New payment methods for obtainingFacebook Credits, the social network’s payment system and virtual currency, will bemade availablein 13 Latin American and Asian countries next month. This list includes Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Singapore in Asia, and Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico in South America. On July 1st, Facebook will require all developers to use Credits instead of other payment systems. To facilitate this change, Facebook has also announced that developers in countries where bank account and PayPal withdrawals have not been supported will now be made possible — though Facebook warns that this will not be in the case in some government-embargoed countries....

There’s a new Chrome Extension that is allowing Facebook users to opt out of the Facebook data-mining. The extension is calledFacebook DataMine, developed by Jim Haas, a Game Maker atMegaEpic. Facbook DataMine allows my data to be mined (great pun with the name Jim). If you need a refresher on what data-mining means, here the definition from the FacebookData Mining Page; Data mining, a branch of computer science and artificial intelligence, is the process of extracting patterns from data....

If you’ve been waiting to get thosehandy mobile dealson your pocket robot, it appears that your wait is over. The newest version of theFacebook applicationfor Android introduces Facebook Deals. Loading up the new version, nothing looks immediately different. Given our understanding of how the Deals will work, though, it will likely be triggered when you check in via Facebook Places. There’s no blog post from Facebook, just yet, so we’ll have to wait for further confirmation....

Facebook announced that it would introduce Deals, the social network’sduly expectedGroupon clone, enhanced with the company’s social features, such as encouraging friends to shop together, to go head on with group buying sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial. Given the social network’s reach, currently more than 600 million users, the benefits to business of offering deals via Facebook’s service may significantly trump competitors. It will be deeply integrated in the website, which makes it easy to share deals with friends, see when a friend purchases something and find offers that your friends are interested in, said Emily White, Facebook’s director of local toNYTimes....

Yesterdaywe brought you newsthat Facebook were reportedly working with smartphone manufacturer HTC to release two branded smartphones, today those rumours have been quashed by Dan Rose, Head of Business Development at Facebook. Reuters reportsthat when asked about the potential existence of a Facebook phone, Rose replied: “This is really just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs (application programing interfaces) and integrated them into their device in an interesting way”....