Below, find the initial complaint in the federal class-action suit against online gaming company Zynga and social network Facebook, alleging the companies are liable for the scammy actions of their advertisers.

Just as the public was learning that a huge chunk of Zynga's social gaming revenue came from scammy "quizzes" and "special offers," Silicon Valley's most prestigious venture capitalists rewarded the company with $15 million. Hey, that's just how VC's roll.

Mark Pincus recently cut off the scamsters who supply his company with revenue. But before he bowed to controversy, the Facebook games merchant was more cavalier about corporate morality, even griping about his "bullshit" Harvard ethics class and idiot classmates.

Facebook and MySpace might finally pay the price for the big social gaming scandal: At least one law firm is investigating whether to launch a class action suit on behalf of duped users.

Silicon Valley pundits like to talk about social media as a potential geyser of cash. What they leave out is that one of the only ways social networks like Facebook, MySpace have done that is joining league with online scammers.

Slide and RockYou, the two largest developers of Facebook apps, have long had a serious rivalry over the most frivolous Web software. But the two may be pulling apart. Slide, Max Levchin's SuperPoke machine, signaled yesterday that it's betting on online entertainment, partnering with Hollywood to bring mainstream…

Today at Facebook's developer's conference, social games widgetmaker Zynga will announce a $29 million round of funding — the company's second — led by Kleiner Perkins, the VC firm that backed Amazon.com and Google. Zynga has also acquired virtual world app YoVille and added former Electronic Arts creative exec Bing…

They can't say they didn't have it coming. But widgetmakers are angry all the same about Facebook's decision to clone Slide's Top Friends application as a feature in its latest redesign. "It would be insane for a new developer" to begin creating new apps the platform now, says an executive at one of the many…

Facebook's redesign — originally planned for early April, but delayed due to objections from widgetmakers like RockYou, Slide, and Zynga — is no longer a Mark Zuckerberg production. Third-party developers have hijacked it. A source close to the redesign process tells us "Facebook has made some changes to the…

When we ran screenshots of Facebook's new profile pages back in late February, what you saw was a classic Mark Zuckerberg production. A source close to Facebook tells us the profile redesign was Zuckerberg's pet project, his baby. Well, that baby is dead.

Looking after his investment in online gamemaker Zynga, VC blogger Fred Wilson reports that applications on MySpace's platform "are not taking off in quite the same velocity that Facebook apps did." He blames MySpace's lack of "viral channels" — code for spamming tools.

Failed social networking entrepreneur Mark Pincus, the force that brought the Internet both Tribe.net and Acebucks, now hopes to dominate the Facebook application market with his new casual games company Zynga. He claims he hasn't touched his $10 million in VC funding because he's in the lucrative business of…

The first gold-rush miners to make any money during the 1840s were the ones who stopped digging and started selling shovels, according to Timesman Brad Stone. Today a similar operation from Mark Pincus, Tribe.net founder and early Facebook investor, announced $10 million in funding from Union Square Ventures, Peter…