Facebook stopped a phishing attack on Thursday, its second day in a row of dealing with a worm on the site that lures people to a fake Facebook page and prompts them to log in. (more…)

David Martin, Vice President, Primary Research, Nielsen Online

Oprah embarrassed herself on it with a stuck caps lock. That guy from Punk’d competed with “the most trusted name in news” for audience. A befuddled Jon Stewart shook his fist at it in anger. Let there be no doubt: Twitter has grown exponentially in the past few months with no small thanks to celebrity exposure. People are signing up in droves, and Twitter’s unique audience is up over 100 percent in March. But despite the hockey-stick growth chart, Twitter faces an uphill battle in making sure these flocks of new users are enticed to return to the nest. (more…)

Thousands of U.S. authors will have until Sept. 4 to either join a settlement with Google Inc. over its book-scanning project or object to the deal, a federal judge in New York ruled. (more…)

As more mobile phones become full-fledged Web-browsing devices, a small but fast-growing segment of all visitors to any given Websites will be mobile. But with so many different mobile phones and browsers, it is difficult to figure out where most of that mobile traffic is coming from. A new mobile Website tracking service called PercentMobile lets you track mobile visitors by device, cell phone operator, country, and more. All you do is insert one line of pixel-based code into the header of your Website and it does the rest. All mobile browsers can read the pixel code, unlike the Javascript required by Google Analytics, for instance. (more…)

Imagine putting 100 of your favorite movies on one DVD.

That’s what a radical breakthrough in optical-storage technology promises, according to a report in the New York Times. (more…)

Mozilla on Monday released beta 3.5 of Firefox, a revamp of the open-source Web browser designed to include better performance, several new Web programming features, and a private browsing mode. (more…)

As we speculated this weekend, Facebook has opened up its activity stream through a new API for developers. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream. One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop, A Twitter client which is now adding your Facebook feed through this API (something Tweetdeck already did in the past through other more restrictive means). Facebook has also created its own desktop notification client to demonstrate what can be built with the API. (more…)

Facebook plans to announce at a developer event Monday that it will open up user-contributed information to third-party developers, according to a report Sunday in The Wall Street Journal. (more…)

Facebook members will own and control their own information under the social networking site’s new policies. (more…)

A 13-year-old downloaded the billionth application from the Apple App Store, becoming the grand-prize winner in the company’s app countdown contest, the Apple said Friday. (more…)