Facebook's been popping up in the news a lot lately, so we thought we'd give you a quick run-down on what people have been talking about.

You might have heard something about the lawsuit and settlement with ConnectU. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg worked at the company before starting his own site, and was accused of using that opportunity to steal some of ConnectU's ideas for social networking pages. Under the terms of the settlement, ConnectU gets $20 million and a good deal of Facebook stock. That leads us to the next bit of news, that because of this settlement, we finally have a good idea of what Facebook is worth.

People have been throwing around all sorts of valuations for the company, as high as $15 billion by some accounts. We know Facebook is hugely popular, but $15 billion sounds like the income of a small nation. Included in all the legal documents tied to the case was Facebook's own, private valuation. This was supposed to be kept confidential, but as the documents were made public, someone messed up redacting the figures. Although the numbers were blacked-out when you tried viewing the document, the data wasn't actually removed, just covered up, so it could be copy-and-pasted into a clean page. It turns out that Facebook is worth — or at least was last year when the figures were tallied — about $3.7 billion. Still a ridiculous amount of money, but in a more realistic ballpark than the earlier figure.

The other juicy bit of Facebook news that's come up recently is that Nokia might be looking to partner up and integrate some social networking features into its phones. It's too early to tell how this arrangement would work out, and what features would translate successfully over to mobile devices. One idea being tossed around is tying Facebook status updates to the phone's contact list. You could get quick mobile updates on which of your friends are currently online and what they're all up to. There have also been talks with Palm and Motorola, so chances are good that at least one of these arrangements will work out. We'll update you as we hear more.

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