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Turns out the Bay Area is the place to be for online video for reasons beyond San Bruno-based YouTube.

Nielsen's numbers for October show YouTube maintaining a healthy lead in overall video views, topping second-place Hulu 6.6 billion to 632 million.

In third place, however, was Facebook, with more than 217 million video streams served -- up from 10th place in September. That vaulted them over Bing, Yahoo and several other sites.

"Facebook's rapid growth in online video during the last year illustrates the site's evolution from simply a communications focused tool to a media portal," said Nielsen Vice President of Media Analytics Jon Gibs in a CNET report. "Social networking sites are evolving from a venue for catching up with friends to a platform for personal expression, allowing consumers to share their experiences in the full variety of content formats available online."

Overall, the amount of video viewed via Facebook grew by 1,840 percent, year over year.

The recent social-network-scam-gate so lovingly exposed by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has finally come home to roost -- or at least that's what a Sacramento law firm hopes.

Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff has filed a federal class-action lawsuit against both Zynga (the primary game-maker that allowed shady businesses to offer virtual currency in exchange for peoples' promises to sign up for programs that they didn't understand and which cost them more money than they realized) and Facebook, through which Zynga's games reached a widespread audience.

At stake: $5 million.

Despite the fact that the dubious actions in question originated from neither company, both, claims the suit, were complicit in their continued profiteering, and themselves made large amounts of money in the process.

Proving that Palo Alto-based Facebook was knowingly in on the action could provide some courthouse drama. Perhaps “The Social Network,” now filming, will want to save space at the end for a postscript.

Read the entire court filing at Valleywag.

A few years back, we offered to put together a digital slide show for a high school reunion. So imagine our surprise when not a few classmates emailed back to say they didn't have digital cameras and where should they send their hardcopy photographs.

It's easy living out in the Bay Area to forget that not everyone in the country is living in a digital world. Which is why it probably shouldn't be all that surprising that the key task for Facebook's Washington lobbyists (picture the kind of earnest-looking, fresh-scrubbed, Oxford-wearing dudes you'd find in the product management departments of the average Silicon Valley company, rather than bloated gray hairs working their way through three-martini lunches) is to explain to Capitol Hill that not all technology products and companies are the same.

All Things D's Kara Swisher stopped by their offices in Dupont Circle recently and asked them about it.

"There's a misunderstanding in Washington," says former ACLU staffer Tim Sparapani, who's now Facebook's director of public policy (pictured, left), "a blurring of the distinctions between hardware, software..."

Swisher: "Right. Intel has nothing to do with Facebook, except that it's inside the computer."

Sparpani: "And yet, folks on the Hill, it all gets mushed. Folks in the regulatory world, it all gets mushed. Certainly folks in the press here, everything gets mushed. It's hard to have serious policy discussions about the future of these various important industries that intersect with our cultural values and our laws unless we can tease apart those really basic distinctions."

Full interview over at All Things D. (7:46)

Facebook's Western Region Vice President of Sales Paul Ollinger spoke at the Social Media World Forum in Santa Clara yesterday. In response to a question about what Facebook will look like three to five years from now, he painted a picture of a world where people are connected to each other, on all devices, by Facebook and the data it collects about people and their relationships.

Everything we do, every product we launch, every person we hire, every office we open around the world, the question is: Is this going to help more people share more often? That's the metric that we keep coming back to. Will they be sharing more photos? Are they connected to more people? Are they watching more videos? Are they reading more links that people have shared on Facebook? That's the metric.

I think what [Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg] would say is also that it's going to become less and less about Facebook.com, and it's going to become more about Facebook on your mobile phone, on your gaming device. We talk about: Someday I go home, and I turn on my TV, and instead of seeing 400 channels that Time Warner cable has offered me, maybe I see what my friend Bob Tivo'd last night, or what Jerry rated a five on a scale of five.... We talk about maybe some day you get into a car, and you turn on your GPS, and you say, "Take me to Joe's house."

Anything that can be connected can be improved with Facebook social data. And that's where we want to go.

First it was U2 on YouTube, now it's the Foo Fighters on Facebook. The band will stream a concert live tonight from its Studio 606 headquarters in Los Angeles, viewable via the Palo Alto-based site.

Seems to be a bit of a trend, not to mention a boon for local tech companies. Last week U2 generated 10 million streams for YouTube and MySpace streamed Weezer from San Francisco. The Dave Matthews Band streamed a concert over Hulu in May.

Foo fans can use status-message updates to discuss the show as it happens.

The event begins at 7 p.m. Watch it here.

(Via TechCrunch.)

The Facebook page for the Spike Jones-directed, Dave Eggers-screenwritten adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are had 1.74 million fans at the beginning of the week, gaining 27% over the previous week, writes Eric Eldon on InsideFacebook. That made it the third top gainer of the week.

About 80,000 more fans joined in the last four days, but growth is apparently tapering off. The page owner doesn't seem to be leveraging the page as well as it could—there have been only three updates in the last week—and Eldon says that could have a material impact on box office sales.

"Lots of late teens and 20-somethings showed up to theaters last weekend in full movie-themed costumes," he says. "The Facebook page could be a way to stoke those feelings now, and keep them going for a long time."

Photo credit: "Where the Wild Things Area"

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to the Silicon Alley Insider for its video series on innovation. Because this is the Internet, you officially have options about how to consume it.

You can watch a two-minute excerpt (titled "Zuckerberg: Why I Stayed Facebook CEO Even Though Many People Thought I Should Quit"):

You can watch the full, half-hour interview:

Or you can watch a 36-second clip in which Valleywag makes fun of Zuckerberg for saying something that was admittedly fairly inane.

Because it just seems right.

Our sister blog WebNewser has an interesting squib on Facebook's new Gross Happiness Index, which analayzes user status updates to take the temperature on the country's mood.

Go: Facebook Knows When America is Happy

In an extensive piece about the evoloution of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, VentureBeat says that he isn't just a visionary when it comes to dreaming up social media applications that will one day spur 300 million people to sign up. Turns out he's becoming a pretty decent CEO, as well.

The story's lead quote, from Greylock Capital's David Sze, a Facebook investor: "When I invested, I thought Mark was one in a million. Now I think Mark is maybe one in a trillion."

It's a good thing, considering that as the Palo Alto-based company's largest shareholder, he would be difficult to oust. Among the changes listed in his management style over recent years: