Fallon Is Webby Awards' 'Person of the Year'

I tried to show the real me, he says

(NEWSER) - Twitter’s negative users appear to have scared away a celebrity tweeter, Rolling Stone reports. Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor delighted some fans by using his 140 characters to announce collaborations, diss Chris Cornell, and raise money for charity. But the social network is “now doing more harm than good,” Reznor writes on the group’s site. “The experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.” More»

Twitter, Path blamed in privacy controversy

(NEWSER) - Leading smartphone apps are taking a lot more of our information than we realize. If you use Twitter's "Find Friends" feature, the company receives every phone number and email address in your address book—a fact that Twitter hadn't clarified, the Los Angeles Times reports. The company now says it will fix the problem. But it's just one of many companies storing user information with a view toward ultimately using it for advertising. More»

Esquire : Sites that were before their time

(NEWSER) - Everything old is new again, especially on the Web. Some of today's tech darlings owe a lot to websites of years past. Here are some of Esquire's 15 favorite, and mostly kaput, Web 1.0 pioneers:

1. Dodgeball (2000) "A location-based social network for mobile devices, and the Internet's gift to stalkers," says Esquire. Today's Foursquare was co-created by one of its founders.

Privacy gap closed, but not before some opportunistic hijinks

(NEWSER) - If your Twitter account lists no followers or follow-ees, thank the happy-go-lucky iPhone acquirers at Gizmodo , who tipped the tech world to a vulnerability this morning. It's no longer working, but the web interface allowed the attention-starved to type "accept" and the Twitter name of any account, thereby gaining a follower—and the attendant direct-messaging capability. "I have no idea how a hole this large could be left in a service as popular as Twitter, nor do I understand why it hasn't been shut yet," wrote John Herrman. More»

Also, that iPhone is never going anywhere

(NEWSER) - Remember the one about the guy who said the Internet will fail ? Ha, ha, ha. Well, while we're waiting 15 years later for that daring prediction to come true, Asylum runs through a few other notables that fell flat:

• 'Portable computers:' "The portable computer is a dream machine for the few," the founder of an early computer mag wrote in the New York Times in 1985. And "no one would want to take one fishing."