These are my links for January 2nd through January 4th:

• More Smartphone Users Now Use Their Phones to Shop Online – Smartphone users are becoming increasingly comfortable with using their phones to shop online. According to new data from Compete, about 37% of smartphone users have purchased something with their handset in the last 6 months. Among the most popular items that these users bought are music, books, DVDs, video games and movie tickets. At the same time, though, Compete also found that smartphone users are very likely to abandon shopping sites that haven't been optimized for mobile usage. Almost 8% of smartphone owners who tried to buy something from their phone were simply unable to do so.
• Flixster Acquires Rotten Tomatoes – Flixster just announced that it has acquired Rotten Tomatoes, the popular movie review site, from IGN Entertainment. IGN is a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Flixster is one of the world's most popular movie communities and currently features about 2.3 billion user ratings and reviews from its users. Rumors about this acquisition first surfaced in late December, when Kara Swisher first reported that a potential acquisition of Flixster by MySpace would hinge upon a merger of Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster.
• Twitter’s Psychologist Strikes Again: Analyze Your Lists – Dan Zarrella has long impressed us with his discourses on the science of retweets, as well as his psychoanalytic apps that scan and parse Twitter streams – one for general analysis and one for dreams.
• The 50 Most-Blogged Albums of 2009, Streaming Free: HypeMachine Zeitgeist Out Now – Hype Machine, the smart, long-running MP3 blog aggregator, has posted its annual collection of the most-blogged-about albums, songs and musical artists of the year. Once again, the project is a pleasure to consume and will unfold throughout the month of January. Top albums 50 through 41, Mumford and Sons through Monsters of Folk, are available now in full for streaming.
• Rock & Roll Will Never Die? It Might on Facebook – The graying of the Facebook population seems to have continued according to new stats released today by iStrategyLabs. And while one might expect more of the site's now nearly 10 million users over the age of 55 to be Neil Young fans, his "Rock N' Roll Will Never Die" refrain seems to be falling through. The listing of the term "rock and roll" as an interest is down over 60% among Facebook users in the past year.
• ComScore Ups the Ante in Mobile Analytics – ComScore, a leading Web statistics provider, has joined with Flurry Analytics to provide a more complete picture on the who, what, when, where and how of our use of mobile media. Founded just over a year ago, Flurry has grown immensely and this move will only serve to boost its popularity.
• Watching TV Together in Different Time Zones – NYTimes.com – Simple technology, including video chatting services like Skype, is making it possible for far-flung friends to watch shows together, even if they can’t share the same bowl of popcorn.
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• George Washington’s Rules for Social Media « digiphile – The following “rules” are interpretation of his intent, not President Washington’s words.
• Why Twitter Will Endure – NYTimes.com – In the pantheon of digital nomenclature — brands within a sector of the economy that grew so fast that all the sensible names were quickly taken — it would be hard to come up with a noun more trite than Twitter. It impugns itself, promising something slight and inconsequential, yet another way to make hours disappear and have nothing to show for it. And just in case the noun is not sufficiently indicting, the verb, “to tweet” is even more embarrassing.

These are my links for December 28th:

• Former Morgan Stanley Coder Gets 2 Years in Prison for TJX Hack | Threat Level | Wired.com – The two great friends talked every day and shared information about all of their exploits — sexual, narcotic and hacking — according to prosecutors. Now another thing they’ll have to share information about is their experience in federal prison.
• Torrent Search Engines Unlawful, U.S. Judge Says | Threat Level | Wired.com – The operator of a popular BitTorrent search site said Monday he will likely challenge last week’s landmark decision by a U.S. judge declaring such sites unlawful and no different from conventional peer-to-peer piracy services.
• Piracy Surcharge Set To Force 40,000 Households Offline | TorrentFreak – Earlier, ISP BT predicted that operating an anti-filesharing scheme in the UK would cost £365m a year. Now the government has admitted that not only will broadband customers have to foot a £500m bill, but that burden will prove too great for 40,000 households – who will have no choice but to give up their Internet connections.
• Top 7 Disruptions of the Year | Epicenter | Wired.com – Technology is like a dog; each year of it seems like the equivalent of seven human years — at least when you get to the end of it and realize it’s only been 12 months since that now indispensable service first launched.
• Code That Protects Most Cellphone Calls Is Deciphered – NYTimes.com – A German computer engineer said Monday that he had deciphered and published the secret code used to encrypt most of the world’s digital mobile phone calls, saying it was his attempt to expose weaknesses in the security of global wireless systems.
• Palm Pre Users Rejoice: webOS 1.3.5 is Coming Today – Here’s a nice Christmas present for Palm Pre users: According to Sprint’s website, a new version of Pre’s operating system, webOS 1.3.5, is due to go live today.
• Facebook more than doubled its number of users this year | Technology | guardian.co.uk – Even by Facebook's standards, the past 12 months have been remarkable. The site cemented its position as the world's favourite social network, reached the verge of profitability and even exerted its influence over the race for the Christmas No 1.
• Twitter’s List Of 370 Banned Passwords – Twitter appears to have learned from its security scare earlier this year and seems to be taking password security more seriously than most Internet services.
• 5 Reasons to Learn Social Media | Search Engine Journal – Have you ever noticed how many bloggers and social media marketers just tell people that they should go out try social media? How you shouldn’t worry about learning social it? That you’ll learn it on the fly and everything will be fine.

This is the Daily Link Report for September 11th

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• Dropbox’s Web Interface Gets An Overhaul: Adds Bulk File Management, Search, And More – Dropbox, the impressive file syncing service which makes it easy to sync your files across multiple computers and the web, has released a brand new version of its online interface. Today’s upgrade brings with it a number of new features that will make it much easier to manage the large number of files users often have on their Dropboxes.
• Yeah, But Did You Steal The Zynga Playbook, Playdom? – It’s a day late, but social game site (and Zynga-antagonizer) Playdom has finally responded to our request for comment on the lawsuit and temporary restraining order they got hit with earlier this week.
• Skype Kills Extras (and Its Developer Ecosystem) – Skype’s new owners should be aware of one small thing: They are paying $2 billion for a company that, despite having more than 400 million subscribers, doesn’t know how to leverage that platform. Why? Because it doesn’t understand developers. It never has. We have consistently pointed out this lackadaisical attitude towards its developer ecosystem. The fact is that if you put your lot with Skype, then you are really on your own. Today the company announced that it’s killed Skype Extras, an API-based effort that was launched with much fanfare in June 2007.
• Yeah Ok, So Facebook Punk’d Us – Techcruch's report of the "Fax Photo" feature in Facebook was a joke played on them by Facebook.
• Twitter Changes TOS, Opens the Door for Ads – The new TOS, which is far more expansive and specific than the old one, not only addresses privacy concerns, but ownership, spam, rights, and links. The microblogging company said that, now that they better understand how users utilize Twitter, they can update the TOS to match.
• Facebook Friends Can Now Be Filtered By City (Again) – Over the last few weeks, Facebook has been removing regional networks. Silicon Valley? New York City? Peoria, IL? They have been slowly stripped from Facebook, to the dismay of many. The biggest complaint from users? They want to find their friends by location when they travel.

  Facebook’s heard the complaints and they understand the value of finding friends by region. So Facebook has decided to address that complaint by adding a filter to find friends by their hometown. This was announced via a Facebook wall post.

• How to Access Gmail When It’s Down – Gmail – Lifehacker – Just because the Gmail Web interface is down it doesn't mean you can't get your email.
• Morning Types Crash Faster Than Night Owls, Study Says – Habits – Lifehacker – The early bird may get the worm, but there's something to be said about burning the midnight oil. In fact, according to a new study, staying up later and longer may increase alertness and productivity more than being an early riser.
• Microsoft: We haven’t bought ‘pornography’ | Technically Incorrect – CNET News – A Microsoft representative declared in an e-mail: "Microsoft has not purchased the keyword 'pornography,' and this term has never been in our AdWords account."
• Your Tweets Are Yours: Now Back Them Up – Yesterday’s change in Twitter’s Terms of service, in which they explicitly state that every user owns their own tweets is cool, but what does it really mean for the user?