Facebook today announced that Web pioneer and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has joined its board of directors. Currently co-founder and chairman at Ning, Andreessen is an investor in several Internet startups. A prominent Silicon Valley veteran, Andreessen co-founded Ning as a complementary platform to Facebook that allows people to create their own social network with any design, any feature set, and in any language. He also authored early Web browser Mosaic and was co-founder of Netscape Communications. Andreessen’s experience also includes his work as CTO of AOL, as well as chairman and co-founder of Web infrastructure company Loudcloud, later named Opsware and acquired by Hewlett-Packard. According to Zuckerberg, Andreessen joins current Facebook board members Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital and Founders Fund. Facebook board observers are David Sze of Greylock Partners and Paul Madera of Meritech Capital Partners. Andreesseen is involved full time at Ning , a platform for the creation of social networks and arguably a direct competitor to Facebook. But Andreessen is known to be a mentor to Zuckerberg, who calls on him often for personal advice. It isn’t surprising that Zuckerberg would ask Andreessen to have a formal involvement with the company. Andreessen will reportedly remain with Ning full time and retain his Chairman title. Andreessen will become the fourth member of a Facebook board that includes Zuckerberg and venture capitalists Jim Breyer and Peter Thiel.

Facebook users who haven’t yet specified their gender in their profile will have to do so in the coming few weeks. Under a new gender policy introduced by the Web site, it will start prompting users to choose whether they’d like to be referred to as ‘him’ or ‘her’, ‘he’ or ’she’. Many people came up with the complaint that due to no gender/sex specification requirements, they were ultimately listed under the wrong gender by default thereby leading to a lot of confusion. Until now, those who didn’t specify their gender in their profile have gotten themselves tagged as ‘him’, ‘her’, or ‘themselves’ which may not be necessarily true. Hence the new policy will make translation work easier. For those who don’t want the tyranny of gender, they can remove gender entirely from their account/s, including how to refer to gender in mini-feeds. The reason behind the change is, the fact that many international languages rely much more heavily on gender-related syntax. The complication, however, may arise from transgendered members of the site who don’t identify with traditional gender assignments. That’s why, it appears, and they will be able to manually opt out of the ‘him/her’ classification. It’ll take an extra step in the process, but it will still be possible.

Ubersoft has launched a new Facebook application “Swoopin”. This application lets users choose from 800 free games and either download the titles themselves, or send them to friends on Facebook. The files are side loaded onto phones, rather than sent directly. It’s one of the first ad-funded mobile game services to try Facebook distribution. Swoopin only has 16 daily active users for its Facebook application since it is new. It provides few attractive subscription offers to the user. One day access enables user to view all the stories that were published over the last 24 hours, but it does not include archive access. There is another plan for the one year access. Annual subscription plan allows user to log-in to the website and read all the daily news stories published by Telecompaper. The price depends on how far back user wants to access the archive, which dates back to 1993. The other facility which Swoopin is providing is that it sends free e-mail with most important headlines of the last 24 hrs which is really amazing. The price for the one month archive period is EUR$ 195 and for 3 months is EUR$ 295. These games are 100% free, but the service provider may charge for normal carrier charges (WAP, GPRS, DATA) and taxes may apply to data transfers incurred when the user downloads the game. These games are supported by ads and sometimes connect to the network to download new ads. A typical connection will transfer 5 to 15 kilobytes of data. Some service providers charge on a per time basis and some on a per kilobyte basis.

Facebook has confirmed that it will launch in-line Mini Feed comments. The feed is a perfect place for personal & public conversation, exactly the type of communication. Updates on friends’ status, application engagement, and new friend connections are compelling contexts for in-feed conversations. The update makes the profile page more like a “room” where conversation occurs. However, comment text does not appear in the Mini Feed by default. User must click the “bubble” to expand the comments. The change expands what people can comment on within the Facebook environment. Though the social networking site already provides ample opportunities to comment on items, this will make it easier for members to comment quickly on what they see. A little balloon shows on the right side for the mini-feed actions that user can comment on. As more comments appear on that item the balloon displays a number of comments. Click on the balloon and the item expands. This is nice, simple and easy. It has the amazing ability to comment something in this area. This will be more important in the new page layouts that are coming very soon. Also worthy of note here is that when people comment on an item (say a video or a note) those comments ROLL UP to the minified. This is absolutely stunning.