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I just unlocked the "New Year's 2011" badge on @foursquare!

Monday my old friend and colleague from TechTV, Erica Hill, hits the biggest of times as CBS Early Show anchor. Brava!

acebook surpassed Google for the first time as the most visited website in the United States for most of 2010. The social network site edged out Google.com (GOOG.O) with 8.9 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010, while Google.com ranked second with about 7.2 percent of all visits, according to online measurement service Experian Hitwise.

Enraged, he launched a Web site called Danhatesspam.com, quit a career in marketing to go to law school and is making a decent living suing companies who flood his e-mail inboxes with offers of cheap drugs, free sex and unbelievable vacations.

n a statement, Nintendo of America spokesman Charlie Scibetta said Friday that parents should use the parental controls on the 3DS to restrict access to the system's 3D mode. The 3DS goes on sale in February in Japan and in March in the U.S. and Europ

Groupon Inc., the daily-deal coupon site based in Chicago, has raised more than half the funds in a financing round that could generate as much as $950 million. The equity offering brought in more than $500 million, Groupon said today in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That leaves about $450 million remaining in the funding round, the company said.

The report also does away with the notion that Verizon would announce its iPhone at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, or that Steve Jobs would make Vegas-bound reporters add a Cupertino, Calif. leg to their journey on Monday or Tuesday, for a pre-CES launch.

A new version of the free iPhone app for Skype SA will let users make and receive video calls. Users of the Internet calling and messaging service will be able to use both Wi-Fi and AT&T Inc.'s 3G cellular network. FaceTime software, which comes with iPhones, works only with Wi-Fi. The app, which is being released Thursday through Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store, will let iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS users make free video calls to other Skype users who are using the app or have access to the feature using Skype on their computer or other video phone.

Skype has pinned the blame for last week's outage in part on a buggy version of its software for Windows. In a blog posted today, Chief Information Officer Lars Rabbe explained the house of cards that took down the service the morning of Wednesday, December 22, and kept it offline for many until the following day.

China will crack down on what it called illegal Internet telephone providers, according to a circular from the Chinese government seen on Friday that could potentially affect Internet calling service Skype.

Users of Android phones might feel like unleashing some "Angry Birds" on Peter Vesterbacka, the Finnish head of business development in North America for Rovio Mobile, which makes the popular game. While there's a free version of "Angry Birds" for Android users available, a 99-cent version for the iPhone is a huge success (Apple recently said Angry Birds was the best-selling iPhone app of 2010). And the iPhone will continue to be "the No. 1 platform for a long time from a developer perspective."

He stated Jobs represented the American dream and is the ideal example for what middle class individuals hope to achieve through hard work, determination and dreams.

About 65% of Internet users have paid for some kind of online content, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. Pew found that digital music and software are the two most common purchases, yet almost half of the users have only bought one or two kinds of content, and most have only used one method of access, such as streaming or downloading. Of the 1,003 people surveyed, 75% were Internet users, which is consistent with the general proportion of Internet use in the U.S.

Online sales this holiday season skyrocketed by 13 percent from last year, to a record $30.8 billion, as shoppers expressed greater optimism and found the Web an increasingly convenient gift resource, a research firm reported Thursday.

Recently the original "Angry Birds" hasn't been getting a ton of love, with the latest updates focused on "Angry Birds Seasons." That changed today with the launch of "Angry Birds" version 1.5 on the iPhone and iPad. The update adds new, Western-themed levels (perfectly-timed for "True Grit"!) and the long-awaited Mighty Eagle.

Bloomberg reported that the Taiwan-based HTC has filed a trademark at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a device called HTC Scribe on Dec. 26, defining it as "a handheld wireless device, namely a tablet computer".

One of the primary purposes of Google's Chrome browser is to push what Google does best: search. The address bar has been integrated with the search box--all queries, suggestions, and misspelled URLs go through Google first. But Chrome is only the latest service to use Google as a middleman. The company has become so synonymous with web browsing that most users see its search box as a replacement for the address bar. Topping the charts for the most searched terms of 2010, according to a new report from Experian Hitwise, are searches that could have been found simply by adding ".com."

Remember that Motorola tablet running Android Honeycomb that Andy Rubin gave a brief glimpse of at D: Dive Into Mobile conference? We are sure you do. Well, we are now hearing reports that it will be named DROID XOOM, according to Droid Life. They are also certain that it will not have 4G LTE support for now, then again with so few networks in the world supporting 4G, it is not going to be a major drawback. Motorola is set to announce the tablet at CES 2011, so we will find out the full details then.

• You can loan a Kindle book once for a 14-day period. Not all books are "lendable," says Amazon. It's up to the publisher or rights holder to decide which books are. Oh, and during that 14-day period, the person lending the book can't read it while it's in another's virtual hands.

This month, numerous headlines alleging the deaths of celebrities such as Owen Wilson, Eddie Murphy, Charlie Sheen, and Aretha Franklin have been posted on social networking sites. In every case, the obituary was proven to be a hoax. However, the individual responsible for promoting the false reports managed to drive an obscene amount of unwarranted Internet traffic to his site, proving just how effective SEO programs can be. Today, according to local police, that man has been found dead.

B&N announced the milestone Thursday, three days after Amazon proclaimed the Kindle its best-selling product in the 15 years the online retailer has been in business. Both devices are available for less than $150 and target mostly avid readers who prefer to carry their books and periodicals in a single, lightweight device.

On Monday, New York publishing firm Alfred A. Knopf told the Associated Press the company had signed a deal with Mr. Assange for his autobiography “prior to the holidays.” Assange, who masterminded the Nov. 28 release of a flood of secret US diplomatic cables, told The Sunday Times of London the deal would bring in more than $1 million. He claimed $800,000 would come from Knopf and roughly $500,000 would be paid by British publisher Canongate.

Here are the most prevalent rumors about iPad 2 that have been circulating the Web, along with our take on whether you can believe what you read: