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So Facebook is enabling Flash to be used on profile pages, according to a report on All Facebook. What’s that all about? There seems to be a general fear that the introduction of Flash will turn the majority of Facebook profiles pages to MySpace-esqe mini, online versions of Vegas, the city of lights and countless distractions.

Well, be calmed by the fact that Facebook is only allowing businesses and select services to create dynamic web pages that support Flash. This is all made available through its Flash product called Facebook Pages, which was designed as a tool for the businesses that participate in Facebook’s culture.

While Facebook has been dishing out the updated amendments to the list of regulations that are designed to whip application developers into shape, there’s another sector of entities that would like to use Facebook for promotional purposes too. It’s these folks Facebook is after with the allowance of Flash profile pages, especially as they’re often the ones to participate in advertising campaigns, and things of that nature.

With that, I doubt such freedom will be extended to the rest of the Facebook users, and I even have a feeling that these business promo pages will still be rather restricted in terms of design, regardless of the Flash capabilities.

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What if you could take the theory of brand recognition and apply it to learning a new language? You’d essentially be taking the tactic of immersion, to some degree, in order to pick up on new vocabulary words on a regular basis. A new application called LearnIt has begun to apply the theory of brand recognition to the learning of a new language, using the web as a giant billboard.

LearnIt Lists aren’t found in a stand-alone site, but operate through a series of widgets that you can place nearly everywhere on the web you may find yourself frequenting. That includes your iGoogle start page, your Facebook account, your MySpace profile, and more. So what LearnIt does is provide a list of 10 words in this cross-platform widget, and it’s present nearly everywhere you go on the web. Today, LearnIt Lists are now available for your iPhone as well. Get it here.

Once you get your LearnIt widget set up, you can also modify the settings to hook up with your web search, so that the daily words will be present across the web in a more contextual manner. LearnIt is still in beta development, so there are a number of tweaks to still work out, but its concept of introducing new words to you on a regular basis is interesting.

Given LearnIt Lists’ branding approach, I do wonder if any behavioral considerations will be incorporated into its application in order to determine the optimal way in which these widgets will be best used in the “immersion” sense. While I don’t see this application being largely effective in its current state, but layering in some browser add-ons for additional and more integrated exposure that can be involved in a more comprehensive manner would make LearnIt Lists that much more useful to its members.

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iFamily has shed its Adams Family appearance and taken on a far more friendly persona. Renamed Familybuilder, you may recall that the iFamily (now FamilyBuilder) application works by looking to your existing network within Facebook in order to connect your actual family tree, letting you begin directly with your own network.

The family-tree building tool has sent over some numbers for its Facebook application, which was launched last summer. FamilyBuilder is reporting 7 million profiles and 2 million registered users for its Facebook application alone. To continue banking on such application opportunities, FamilyBuilder is taking its show onto Bebo. Get it here.

The Series A funding didn’t hurt either. The funding amount totals $1.5 million from DN Capital, and this really showcases the fact that we’re seeing a healthy amount of monetary interest in the application space, especially as other services create centralizing systems that span across a number of platforms. FamilyBuilder’s funding will go towards the expansion of its family tree-building applications across other social networks as well.

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Mashable is proud to announce a media sponsorship for the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco from April 22-25, 2008. Web 2.0 Expo takes the pulse of the Web ecosystem and looks to its future, shining a spotlight across the Web 2.0 landscape to show how the Internet Revolution is being created and delivered. It showcases the latest Web 2.0 business models, development paradigms and design strategies for designers, developers, entrepreneurs, VCs, marketers, product managers and business strategists, from start-ups to enterprises. Web 2.0 Expo is for the builders of the next generation web; people who have experiences to share and a passion for learning–the hot new thing, lessons from failures, innovations and inspirations, and the practical applications of all of the above.

What will you do with the power of Web 2.0? Join your colleagues find out how you can tap the power of Web 2.0; save your place and register today at web2expo.com/sf.

Mashable readers can take $100 off the pass by registering with coupon code “websf08ob16″.

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On a seasonally slow Friday, much is being made over some seasonally slow numbers that comScore released about Facebook and the other top social networks. Actually, we posted about these numbers a couple weeks ago, but focused on the engagement aspect – users spending less time on social networks, versus the unique visitor count, which has essentially been flat since August of last year. At the time, comScore had reported that users on Facebook were spending 10% less time on the site than they had in the same month the prior year.

I think engagement is the more interesting stat to look at, since in the long-term there are only so many users you can acquire, but an infinite amount of ways to make them spend more time on your Web site and load more pages. Compete.com has taken a look at how users (in the US) are engaging with Facebook applications, and while those too saw a slight decline in visitors from December-to-January, page views for them were up 14.6% to a record 1.53 billion. Likewise, pageviews at Facebook on the whole were up 18.3% to 18.3 billion. Here's the chart:

As we noted in our earlier coverage, according to comScore, Facebook's year-over-year growth in unique visitors is still up a robust 78.6%. As Allen Stern properly notes, "whatever caused the graph to have the same shape last winter is causing the graph to have that shape again this year."

What's actually going on here is users who are on Facebook are spending more time there, and assuming traffic picks up in the same seasonal fashion it did last year, Facebook will be a much stronger web site and in a better position to start generating serious advertising revenue.

And, let us not forget on the whole how inaccurate third-party tracking service can be, which make many of the arguments you read (including this one) worth little more than the digital paper they’re printed on. This just in from a Facebook spokesperson:

“The number of users for Facebook continues to climb in the UK. Our internal monthly active user numbers rose between December and January in the UK and are now at more than 8.3 million. Facebook tracks active monthly users, rather than registered user or unique visitors. Active users reflect those who have used the site in the past 30 days.”

“Active Users” is indeed the right metric to measure performance by, and both the public stats and internal numbers for Facebook tell us that it’s moving in the right direction.

Now, go enjoy your weekend

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The Cult of the Dead Cow, the world renowned hacking group, today released a tool that utilizes known server exploits as search terms in Google to find vulnerable systems.

The CDC is probably best known for their release of Back Orifice ten years ago.  The system demonstrated to a very wide audience the concept of a trojan horse to the masses, but they’ve released a bevy of interesting tools over the year.  Most of them serve the purposes of either exposing widespread vulnerabilities in common computing platforms or creating tools used to circumvent governmental restrictions on Internet usage for the purposes of “social activism.”

The new CDC tool is called Goolag Scan, and is just as incendiary as any of the other tools they’ve released. The installable utility makes it easy for users of any skill level to track down vulnerabilities and sensitive information on “a specific website or broad web domains.”

“It’s no big secret that the Web is the platform, and this platform pretty much sucks from a security perspective,” said CDC spokesperson Oxblood Ruffin told Techworld today. “We’ve seen some pretty scary holes through random tests with the scanner in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. If I were a government, a large corporation, or anyone with a large website, I’d be downloading this beast and aiming it at my site yesterday.”

Results of vulnerability searches are displayed as link lists in your browser, and come complete with error messages indicating the nature of the vulnerability and exploit.

You can download the software at Goolag.org.

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