Here’s a few of this past week’s top headlines in the social space.  I decided to recap on Mondays because a) I have other things I want to do on Friday’s and b) everyone else does Friday recaps it seems. Overall, a relatively quiet past week with perhaps the biggest announcement being a patent awarded to Facebook for their “feed” feature.  Many other companies use similar setups that borrow bits of the technology, so it could feasibly have legal/licensing implications in the near future.  Anyways, without further ado, here is my top picks from this past week in social.

Facebook Pages Now Part Of Google’s Real Time Search Results [All Facebook]

A few weeks after Google first announced the launch of Twitter and MySpace’s integration into their-real time search results, Facebook Pages have begun to show up. While the features are just beginning to roll out, they real-time search will be globally available in English over the next few days. While the few million pages that Facebook has are nowhere near the 400 million Facebook users on the site.

Pants and Pickles Are the Surefire Way to Get Millions of Fans [All Facebook]

As we covered earlier this month, countless pages were set up in an attempt to drive more fans to obscure vegetable pages instead of celebrities. As we wrote earlier this week, Chad Kroeger, the lead singer of Nickelback, learned that the band had lost a popularity contest with a pickle.

Facebook Granted Patent On News Feed (This Could Be Very Big) [ReadWriteWeb]

If all algorithmic ranking and delivery of social activity updates to social network users falls under this patent Facebook applied for in August 2006 (one month before it launched its controversial Newsfeed) then there’s going to be a whole lot of trouble for sites all over the web.

Could the Toyota Recall Crisis be Helping the Brand? [Mashable]

Shockingly, an analysis of Toyota shows that its Social Influence Marketing (SIM) Score saw an uptick in January. Who’d have thought that a crisis of such significant magnitude could actually help a brand’s perception? This seems to be true, at least in the short term, even though sales may be dropping. Let me explain how.

Are the Fortune 100 Now Beginning to Embrace Social Media? [ReadWriteWeb]

The fact that the Fortune 100 do not leverage multiple tools is a sign of how consumer-based social media tools are not fully understood or leveraged for maximum benefit. It’s also evident of just how much of an opportunity big companies have in using the social Web if they use it to its full extent. Companies that extend to multiple media networks still have a chance to get ahead of competitors.