Even Tom from MySpace knows that Facebook’s app platform is a powerhouse, and has joined a company called RocketFrog as an advisor.

The company has launched what it calls the “largest free to play online casino app” on the Facebook platform. I’m not a social games kind of guy, but there’s no doubt that people love to play around on Facebook, just ask Zynga.

RocketFrog’s founder, Brett Calapp, has a past chock full of gaming, including a stint as the President of the Ultimate Blackjack Tour. Here’s what he said about the app’s release today:

We’ve created social tournaments where players can interact and compete to win real prizes against their friends; not just leaderboard points or status increases. There’s no better place to do that than Facebook because that’s where your friends are at online. Who doesn’t like beating their friends and winning a prize?

If you ask me, it’s only a matter of time before gambling becomes fully legal in the United States, which will let people drop real money into digital games of blackjack, poker, and slots. If that were to happen, then Facebook would clearly be in a fantastic position with its credit system.

The Los Angeles based company has drawn the attention of Tom Anderson, who famously co-founded and sold MySpace. He’s joining as an advisor and had this to say:

Advertisers are always looking for something different, something that engages users and cuts through the noise. RocketFrog delivers. The entire game experience is branded by the daily advertiser and at the same time users get to play for with real world prizes.

By playing the game and inviting your friends, you can unlock rewards and perks. This is clearly the type of social engineering that annoys people like me, as I end up getting ten to twenty game invites a day on the social network.

I call this story, and Anderson’s involvement in a Facebook app, the complete full-circle of social networking.

➤ RocketFrog Casino on Facebook

In case you were wondering to yourself what would become of Myspace now that it’s under new management after a $35M firesale to Specific Media, here’s your first glimpse.

Fox Digital Entertainment announced today that it would be releasing a brand new scripted Web series called “LET’S BIG HAPPY” exclusively on the social network that its parent company News Corporation used to own. That’s right, Fox is debuting a show on Myspace.

The show revolves around indie music so Fox figured that Myspace, which in its heyday was the place to debut and share your music as an artist, was the best place to launch the show. Here’s what Fox Digital Entertainment’s senior VP Matt Glotzer had to say about it:

We are excited to further our partnership with Myspace with a show like LET’S BIG HAPPY. With independent music as its focus, the series could not have a better launchpad.

The show is being sponsored exclusively by Taco Bell and is the second such deal between Fox and the once-purchased-for-$580M social network. Previously, Fox and Kia partnered up to bring a show called “WOLFPACK OF RESEDA” to Myspace.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed but I have to imagine that the team at Specific Media, which includes Justin Timberlake, has to be pretty stoked to get an opportunity to turn the Myspace brand around. I didn’t make that up, because the quote from Roger Mincheff, the current president of Myspace Entertainment, has words like “incredible” and “thrilled” in it:

LET’S BIG HAPPY is a stage for up-and-coming musical acts and provides an incredible opportunity to reach fans worldwide. The new Web series is in sync with Myspace’s unwavering commitment to developing artists. We’re thrilled to join forces with Fox Digital Entertainment to deliver on our promise to create and serve up original must-watch online programming.

I will now start popping my popcorn to watch how this train wreck project turns out.

According to Blake Ross, Director of Product at Facebook, the project “Focus On The User” has seen over 100,000 visitors in just 24 hours. How many of those visitors actually used its bookmarklet to perform a Google search is unknown.

People have asked about stats.We’ve seen over 100,000 unique visitors in the 24hrs since focusontheuser.org launched! #weekendproject

— Blake Ross (@blakeross) January 24, 2012

The project, which aims to show Google search results before the company pushed its “Search Plus Your World” changes, was started by members of the engineering staff at Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

The project is a bookmarklet created as a weekend project, which lets you go back to seeing searches sans all of Google’s own search products, widgets, and links. The site itself has also become a central reference point for those saying that Google has lost site of its larger base of users, the ones who use search. While its social efforts are meant to increase usage on Google+, some see it as an annoyance for everyone else.

The success of the site shows that the subject of what should and shouldn’t be promoted in Google’s search results is most certainly a hot topic amongst the tech set, as the project has been covered by most large tech-focused publications. Search, Plus Your World has been added to the FTC investigation on Google’s potential anti-competitive practices, but it is not known whether any further action will be taken yet.

With the introduction of Timeline on Facebook, a new feature that allows you to add a “cover” photo has become all the rage. It’s very MySpace like, in that you can spruce up your profile with pictures of yourself, something you saw on a trip, or perhaps something artistic.

Right now, covers and profile photos are the only way to personalize the visual tone of your Facebook profile, as the rest of the site is pretty uniform looking.

Naturally, people want to impress you with their cover photos, so one site decided to dedicate all of its efforts to finding the most visually stunning pieces of art that you can add to your own Facebook profile. The site is called Fookcover, and it has hand-picks the best of the best.

Cover me

Fookcover has sorted these beautiful cover photos into categories like nature, abstract, urban, and cute. You can even submit your own by emailing them to hello@fookcover.com. But be sure to send them a photo with the following dimensions; 851×315 .PNG format.

These are a few of my favorites:

Unfortunately, you have to add the cover photo yourself by downloading it, but that’s probably because Facebook hasn’t exposed the cover photo feature to developers yet. You can however click “Add cover” to share your favorites from Fookcover on your wall.

I imagine that a slew of these sites will pop up, but it looks like the folks behind this one have a keen eye for design and art, and I’m enjoying what they’ve carefully curated so far. I like how the site gives full attribution to the creators, a nice tough to create a budding community around this idea. Hopefully Facebook never allows animated GIFs to be added to your profile though, or it will turn into MySpace. Yikes.

➤ Fookcover

Read the latest Facebook news every day at TNW Facebook.

We’ve long said goodbye to the days of rock and roll records, VH1 music videos and glossy music magazines as we’ve listened to music abrasively cross over into the digital space over the past decade. Print magazines like Rolling Stone, SPIN and Relix have struggled to transition to the web, in heated competition with the likes of Pitchfork, (est. 1995), which is devoted to sharp music criticism and news and Stereogum (est. 2002), which was one of the world’s first successful MP3 blogs.

In early 2011, David Wade, a serial entrepreneur started Popdust with Editor Craig Marks of Billboard, Spin and Blender fame, to be the premiere pop music online destination, much like Pitchfork and Stereogum are for the indie music scene. Wade has been in the online music space since working at Imeem, a social media web site for streaming, uploading and sharing music. After Imeem was sold to MySpace in 2009, Wade focused his efforts on this accelerating space. “Pop music news hasn’t found a home in the digital landscape. MTV cares more about TV than M (music), as its core content mission is long form reality TV. And as Justin Bieber dictates 3% of Twitter’s servers, pop music is clearly a space that shouldn’t be ignored,” explains Wade.

Popdust is a startup of NYC based Gramercy Labs, including companies Snooth and Lot18. Each Gramercy Labs startup is built on a specific formula for success: essentially take a viable, profitable concept + hire someone with incredible business savvy (Wade) + pair with a creative, celebrity force (Marks) to establish a brand + build scalability through software.

Popdust focuses a critical, humorous lens on the pop music genre, which Wade defines pop music as the 100 or so most consumed artists (think Lady Gaga, Kitty Purry, Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Drake and Little Wayne) but says pop music critique has never been taken less seriously by real music journalists. Popdust offers opinion-driven features on bigger moments relevant to pop music like the Grammys, American Idol, or even the Rebecca Black phenomenon; rates new singles and collaborations daily; and produces multiple photo caption posts per day, as well as slideshows of event coverage and artist biopics.

The site leans heavily on artist participation through exclusives like their recent world premiere with Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy. Due to industry veteran Craig Marks’ golden Rolodex, Popdust will be brewing in rich content for years to come. The site also relies on non-traditional formats to engage readers like Magic Box, its hilarious interview series which relies on unusual, often left field reader submitted questions. For example, watch this one below in which “rock-chicklet” Taylor Momsen drops the C-word.

On May 1st, Popdust will release a social feature called “Friends with Benefits” as a way to encourage people to contribute and share content through incentives such as access to artists and products from their advertising partners. Popdust is currently running ads from the MOG Music network, to maintain a premium, clean environment. This summer, Popdust will produce a mobile and tablet app to leverage its music, photo and video content.

In the past 30 days, Popdust has garnered more than 1.2 million total views and partnered with AOL, Huffington Post, MTV, CNN, Gawker, CBS Radio, Allhiphop, Grammy.com, MSN Wonderwall and Vibe. So far the Gramercy Labs startup has raised $1 million in Series A funding from SoftBank, RRE, Raptor Group, Lerer Media Ventures and other angel investors.

Want to find out more about Kitty Purry, the girls behind Glee or why Justin Bieber was named one of the world’s most influential people? Tune into Popdust.

We like to nerd out here at The Next Web, which often means keeping up with black holes, interstellar space travel, extraterrestrial life and NASA shuttle launches. Which is why I’m excited that one of my favorite sites, Space.com, just got a shiny new update.

The site’s re-design includes better graphics and the addition of a suite of social sharing and community tools. Their social media campaign integrates their Twitter and Facebook page and encourages users to play space trivia games, engage with astronauts and keep up with space events. Their new site boasted a total of 19 million monthly page views in December. For a science site, they’re pretty social media savvy, letting users log-in with Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, MySpace, AOL, MSN Messenger, Google, OpenID and others.

“It’s not just the trekkies anymore who care about outer space,” said Jerry Ropelato CEO of SPACE.com and its parent company TechMediaNetwork. “Whether water discovered on the moon, an eclipse, NASA and shuttle expeditions, Space has become part of our regular news consumption and we’re complementing our digital news content to appeal to this growing audience of space enthusiasts,” Ropelato continued.

Among SPACE.com’s advertisers are AT&T, Verizon, American Express, Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Buick and Sprint, joined by new advertisers ABC Television’s “V” and Toyota.

We recently wrote about Clearspring, an online content sharing network, as one of the “10 D.C. Start-Ups You Need to Know About.” Clearspring’s meal ticket, the “AddThis” button that you’ve undoubtedly seen on numerous blogs and websites, has reached 1 billion global monthly users and is used by everyone from The White House to the Dalai Lama to the British Monarchy.

Publishers like ABC, AOL, Demand Media, MTV, MySpace, NBC use the AddThis button to distribute and track digital content such as links, widgets, videos, and photos to social networks, bookmarking sites, blogs, and other web services. This morning they announced a new analytics tool for their AddThis sharing platform that helps online publishers better understand their audience’s interests, so they can make better editorial decisions that drive more users and traffic to their sites. Clearspring will use their new tool to leverage the 1 billion global users and will provide publishers with an audience-based report that can be viewed within their existing analytics dashboard.

The technology underlying their new analytics feature is the “Implicit Interest Graph,” which helps to create a digital map of the connection between people and the things they care about most. Unlike the Interest Graph created by Facebook, interests in the AddThis graph are determined by actual user behavior rather than by a user declaring interest by ‘liking’ something. Moreover, interests are displayed by levels of intensity.

“People’s interests are not binary. We do not just like or dislike something. For example, I don’t just ‘like’ movies about comic books – I love them. That difference is priceless,” says Clearspring CEO Hooman Radfar. “Using this new platform, we can understand interests more granularly. It’s like going from a black and white TV set to color.”

For more information, watch this video of today’s announcement.

Clearspring, which launched in 2006, is currently ranked #1 by comScore.

Yet another news organization joins the rounds at Tumblr, launching its first Tumblr blog today. CNNMoney Tech will use the Tumblog to share story outtakes, amusing tidbits and tech buzz from the newsroom.

It’s not a bad idea for news sites to join Tumblr as it has the potential to add a lighter layer of context to their day-to-day coverage in a viral, highly visual environment. CNNMoney Tech stocked its blog with over 270 funny, snarky, insightful posts before today’s launch. Tumblog contributors include: Paul R. La Monica, CNNMoney Assistant Managing Editor; Stacy Cowley, CNNMoney Tech Editor; David Goldman CNNMoney Staff Writer; Julianne Pepitone, CNNMoney Staff Reporter; and Laurie Segall, CNNMoney Staff Reporter.

CNNMoney’s tech-news coverage team says they’ve been stealthily building their Tumblog since September. Check it out here.