The popular social-networking site has tweaked its home page yet again. This time around, the redesign puts more of Facebook's core features and settings right on the home page. The goal is to spare users from having to jump from one page to another to access their favorite features.

The redesign was rolled out to the first group of users on Thursday, Facebook's 6th birthday. As of Thursday evening, 80 million out of Facebook's 400 million customers should have received the new home page, according to Inside Facebook.

The top menu of the Facebook home page now displays icons for requests, messages, and other notifications. The icons turn into red bubbles when you've got new requests waiting for your attention. Just click on one of the icons, and a drop-down menu appears showing you all the items in that list.

If you're one of Facebook's 350-million-plus members, you've probably noticed a handful of people on your friends list changing their profile photos to pictures of celebrities, cartoon characters, Muppets, and other notable figures recently.

That's because an unofficial viral craze called "Doppelganger Week" has arisen on the social network. To participate, you change your profile picture to a celebrity or otherwise notable figure whom you resemble (or like to think you resemble).

Nobody's really sure where Doppelganger Week came from or who started it. It's particularly funny considering the recent emergence of more photos from the set of "The Social Network," a movie based on the origins of Facebook in which the company's early executives are portrayed by, yes, celebrity doppelgangers.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's contention last week that privacy is becoming less important to online users caused a stir across the Internet and among privacy advocates.

Zuckerberg told an audience at the 2009 Crunchies Awards ceremonies in San Francisco on Friday that social norms are changing and people don't expect or want nearly as much privacy as they have in the past.

"When we got started, the question people asked was, 'Why would I want to put any information on the Internet?'," he said during the presentation of awards to top online startups and makers of innovative technology.

Thousands of female users - and some male ones - began updating their statuses on Friday with “beige”, “hot pink”, “crimson red”, “sexy black and gold” or even “nothing”.

As online confusion raged and dozens of bloggers speculated about its meaning, it was disclosed it was part of a new campaign to help raise awareness for breast cancer.

Within hours of the craze starting, dozens of Facebook groups began appearing, with one group “breast cancer awareness ♥ I updated my Status with my Bra colour ♥”, having more than 33,000 fans.

Facebook recently has made headlines for the ways in which it is calling attention to the challenges of online safety, particularly with respect to social networks. On Monday, Facebook launched a Safety Advisory Council -- one of a number of ways the social networking site is trying to batten down the hatches and provide a safer online environment.

- Facebook's Safety Advisory Board comprises five leading Internet safety organizations from North America and Europe that will advise Facebook on online safety policy. The members of the Safety Advisory Board are Childnet International, The Family Online Safety Institute, Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely and WiredSafety. One of the council's first projects will be to overhaul the safety information at Facebook's Help Center with the goal of providing more comprehensive resources and including content that's specifically tailored to the needs of parents, teachers and teens.

- Facebook is active in MTV's A Thin Line campaign, aimed at helping teenagers stop the spread of digital abuse. MTV's A Thin Line campaign debuted this month and urges Internet users, especially young people, to "draw the line" line between digital use and digital abuse.

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we've built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

A Canadian woman claims she has lost her health benefits after her insurance company used her Facebook pictures as evidence that she was no longer depressed.

Nathalie Blanchard had been on sick leave for a year from her job at IBM in Bromont, Quebec, after being diagnosed with severe depression. The 29-year old was receiving sick pay from insurer Manulife.

However, when payments stopped coming she contacted Manulife and, she claims, was told that Facebook pictures taken on a beach and during a night out were evidence that she was no longer depressed.

If you’re looking to bring Facebook to the Windows desktop and Twitter-centric update tools like Seesmic or TweetDeck are too limiting for you, you might want to take Fishbowl for a spin.

The app, built on Microsoft Silverlight 4, features photo browsing and zoom, photo slideshows, drag-and-drop image uploads and a completely ad-free way to browse and update the news feed. It works on XP, Vista and Windows 7, and just became available for download.

We’re already more addicted to Facebook than could be considered healthy, not to mention our affection for the Mac, but for those Windows users looking for a rich desktop experience, our friends at Download Squad are calling Fishbowl a “kick-ass Facebook client for Windows 7” – it’s free and built by Microsoft’s own developers, so it might be worth taking for a spin.