Your Econ class probably never covered Facbook, but maybe it should. According to the Silicon Alley Insider, Facebook is "beating the s--- out of its numbers," and it's all thanks to Zynga's virtual goods.

Farmville, Texas Hold'em, and other social games are turning out to be cash cows. By some estimates, Zynga is pulling in a staggering $580,000 per day, with a good chunk of that coming from selling its users virtual goods. To ensure the well doesn't dry up, Zynga has spent a reported $50 million on Facebook ads.

"Zynga is an aggressive player in this space … possibly the most aggressive," writes AllFacebook.com. "There is two parts to their strategy. The first is to fund developers that have game ideas, promote them, and for those that are successful, they snatch them up, often at pennies on the dollar. The second is outright acquisition of successful application that they didn’t fund."

While Zynga has proven that selling virtual goods can be booming business, the future looks even brighter. There's talk of Zynga and Facebook teaming up to build a "Pay With Facebook" payment system that would both take on Paypal, and allow the companies to cash in twice on selling virtual goods.

According to DigitalBeat, Facebook today is expected to announce a partnership with media research firm Nielsen that will give the social networking site better analytics on how its ads are doing.

The partnership comes just one week after Facebook flew past 300 million users and, presumably, will bring the site closer to its goal of being a massive company on the same level as Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. In order to do that, Facebook needs a strong presence in the advertising market.

As part of the partnership, advertisers who are also Nielsen customers will be allowed to poll Facebook users who have seen the ads on the social network's site. These will appear in the sponsored messages space on Facebook's homepage, and according to Facebook, they will be controlled to limit participation. Facebook also allayed privacy concerns by promising that no personally identifiable information will be collected.

Can a person's sexual preference be revealed simply by looking at their online Facebook friends? Yes it can, say two students from MIT who have developed a software program that purports to do just that. By looking at the gender and sexuality of a person's Facebook friends, the program uses statistical analysis to predict the likelihood that someone is gay or straight.

"When they first did it, it was absolutely striking - we said, 'Oh my God - you can actually put some computation behind that,'" said Hal Abelson, a computer science professor at MIT. "That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information - because you don't have control over your information."

The project, which the MIT students have dubbed "Gaydar," is just one of many that seek to analyze social networks and find out what the connections between people might be revealing, such as whether or not someone is likely to be a terrorist, political affiliations, or even if they're happy or overweight.

Boston.com has a ton more on this and related studies, which you can read here. Afterward, hit the jump and tell us whether or not you think your Friends list reveals anything about you.