Update : The ever-reliable Nick O’Neil from Social Times clarifies – “That isn’t actually threaded comments.  It’s the new share format.”

Looks like something’s new brewing up at Facebook. The world’s largest social network appears to be experimenting with a new threaded commenting system. At present only a select few users are noted to be seeing the feature enabled on their profile. The new threaded commenting system will allow users to comment on comments made by other friends. This is pretty similar to the ‘Like’ function that was recently introduced on comments by Facebook.

The threaded commenting system at present looks like only two-level deep. I am yet to come across those that are more deeper than that at the moment. There is no announcement about this on the Facebook blog as of now. Do you see this feature on your profile? Do let me know in the comments section below.

Those of you who own iOS (iPhone or iPod Touch) or Android devices rejoice. Vonage – the popular VoIP service provider has launched a new Vonage Mobile App for Facebook that will allow users to make free voice calls to their friends on Facebook by using their mobile app.

Do note that to use the app, both the caller and the receiver must have the application installed on their mobile devices. Once installed, the caller may simply sign into the app using their Facebook credentials and surf through their friends list. The Vonage app will display a small sign of their service against those user names who have already downloaded and installed the app. These user names may simply be tapped for the free voice call to be initiated. Alternately, the app users may also choose to simply text-message with other friends who are online on Facebook.

The Vonage mobile app for Facebook (iTunes) is clearly an attempt to go viral with clever use of social media and the offer of free voice calls. There are no caveats as far as I can see. Nevertheless, Vonage for the win here.

Folks at ReadWriteWeb have written about a new section that MySpace has been experimenting called MySpace Everything. The section, located at MySpace.com/Everything is noted to be a celebrity news portal that will aggregate celebrity news content from elsewhere and is aimed at driving up subscriptions to topic news and consequently enliven the MySpace news feed.

While this does sound like an exciting experiment, trouble is that the MySpace Everything is everything that Yahoo OMG does. Yahoo OMG, as you may know is a celebrity news website that has a characteristic photo-heavy look to it where news items are lined up by images and not text.

This could potentially invite legal trouble for News Corp that is already battling the loss of eyeballs on what was once the world’s biggest social network. Yahoo had filed for a patent application on the OMG user interface. To be fair, the patent to the Sunnyvale based company is still pending. But in case it does, News Corp may have to feed their lawyers one more time.

Facebook has been crossing one milestone after another in the past few months. The company announced the registration of the network’s 500 millionth member earlier this month and according to a recent estimate by Inside Facebook, the world’s largest social networking service could make as much as $1.1 billion in 2010.

Looking at the fast growth over the past few months and also the uncertainty that exists in the longer term – MySpace dropped down the cliff in less than two years time – it was popularly speculated that Facebook may choose to file for an IPO by next year.

However, according to a recent revelation on Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook may have decided to put off the company’s initial public offering at the stock markets by at least a year. The reason, it is believed, is to ensure that the company earns more users and revenues without the additional scrutiny that comes with going public.

With revenues of $1.1 billion, that growth may be possible. However, the company may also be losing out on building a much more robust cash chest by delaying the IPO filing. With Google rumored to be working on a social networking rival, there are external threats to Facebook as well in the long term. I would have personally wanted Facebook to go for an IPO sooner. What do you think?

A report on The New York Times indicates that the United States Congress may be rethinking its decision on the ban imposed on internet gambling four years ago. According to the report, the House Financial Services Committe has approved a bill in this regard that would mandate the United States Treasury to commence licensing and regulating activities related to internet gambling inside the country.

This is just one step in the entire process of legalizing internet gambling though. Another measure is pending before the committee that will direct the IRS to begin taxing businesses and individuals on their revenues. The US Government is expected to earn as much as $42 billion from the opening up of internet gambling in the next ten years.

It will be interesting to see how the lobbyists who had apparently spent “tens of millions” to effect the ban in 2006 will react to this change in Government policy. What do you think? Is legalizing internet gambling a good thing?

Friendster is reported to have partnered with Smart2Pay to bring additional modes of payment to the social network’s Wallet feature. As users of Friendster may already know, the Friendster Wallet allows users to make transactions at the Friendster Gift Shop. The virtual goods economy at Friendster is said to be one of the primary cash cows to the company that has garnering increasing popularity in South East Asia.

Friendster was founded in 2002 and was one of the earliest social networks to become popular in the USA. However, with the international growth and popularity of Facebook, other social networks have increasingly come under threat and Friendster is no different. The website was purchased by Malaysian entrepreneur Ganesh Bangah for an estimated $26.4 million.

Friendster’s partnership with Smart2Pay shall make it easy for users to refill their Friendster Wallet which is expected to commensurately improve the network’s ability to make money off virtual transactions.

Are all your ‘friends’ on Facebook actually your friends? Well, quite a lot of your contacts may be your childhood friends or contacts from yesteryears who you may not speak to on a regular basis. Also, a few of your friends are family, others from high school and a few more from your music class.

So if you are looking for a better way to organize these friends better, you must check out this Facebook app named ‘Friend Organizer‘. Very much like what the name suggests, this application allows you to create virtual folders to sort your ‘High School friends’, ‘Work friends’,etc.

The app is free and is easy to use. Also, you may now surf through a smaller groups while throwing up a party for your work friends. A great time saver.

There are some services that you love simply at first sight and Envolve is definitely one of them. The concept of Envolve is simple – Add a Facebook-like Chat service to your own website or blog. To get started, publishers merely have to sign up for the service and insert a tiny piece of code to their website. Once done, visitors to the website may start chatting with other users online using the Facebook-like Chat box at the bottom right part of the screen. Users may either sign up or use the randomly awarded anonymous profile. Either ways, Envolve helps website visitors to get started on discussions with other readers.

Envolve is also available as a WordPress plugin and expect it to be installed on the GoRumors Social Web channel shortly. So how does the company make money? Well, the service is free that supports up to 5 simultaneous users. Other plans include a $9 a month plan for allowing up to 10 visitors and the costs rise constantly up to $99 a month for 200 concurrent users.

I think that is the most tricky part of the service. While this is no doubt a very attractive feature that bloggers shall be interested in, this is not exactly a profit-center as far as the publishing business goes. Consequently I wonder if bloggers would really be keen on signing up plans simply to let more users join in a conversation.

What do you think?

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting piece of news that could possibly indicate that a new pay-per-follower monetization model is on the cards. This follows reports on TechCrunch of a new feature on Twitter search that prominently displays Twitter user accounts on search results.

Marshall Kirkpatrick speculates if this could eventually allow users to advertise their user accounts on Twitter search to gain more followers. The business idea is not entirely innovative. Facebook has, for a long time, let brands to advertise their fan pages to users in order to win fans.

However, RWW’s speculations points more towards a CPA model whereby brands/accounts only pay for every follower gained. It is not clear if these Twitter user accounts shall be promoted beyond the search pages. Also, it is not clear if third party Twitter clients like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck will be offered a share of the revenues based on referrals from these clients.

Nevertheless, this could be an interesting new way to monetize without having the user to bounce away from Twitter’s website.

This is one rumor that will never die ever. For more than two years, there have been repeated speculation among the Facebook regulars that the world’s most popular social network may finally begin to charge users for access to the website. There have been blogs, fan pages and Facebook groups created by ill-informed users to plead the website against the decision.

Now apparently bored of these constant rumor-mongering, Facebook has made a subtle change on the website homepage that makes the company’s position clear – Facebook is free to sign up and shall always remain so.

If you are one of those Facebook users who have been fooled into thinking that Facebook might actually begin to charge for content, now all that you have to do is refer your friends to the Facebook home page that shows this message: