As the social network sweeps clean all bogus activity, page fan counts drop by the tens of thousands.

Metric data on Facebook's top pages by fan counts and their daily growth.

(Credit: PageData)

The purge has commenced. Facebook is throwing out all fake users, accounts, and likes. That's right, all of those thousands of questionable thumbs ups are starting to disappear.

The social network announced last month that it'd start this massive deletion process, but it was unclear when. According to TechCrunch, Facebook confirmed today that the time is now.

Facebook releases its own Desktop messenger. You can now chat from your desktop like any other messenger. Like Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger or Google Talk, you can now chat with your friends without having to open your web browser. You just need account on Facebook to avail this great tool.