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Facebook overtook Google to become America’s most popular website. Figures for the week ending March 13th showed that the social-networking site accounted for 7.1% of the country’s traffic, compared with Google’s 7.0%, the first time it has had a weekly lead. However, with revenues of $23.7 billion last year, Google remains easily the more profitable of the two.

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Hackers have flooded the Internet with virus-tainted spam that targets Facebook’s estimated 400 million users in an effort to steal banking passwords and gather other sensitive information.

Technology  |  Lifestyle  |  Media

The emails tell recipients that the passwords on their Facebook accounts have been reset, urging them to click on an attachment to obtain new login credentials, according to anti-virus software maker McAfee Inc.

If the attachment is opened, it downloads several types of malicious software, including a program that steals passwords, McAfee said on Wednesday.

Hackers have long targeted Facebook users, sending them tainted messages via the social networking company’s own internal email system. With this new attack, they are using regular Internet email to spread their malicious software.

A Facebook spokesman said the company could not comment on the specific case, but pointed to a status update the company posted on its web site earlier on Wednesday warning users about the spoofed email and advising users to delete the email and to warn their friends.

McAfee estimates that hackers sent out tens of millions of spam across Europe, the United States and Asia since the campaign began on Tuesday.

Dave Marcus, McAfee’s director of malware research and communications, said that he expects the hackers will succeed in infecting millions of computers.

“With Facebook as your lure, you potentially have 400 million people that can click on the attachment. If you get 10 percent success, that’s 40 million,” he said.

The email’s subject line says “Facebook password reset confirmation customer support,” according to Marcus.

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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.

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Some 25.1 million people accessing Facebook via a mobile Web browser, a growth of 112 percent from January 2009, according to new research from comScore. Twitter use via a mobile browser grew 347 percent to 4.7 million users. MySpace lured 11.4 million users. In total, some 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010. Apple’s iPhone 3GS and Google Android devices such as the Motorola Droid and Nexus One make it easier for users to access applications they would normally only be comfortable using from their PCs and Macs.

Some 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, according to new research from comScore.

That number is an 8.3 point jump from the 22.5 percent figure the researcher tallied one year ago, and is much greater than the 6.8 percent of feature phone users who accessed social networking sites on their mobile phones.

The specific breakdowns, which do not include access of social networks by the 6 million mobile phone owners who do so solely through mobile applications, are even more encouraging for the top social network sites.

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The Department of Defense has loosened the reins over the use of Facebook, Twitter and other user-generated applications among its personnel, ending the maddening inconsistency of Web 2.0 application use among the military.  

In a Feb. 26 memorandum covering the “safe and effective use of Internet-based capabilities,” the DOD said the entire non-classified network may provide access to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other user-generated content and Web 2.0 applications, such as Google Apps, wikis and blogs.

“This directive recognizes the importance of balancing appropriate security measures while maximizing the capabilities afforded by 21st Century Internet tools,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn III.

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You know those patents we see in the tech world that seem overly broad and tend to restrict competition in the space? Well, check out this one. Social networking giant Facebook was just granted a patent for “displaying a news feed in a social media network.”

The patent, which was filed back in 2006, covers the information that is released the in the information river on Facebook’s front page. It doesn’t seem to cover status updates exclusively, meaning that sites like MySpace are probably safe on that front.

As many sites are pointing out, Twitter also seems safe from the effects of the recently granted patent. 

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The Internet is moving away from being a data transportation and messaging platform, into a space filled with integrated rich-media content such as video and voice, and Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook, that encourages online collaborations even at the enterprise level, according to Cisco Systems.

 The networking giant also sees increasing demand for distributed virtualized data center architecture, Irving Tan, newly-appointed managing director of Cisco Singapore and Brunei, said during a media briefing here Thursday.

He noted that this “new Internet” will frame the company’s future strategies and product offerings.

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