Facebook was down for over 2.5 hours for some users, according to a post from the company. A post in Facebook’s engineering notes says:

The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.

The world discovered a little bit more about this mysterious "Google Me" project this week, when Googlers, including CEO Eric Schmidt opened up (just a little bit) at the company’s Zeitgeist event. 

Last year, Facebook settled a trademark dispute with Aaron Greenspan, CEO of Think Computer Corporation and Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg, who built houseSYSTEM, a section of which was called "The Universal Facebook".

Facebook has launched some new features related to controlling game updates seen in the news feed. Before, Facebook users could hide an application story or block it completely, but now game stories will only post to the news feed if you’re actually playing the game. 

Facebook has formed a new partnership with Rotten Tomatoes, which will make Rotten Tomatoes personalized for the user, if they are logged into Facebook. 

This week, Twitter introduced a new redesign of Twitter.com with a two-pane format aimed at providing a richer user experience, and you can easily tell by looking at it that it does just that. 

According to ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez, Twitter VP for business and corporate development Kevin Thau said today that Twitter is not a social network. I seem to recall Facebook saying the same thing a couple years ago. 

AllFacebook has discovered that Facebook is now testing showing all liked news articles in its search results. This would obviously be a significant move as the company competes with Google. Nick O’Neill writes:

Let’s take a look at some points made around the Blogosphere.

Facebook is testing a feature that lets users "subscribe" to other users. Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook shares an official statement from Facebook: "This feature is being tested with a small percent of users. It lets people subscribe to friends and pages to receive notifications whenever the person they’ve subscribed to updates their status or posts new content (photos, videos, links, or notes)."

Facebook may be going through some of the growing pains that Google went through earlier in its life. Google has always had to deal with link farms and link buying, polluting its search results, and has gotten better and better at keeping this under control over the years.

Twitter has launched its official iPad app. There’s a bit more to this than the standard mobile Twitter app.

"Twitter for iPad takes advantage of the iPad’s fluid touch interface, letting you move lots of information around smoothly and quickly – without needing to open and close windows or click buttons," says Twitter’s Leland Rechis.

Facebook has been granted a patent called "Ranking search results based on the frequency of clicks on the search results by members of a social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation". Here’s the abstract:

Update: WebProNews reached out to Teachbook for comment. Read Teachbook’s full response here. See comments from Facebook in the comments section of either article.

You may recall that earlier this year, Facebook took a lot of heat over user privacy. While some may still not be satisfied, the company did release simplified privacy settings in response. Around that time, however, a project called Diaspora started generating a lot of hype as a potential, open alternative to Facebook as a social network.

MySpace has announced a new feature that lets users sync their status updates with their Facebook profiles or Pages, while also letting them share content from their MySpace page with Facebook friends.

"Sync with Facebook allows users to keep their friends on Facebook up to date on everything, including: sharing songs, latest photos, fun game apps, and more," says MySpace’s Jennifer Ruffner.

LinkedIn has launched new search filter features for LinkedIn Recruiter. The company has taken advanced search and refinement filters that have been available, and added them to some new places.

As usual, Facebook is making its way into a lot of headlines for a lot of reasons. While many of them have to do with legal issues, some are also based on the social network itself and other areas of innovation.

A great deal of attention has been put on what Facebook Places means for the future of other check-in apps. This discussion has been around as long as the rumors of Facebook launching a location feature, which have been swirling for quite some time.

Will you check in with Facebook Places? Let us know.

As you may have read, Facebook is suing Teachbook for using the word "book" and being a competitor. To put it in Facebook’s exact words, the company’s Director of Policy Communications, Barry Schnitt, tells WebProNews: