Facebook is planning on allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed, we’ve confirmed. The goal is to centralize all that activity in one place.

Third parties can already integrate directly today via the Facebook API, Beacon and the Facebook Platform, but adoption from these companies, which are indirectly also competing with Facebook, has been slow. Now, users can add the content stream directly. Users simply tell Facebook what third party services they use the most, along with their credentials or public feed for the site. The content stream is then pulled into your Facebook News Feed.

What this means: in your friends news feed, you may start to see more content from Flickr, Twitter, Digg and other third party services. This competes directly with what a number of startups are doing - namely FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and the more recently launched Iminta.

This is certainly an opening up of Facebook. And given that so many tens of millions of users spend so much time on the site already, it could remove the wind from the FriendFeed/Plaxo sails.

But don’t expect to see a RSS feed or widgets showing what you or your friends are up to any time soon. The data feeds that Facebook opened up last year do not extend to the News Feed. And from what we hear, Facebook hasn’t made a decision to open it up yet. Until they do, there is still plenty of breathing room for competitors.

Yahoo is being sued by the Detroit Police and Fire retirement system and general retirement system, as well as “all other similarly situated public shareholders,” over its rebuff of Microsoft.

The new lawsuit follows a similar lawsuit filed February 13 by the Wayne County Employee?s Retirement System of Michigan.

The lawsuit claims that Yahoo’s board is pursuing value-destructive third-party deals in an effort to fight off Microsoft. The suit asks the court to block the Yahoo board from completing any such transaction with third parties and to force it to reconsider Microsoft’s offer. It also asks the court to block Yahoo from implementing defensive measures “that would render the company unattractive to potential buyers.”

“Yahoo’s directors cannot ‘just say no’ indefinitely to legitimate acquisition offers….Likewise, Yahoo’s directors cannot pursue transactions that do not require shareholder approval for the primary purpose of making Yahoo unattractive to Microsoft.”

“Regardless of their emotional ties to Yahoo and their desire to retain their positions as directors at the company, the Yahoo directors owe fiduciary duties to Yahoo and its shareholders.”

It was not clear when the case may be heard by the Delaware Chancery Court.

(via AP)

There is a lot of funny money on Facebook, but it is getting really bad. Startups are trying to raise money based on virtual valuations. Earlier this week, I wrote about a fishy Facebook organization in the making called the UADA. It is listed on Facebook-stat site Adonomics as the biggest Facebook app company, even though it doesn’t seem to exist yet. Altura Ventures, a Facebook-focused VC firm which owns and operates Adonomics, is also behind the UADA and is conveniently using Adonomics to promote the mystery company before its launch on February 29.

But the UADA isn’t even funded yet. It turns out that Altura is trying to raise a seed round of $250,000 for the UADA, and another $250,000 for Adonomics, which will be spun off from its parent company, KallOut. (Stay with me, Altura and KallOut are two entities that are joined at the hip). From a letter to prospective investors, the UADA is described as a “virtual roll-up of the facebook developers? ad real estate that will likely represent 200 to 400 million installs, 40 to 50 million unique and 6 to 10 million daily active users.”

Notice the term “virtual roll-up.” A real roll-up would be a company aiming to buy up the best Facebook apps. That would actually make sense since there are more than 16,000 Facebook apps and consolidation is inevitable. But the UADA is not actually buying anything. Instead, it is trying to sign up Facebook app developers to its “cooperative” which will cross-promote their applications and run advertising across the network of apps. The reason this is only a”virtual” roll-up is because the UADA will only collect 20 percent of any revenues generated across the network. So it is really just a marketing agreement.

Lee Lorenzen, the CEO of Altura Ventures and interim CEO of the UADA, has bigger dreams. And they are dreams. The guy has not even raised his $250,000 seed round yet, and he is already counting on closing a $3 to $6 million series A round by May 24. Not only that, he’s also got his IPO all planned out, at which point all the developers who sign up for the UADA will miraculously agree to reverse the revenue split 80/20 in the UADA’s favor in return for cash and stock. Sounds good, except that the letter to potential investors makes clear that no “definitive agreements with TheUADA members” have even been signed.

Here’s the part I love. Lorenzen is apparently clairvoyant:

This company will be profitable from day one based on its 20% share of ad revenue on 1 to 5 billion page views per month under management. . . . Upon IPO, this company will have $30+ million in revenue and $20+ million in earnings and long term rights to all the ad real estate of the majority of top apps on Facebook. From this platform, TheUADA will buy or build a suite of category killer apps (e.g., dating, gifting, shopping, calendar, etc.) for the mainstream social operating system (this is equivalent to the position the Microsoft Office Suite enjoys on Windows).

This is the next Microsoft, folks! And you can own one percent of it now for only $25,000!

Oh, and did I forget to mention that the $500,000 Lorenzen is hoping to raise for both the UADA and Adonomics will go towards “transferring some of KallOut?s IP into these businesses to fund KallOut?s operations.” That’s right, KallOut’s operations, not the UADA’s or Adonomics. So how will the UADA function? Lorenzen and KallOut employees will provide “engineering and management services” to both the UADA and Adonomics for a mere $100,000 a month (this is on top of the $500,000). Talk about cashing out the shareholders before you’ve actually done anything.

If you receive this invitation in your Facebook inbox to invest in the UADA, my advice to you is to just delete it and unfriend whoever sent it to you.

The number of people who visit Facebook has been leveling off over the past few months in the U.S., and even dipped by about 800,000 individuals in January. According to the latest stats from comScore, Facebook attracted 33.9 million unique visitors in January, 2008, down 2 percent from 34.7 million in December, 2007. Maybe all that friend spam has something to do with the decline. Will the Facebook fatigue get worse, or is this just a temporary dip?

Worldwide, Facebook is still doing fine. It grew 3 percent in January over December, attracting 100.7 million unique visitors. (MySpace had 109.3 million visitors worldwide, up 2 percent month-over-month. And in the U.S., it was slightly down as well from 68.9 million visitors in December, 2007 to 68.6 million in January, 2008. Despite its larger size, though, MySpace lost fewer visitors in the U.S. than Facebook did).

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