear whether or not the button would also be included in the Android app as well, but I am betting it will.

Checking in has become a much more popular activity on Facebook, as the company steals more and more of Foursquare’s thunder In fact, there really isn’t much that Foursquare does when it comes to checking in that Facebook hasn’t added itself.

By adding the functionality to events, Facebook could help those promoting these events better gauge how well their promotions on Facebook work. We all know folks who mark themselves as “attending” but never show up. (Hey, it happened to me this weekend. )

“You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.“

-Mark Zuckerberg, as quoted in The Facebook Effect

It is with Zuckerberg’s remarks in mind that I read a couple of conversations over the weekend about Facebook’s new comment system for blogs and other websites. Although many websites — including this one — allow commenters to sign in with Facebook, some high-profile sites, such as TechCrunch, have switched over the new system, which is run entirely by the social network. This requires commenters to write under their real names, provided they aren’t using an alias on Facebook, and by default displays the comment on the user’s wall and friends’ news feeds.

Not surprisingly, the switch had a chilling effect on TechCrunch, according to MG Siegler. Although the venomous remarks that once dominated the site’s peanut gallery are gone, in their place are “comments that gush about the subject of the article in an overly sycophantic way,” Siegler writes. There are also fewer comments overall.

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Although Angry Birds got its start on the iPhone, it didn’t linger there for long. The hit bird-slinging puzzle game has since migrated to Android, iPad, WebOS, Windows, Mac and the Playstation Network.

Next up is Facebook, where Angry Birds will be landing later this year, according to Develop. And because of the game’s existing popularity — it’s been downloaded 75 million times on other platforms, and some pundits have compared its cultural impact to Pac-Man — Angry Birds has a decent shot at stealing the Facebook gaming throne from Zynga, developer of Farmville, Cityville and Mafia Wars.

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Social networking site Facebook created quite a stir last month when it announced that it would share much more personal details of its users — such as addresses and phone numbers — with third party developers. The move was so controversial that the company quickly reversed its plans and delayed the offering while it weighed its options. It also attracted the ire of Congress.

In a response to Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), the company now says it plans to go ahead with offering the functionality. “We expect that, once the feature is re-enabled, Facebook will again permit users to authorize applications to obtain their contact information,” the company wrote, adding it was looking into ways to “further enhance user control.”

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As Google and Facebook quibble over user data, the relationship between Facebook and Microsoft is only getting cozier.

Since December, Bing has been using Facebook “Likes” to deliver separate results from its main search algorithm. Starting today, Bing is expanding Likes to its algorithmic search results, so every link has the potential to get a nod of approval from your friends.

At a time when search is under fire for being spammy — especially for consumer needs such as product reviews and travel information — the infusion of personal recommendations seems like an antidote. Bing is getting a big boost here by tapping into Facebook’s massive word-of-mouth database — something that Google may never get.

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The issue over the changes to Facebook newsfeeds got a bit more interesting on Friday. While I had surmised on Wednesday that the changes were part of a broader rejiggering of the site (as apparently had Inside Facebook about a week earlier), that’s apparently not the case.

We contacted Facebook to understand more about the changes, and have received an interesting response. “We did not ‘change’ the settings,” spokeperson Jaime Schopflin told Technologizer. “We’ve simplified the News Feed settings that we’ve had in place for over a year. No default behavior has changed.”

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Facebook has been making a few changes to the way your newsfeed operates, some of which have been very visible. But it’s also made one change which you may have not even noticed, and might not want.

The visible changes are nice. For one, clicking on a picture now opens a pop-up rather than taking you to the page with that photo: nice for those like me annoyed they “lose their spot” and have to rescroll through previously read updates. Another is changes to the fan page design, which now mirror the look of profiles and gives Facebook a uniform design throughout.

Okay, nothing wrong with those tweaks. However if you’re like me, and comment on your friend’s statuses and prefer to just watch others, you may have noticed some people apparently are commenting much more, and others much less. This is due to a change in how the site displays your newsfeed: if you haven’t commented, liked, or looked at a person’s profile regularly, they have now seemingly disappeared.

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Facebook’s plan to give developers access to users’ addresses and phone numbers has not gone over so well with many, and now the heads of the House of Representatives’ Privacy Caucus want answers. The feature only lasted three days as the social networking site decided to suspend it pending a better (and less controversial) option.

In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Representatives Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) are asking for specifics on the plans. Among the questions are how this information would be shared and how the process was vetted, as well as asking for specifics on why Facebook ultimately decided to shelve the plan.

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While Facebook has definitely been able to expand its reach through its smartphone apps, there is still a signficant portion–a majority, actually–of mobile phone users who do not own a smartphone, or maybe even want one. The social networking giant seems determined to put itself in front of those consumers as well.

In collaboration with Snaptu, a company that specializes in developing stripped down apps for use on so-called “dumb phones,” Facebook has launched an app which will work on about 2,500 devices from a range of manufacturers including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and LG. It aims to provide a similar experience to that of its fancier smartphone counterpart.

It appears that the focus (at least initially) is to expand mobile usage of the site into developing markets. Facebook has struck deals with several carriers across Asia, Europe, and the Dominican Republic to offer use of the app for 90 days without any data charges.

Facebook plans to offer the application to other carriers worldwide over the next several months, it says. The offering is much like “Zero,” its free-to-use low bandwidth website that the company launched last year.

One caveat–if you are downloading Snaptu in an attempt to get Facebook, unless you’re on a launch carrier it will not work (whether you pay for the data charges or not). It’s not clear when this restriction is set to be lifted. Snaptu still has its own unofficial app, which according to TechCrunch is similar to the official one.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan does great legwork on the Make-My-Baby.com story I wrote about earlier today: Facebook says the company isn’t its third largest advertiser (and in fact was never an advertiser), and Bing says it’s terminating its affiliate relationship.

[UPDATE: Facebook says Ad Age had it wrong and Make-My-Baby.com wasn't a Facebook advertiser at all.]

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb has a post this morning that left me with a chilling sense of deja vu. It’s about a Facebook advertiser named Make-My-Baby.com–according to an Advertising Age story, Facebook’s third-largest advertiser–which has a silly little site that lets you dress up a baby. The site requires you to install a browser plug-in; the plug-in changes your home page and search engine to Bing. From then on, Microsoft gives the Make-My-Baby people a bounty when you click on a search ad in Bing. (Kirkpatrick is reporting on discoveries made by Google’s Matt Cutts.)

It’s all eerily reminiscent of ugly practices of the early-to-mid-2000s in which advertising companies and their partners used a number of practices to install software that pelted PC users with pop-ups and otherwise fouled up their computers. Here’s a 2005 story we did at PC World on the topic.

For the most part, the companies involved in the earlier round of cheesy PC invasions got what was coming to them. The PCW story discusses DirectRevenue, 180Solutions, and WhenU; the first two companies are out of business, and WhenU’s site now leads to information on how to uninstall its software. I wonder how Facebook and Bing will handle the news of this business partner’s behavior?

File this under the so-ridiculous-its-sad-people-believe-it department: sometime around dinnertime Saturday on the East Coast, somebody thought it funny to start the rumor that Facebook would be shutting down on March 15. A Twitter search shows that people actually are taking this seriously, sadly enough. Sorry to disappoint but Facebook is not going anywhere, especially after that $450 million cash infusion from Goldman Sachs…