Jordan Golson

After a six-hour Internet-organized pillow fight attracted more than people to San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza, city officials are considering a crackdown on "flash mobs."

According to local regulations, most organized gatherings over a certain size must obtain permits, pay a use fee and supply security, portable toilets and cleanup crews. Flash mobs have none of these things, partly because of their spur-of-the-moment nature and the lack of any real authority over the mob.

The iPhone has been viewed as something of a portable electronic kitchen sink by fans. It's a gaming device! It's an email client! You can browse the Web with it! It's a GPS nav unit! Oh yeah, it's a phone too! A healthy number of users have also decided the iPhone was an eBook reader, with a number of applications designed around that objective.

To be perfectly honest, I never bought into the eBook phenomenon. I was a purist for years. I told anyone who would listen that electronic books were foolish and would never replace good old paper.

Palm's new handset has been introduced to the world. Though it isn't getting quite as much coverage as the iPhone did when it was introduced two years ago at Macworld, the Pre is getting plenty of attention.

The general consensus among the critics and journalists is positive. Adrian Covert at Gizmodo said the phone is "simply amazing" and "maybe the most important handset to be announced in two years." Engadget called the interface "well thought out and smooth." Though there are some dissenters, though. Om Malik says "remains highly skeptical of Palm's chance to succeed with this new effort."

Internet tracking firm ComScore Tuesday said that YouTube had almost 100 million viewers in October 2008, easily making it the no. 1 online video property by unique viewers (99.5 million) and total videos streamed (5.3 billion).

Perhaps more impressive than the huge viewership numbers is the average videos per viewer at YouTube. The average YouTube visitor watched more than 53.2 videos in October '08 -- that's almost two per day. Viacom was next closest, pushing just under 12 videos per user.

A study in AdAge notes that very, very few consumers are willing to pay a monthly or yearly subscription fee to remove advertising on their favorite websites.

I've never felt the need to remove ads from the sites I read, but I certainly wouldn't pay a subscription fee to remove them, when I can do that for free with a FireFox add-on (I don't, though). I have given money through memberships and fundraising drives to smaller sites that I read often.

A number of companies have adopted Twitter as a way to keep in touch with their customers. One of the more famous (that I've personally used, natch) is @ComcastCares -- a Twitter account staffed by Frank Eliason and several other Comcast employees, all of whom should get a raise for the amount of good they do for that company. Now, Comcast has a lot of unhappy customers, so any route for direct feedback is useful -- and the company uses that Twitter account very well.

On the other hand, Southwest Airlines prides itself on happy customers and on giving excellent customer service. I've flown Southwest dozens of times over the past few years and I've never had a truly poor experience -- at least not like some of the disasters I've seen from Comcast. So, it wouldn't seem like a Southwest Airlines Twitter account would be that useful.

The Apple iPhone now has a 30 percent market share in the U.S. smartphone market and 16.6 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, Needham analyst Charlie Wolf wrote in a research note this week. Apple is now second only to Nokia, which, while still very strong, saw its share plummet from 63.3 to 43.6 percent year over year. Most of that loss went directly to Apple.

Additionally, Apple's strong iPhone launch has prevented this market segment from stalling. The launch of the iPhone is the "only reason" the smartphone market didn't show a drop in numbers, according to Wolf.

Blizzard's latest expansion to its 11-million subscriber strong World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King, sold 2.8 million units in its first 24 hours of availability, a 16 percent growth over the prior expansion The Burning Crusade, which sold 2.4 million units during its first day.

Blizzard noted that more than 15,000 stores opened at midnight to start selling the highly anticipated game.

Amazon Monday launched 100,000 new "artist stores" -- special pages which, while filled with useful information on bands including biographical information and tour dates, are designed to do one thing: sell music. Comparing the new pages to similar pages on MySpace and Last.FM, all three include information about albums and CD's, including links to buy songs legally, tour date info and more.

The main thing that Amazon does not include is a way for fans to reach out to the band. Both MySpace and Last.fm offer a "wall" that fans can write on to express their affection for artists. Amazon isn't in the social networking business and is much more of a one-way information resource. Because of the lack of interaction, many fans will still flock to other music resources like MySpace music -- but I suspect that fans who just want to buy music will find everything they need on Amazon's new artist pages, which are vaguely Facebookesque in their presentation.

Blizzard Entertainment announced last week that World of Warcraft had surpassed 11 million worldwide subscribers. While other games have sold far more than 11 million copies, no other MMORPG comes close in terms of the number of paying subscribers.

What's also remarkable is the longevity of the game. Most successful games peak early and then fade. Not WoW -- it's been a rolling hit since it launched in 2004. WoW grabbed the best-selling PC game title in 2005 and 2006 and The Burning Crusade expansion pack was the bestselling PC game of 2007 in North America and Europe. Burning Crusade also holds the record for fastest selling PC game of all time, moving 2.4 million copies in 24 hours and 3.5 million in its first month of availability.

Like every other popular internet service under the sun, lots of spammers try to spam Facebook. Luckily for users, the company tries real hard to stop it. Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told The Standard that "malicious actors are constantly attacking the site and what you see is actually a very small percentage of what is attempted." Yikes!

Nick O'Neill at allfacebook noted the increase in IM spam coming over the fancy new Facebook IM platform. It seems spammers are somehow gaining access to user accounts and sending IMs to everyone on their buddy lists. Facebook recommends that affected users reset their passwords. "We're aware of the IM spam and believe that only a small percentage of users have been affected," Schnitt told me. "We're working to update our security systems to minimize further impact."