“With final toxicology tests and an official cause of death still pending, Corey Haim’s body will be laid to rest in Toronto on Tuesday.
Haim’s longtime friend, Corey Feldman, said that Haim died with little money to his name, and some of Haim’s friends have already begun putting his items on eBay to raise money for his estate. Naturally then, there were questions about how Haim’s family would pay for his funeral.

Last week, Haim's mother, Judy, herself battling cancer, said that memorabilia site Startifacts.com has offered $20,000 to pay for a tombstone and other expenses, but now she tells Access Hollywood that the city of Toronto might step in to pay Haim's funeral expenses.

The city, however, has not confirmed that, saying in a press release that it “does not confirm or comment on any potential, pending or active applications for assistance in such matters. Therefore, the City will not be commenting further on these reports.”

Banana metaphor loses a-peel

Ellen DeGeneres used the evolving ripeness of a banana as a metaphor for ousted contestant Alex Lambert’s talent. Poor guy not only lost his spot on the show, but he might have also lost his appetite for fruit forever.

“I guess I probably won't be able to look at a banana the same,” Lambert told reporters in a conference call on Friday.

Lambert echoed the sentiment of many critics who thought voters eliminated the wrong contestants. He said that he and the other finalists were surprised by all four eliminations.

"There were four other people that everyone had in mind (to go home last week)," Lambert said, “and probably six other people that people had in mind before us. That was what made everybody so emotional.”

‘Wonderland’ a winner

“Alice in Wonderland” obliterated the competition this weekend, bringing in another $62 million at the box office.

That means the domestic total for the Johnny Depp vehicle is expected to exceed $200 million for the two weeks it’s been in theaters, once official box office numbers are released.

Matt Damon’s war film “Green Zone” didn’t impress: it came in second and only made $14.5 million.

“She’s Out of My League” managed to come in third, surprising many by beating out “Twilight” heartthrob Robert Pattinson and his film, “Remember Me.”

At SXSWi, Facebook flexes its gaming muscle
by Caroline McCarthy


AUSTIN, Texas--Facebook envisions its technology as a powerful unifying force in the gaming world, games program manager Gareth Davis said to a packed house of eager coders at the social network's "Developer Garage" event on Sunday afternoon here. The get-together was held as part of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi), which drew developers and other tech enthusiasts from all over the world to Austin for the week.


"Facebook is a service that enables developers, like you, to make applications social everywhere, on as many platforms as possible, and we get some very interesting cross-platform properties," Davis said at the beginning of his talk. The company's Facebook Connect technology has been extended from third-party Web sites to the iPhone and now gaming consoles like the Xbox 360.


"We're working very closely with the console makers--Sony, Xbox, and Nintendo--and we've done integrations with all three of them," Davis said. He envisions a world in which thanks to Facebook Connect, a multiplayer game can be played by gamers on consoles, PCs, Facebook, and mobile devices simultaneously, effectively ending the longstanding problem of not enough game platform interoperability.


About 200 million people play games on Facebook every month, Davis said. Many of these are relatively basic social games--Farmville, Mafia Wars, Pet Society, and the like.


Davis says that will change as Facebook Connect grows more sophisticated, and he hinted at the widespread reports that geolocation, the Silicon Valley crowd's current hot fad, will be coming to Facebook.


"We can build a new kind of game around identity, and friends, and augmented reality, and location," Davis said. "It's going to be a really exciting 12 months," he added, referring to the fact that Facebook Connect for the iPhone had been launched exactly one year prior, bringing the capabilities of the "social graph" to hundreds of iPhone and iPod Touch games.


Games have become a key focus of Facebook as it became clear that they were far and away the most successful applications to be built on the social network's developer platform: companies like Zynga and Playfish (now owned by Electronic Arts) have become hugely profitable sensations. They also served to elevate Facebook's own revenues, as millions of avid social gamers spent hours at a time on the site and led to a significant boost in ad impressions.


Gaming companies have been snapping up Facebook's ad inventory themselves as they lobby to get even more of the social network's 400 million users on board.


Speaking later on Sunday at the Developer Garage, Playfish co-founder Sebastian de Halleux spoke of "the brave new world beyond Facebook.com," something that undoubtedly has concerned Facebook as it attempts to keep benefiting from the gaming craze. So now, it's courting game developers to see Facebook Connect as a tool, not a tether: play with more friends, reach bigger audiences, and eventually pull once-disparate platforms together.


"We're talking about bringing you the game experience to the platform that you prefer the most, and for many people that is an Xbox or a PlayStation," de Halleux said.