Farmville, one of the most popular games on Facebook, is full of scams, along with other popular games like Mafia Wars, TechCrunch blogged over the weekend after a heated exchange at last week's Virtual Goods Summit (video here). The games allegedly use offers like NetFlix subscriptions to trick consumers into paying far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash. The remedy: "Facebook and MySpace need to create and enforce rules against it so that game developers aren't tempted to get a competitive edge by scamming users." "All third party companies that provide services or games through Facebook and other social networks need to be put under the microscope," says Shooting at Bubbles, while Gawker fears  social networks are basically turning in to just another "snakeoil sales channel preying on in the mold of late-night 1-800 number commercials." But there's hope! Just a couple days after Arrington's post, Zynga, the company that owns FarmVille and Mafia Wars, announced steps to clean up its platforms. Arrington finds this heartening: "There may be hope yet for the Internet."

Elsewhere, though, the Internet is up to its usual tricks: British Google Maps users have been confused by the appearance of a fake town, "Argleton." "Tantalisingly, 'Argle' echoes the word "Google", while the phantom town's name is also an anagram of 'Not Real G', and 'Not Large'," theorizes The Telegraph. "One theory is that Argleton could have been deliberately added, as a trap to catch companies that violate the map's copyright." But Google claims not to know what's going on! Conspiracy? One Maps user went to find Argleton, writes TG Daily, expecting to find "an alternate universe like Narnia. Instead he found just acres of green, empty fields." Maybe he didn't go at the right time of day! "Everybody knows the only way to visit Argleton is to flash your GPS unit's firmware with a new version from this site," explains Snarkmarket. "Then you wait until the night of a new moon, tap in A-R-G-L-E-T-O-N, blindfold your­self, and follow the unit's spoken directions. Follow them exactly. Follow them no matter what they say. Do that, and you'll get to Argleton. But remember... Argleton is a trap."

While Argleton is either the next Bermuda Triangle or just doesn't exist, the exclusive Twitter device is real, says DevicePedia.com, "amazing as it may seem." The TwitterPeek (made by a company called, not surprisingly, PeekInc.), is Twitter blue and devoted only to Twitter: "reading tweets, sending tweets, replying, retweeting and direct messaging--only it gives users that access on the go," explains the WSJ's Venture Capital Dispatch. But since you can already tweet from your phone, "who the hell would spend $200 on this?" wonders Gizmodo. Plus, [technabob] points out, "if you come across a tweet with a link on it, you won't be able to look at whatever's being linked, because the TwitterPeek doesn't have a browser." It's definitely a device we hope we don't get for Christmas.

Michelle Obama, meanwhile, gave the producers (and viewers!) of Iron Chef a holiday gift: She'll appear on the show's season premiere, in January, and "will be revealing the 'secret ingredient' that the chefs will use in their televised cook-off, which is a hallmark of the Iron Chef America series," Obama Foodorama reports. "The 'secret ingredient' in this case is anything that grows in the White House Kitchen Garden, which leaves things wiiiide open, because the Kitchen Garden has produced a stunning variety of crops this year." The White House actually sought out Iron Chef, the NY Times reports, "as a way to reach people who might otherwise know nothing about the first lady's efforts [to reduce childhood obesity]."

Finally, some sad food news: Gourmet's former art director, Kevin DeMaria, has posted a series of photos on a pop-up blog called Last Days of Gourmet, taken in the magazine's offices. "Sad? Very. Morbid? A little. But worth a look," says Serious Eats. "DeMaria's shots have a detached sadness to them, capturing the antiseptic side of office life in a failing industry," writes Mediaite. "It's a representative freeze-frame--relics, if you will--of a tough time that will be remembered as such thanks to those, like DeMaria, who have documented the decline from inside."

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