It's been a quiet week in Lake Woebegon, out here on the edge of the prairie. Oh, wait, that's Garrison Keillor, not us. Regardless, here's some stuff that happened this week on Download Squad.

Open Web Awards

The Open Web Awards voting rounds kicked off this week. If you missed the first three categories, there's still time to cast your vote.

Veto Beacon with Freakin Beacon Firefox extension

Has Facebook's Beacon caused your blood pressure to rise as your level of web privacy has fallen to a new low? Fear not. Dolores Parker shows us how to block that pesky Beacon and take back your life.

Flickr gains photo editing with Piknik

We love Flickr but, until now it's been strictly info-in, info-out. Editing your photos was something you did before you uploaded to Flickr, not after. Flickr's new partnership with Picnik means now you can crop, resize, adjust exposure, contract, color saturation and other aspects of your images with just a few clicks. Sweet!

Ever since Facebook announced its advertising platform earlier this month, people have been wondering if the service isn't a bit of an invasion of privacy.

Now it looks like Facebook has backtracked a bit after hearing complaints from users. The response makes sense. It's hard to capitalize on your huge popularity as a social network to launch an advertising platform if the users are threatening to leave. And more than 50,000 Facebook members have signed a petition complaining about Facebook Beacon.

In a nutshell, Beacon lets Facebook send messages to users letting them know that their friends bought concert or movie tickets or other goods online. Current Facebook members are already probably sick of receiving messages letting them know when a friend signs up for any new Facebook application, whether it be Scrabulous or a Zombie tag game. But once you start reporting people's buying habits, well, that's kind of crossing a line, isn't it?

The petition asked for the right to opt-out of the program easily. Yesterday Facebook responded by saying Beacon would become an opt-in program. Each time Facebook wants to send out a Beacon message, the service will ask users for permission first.

Look, we're as happy as anyone that Facebook has figured out how to start making money through advertising. But we're also as freaked out as anyone that one way the company will do this is by tracking your web surfing behavior and add it to your profile.

Fortunately Nate Weiner figured out an extraordinarily simple solution (for Firefox users). Just install the BlockSite Firefox add-on and block Facebook Beacon.

Weiner was playing an online game the other day when he noticed a pop up window telling him that the web site was going to share his information with his Facebook profile. He had an option to say "no thanks," but like many people, Weiner figured he'd rather not get the message in the first place. So he found the offending requests were sent to "http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php." So you could either add that URL to your BlockSite blacklist, or better yet, add "http://www.facebook.com/beacon/*" to block any requests to the entire Beacon folder.

And now you have your privacy back. For now.

As pretty much everybody expected (or everyone who cared anyway), Facebook founder Mark Zukerberg announced the launch of Facebook Ads today. More than 60 brands have already partnered with Facebook Ads, including Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Sony Pictures, and Verizon Wireless.

There are three components of Facebook Ads (the website is not live yet):

1. Businesses can build pages on Facebook
2. An Social Ads system that lets advertisers spread their brand message
3. An interface for gathering data about users' Facebook activity for marketing purposes

More than 100,000 new Facebook pages have been added today, covering brands, businesses, organizations, and bands. A brand page is a lot like a typical user page, allowing advertisers to add information and Facebook apps for doing things like reserving movie or plane tickets or making purchases. Fandango, iLike, Zagat and a bunch of other companies are launching applications for pages.

So how does this all work? Well, users can identify with particular brands they like helping to build a brand network. Every time a user becomes a fan of a business or brand, for example, their news feed will be updated sending out info about that brand to all of the users' friends. Because we know that you just can't wait to let all of your friends know that you drink Coke and not Pepsi.

Facebook's new Social Ads also combine social information with advertising. For example, rather than just seeing an Ad for a new movie, you may see an ad show up on your screen along with a review that a friend has written on his or her page. The system attaches this information without delivering personally identifiable information to advertisers. Social Ads will show up in user news feeds or in the ad space on the left side of the Facebook page.

Facebook is also launching a service called Beacon that lets users send information to their Facebook page from other sites. For example, Blockbuster is launching a service that lets you add information about your Blockbuster queue to your Facebook news feeds. And eBay will let sellers include eBay listings in their Facebook news feeds.