Carla Thornton, Nikki Echler McDonald

A Foster City, Calif., pediatric dentist is being allowed to proceed with a libel suit against a husband and wife accused of giving her a bad review on Yelp, according to Mediapost.com.

The lawsuit, filed in December in Santa Clara Superior Court, alleges that dentist Yvonne Wong was defamed by comments made on Yelp by parents Tai Jing and Jia Ma. The couple complained that Wong filled their four-year-old son's cavity with mercury and made him "light-headed" from laughing gas. Wong's attorney says the couple signed a consent form that informed them of the mercury.

"TV Widgets" -- the latest attempt to meld television and the Internet, this time by Yahoo and Intel -- is here. Based on simple screen icons, it promises to show up in a range of products this year, ranging from flat-panel TVs to DVD players. First out of the gate: A new breed of Samsung HDTVs.

Best Buy stores Sunday began selling the Samsung LED 7100 Series equipped with Yahoo widgets, which are mini-applications that connect directly to the Web using Intel's Media Processor CE 3100. They're the first products to spring from the Widget Channel TV application framework announced last summer by Yahoo and Intel.

Twitter appears to be experiencing more growing pains. Users and the service itself recently have reported a spate of problems including erroneous "over the follow limit" messages, missing updates and problems uploading JPEGs.

Twitter usage has surged this year as more people discover the service. During major events -- such as the presidential inauguration in January -- it has bogged down, although uptime has generally increased thanks to staff and infrastructure investments.

Facebook fans unhappy about the site's most recent design changes are mobilizing to make their voices heard and plead with management to bring back the old look.

At issue is Facebook's new appearance and functionality that's intended to give the site a friendlier, timelier feel. Some reviewers have given the changes an overall thumbs up. However, tens of thousands of users are opposed to the changes, and want to force Facebook to return some old features.

April Fool's Day is still two weeks away, but many Twitterers have already been punked. It's a good one, too. Thursday's BBSpot spoof that reports Twitter has decided to charge for "premium" services is still tricking some Twitter users.

After much speculation about how Twitter intends to make money, it's easy to see how some could be duped by the BBSpot headline, "Twitter Unveils New Premium Accounts," and even the made-up quote from Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams:

Google has introduced what it says is a faster beta version of Chrome. The announcement was made on a new company blog devoted to the browser.

According to Chrome product manager Brian Rakowski, the beta is up to 35 percent quicker than the previous version of Chrome. Other new features include being able to drag tabs to get a side-by-side view, form autofill, autoscroll and a full-page zoom.

Nokia is seriously contemplating entering the notebook market, according to research firm DisplaySearch. A blog entry by analyst John Jacobs quotes Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo as saying in an interview with Finnish national broadcaster YLE that the company is "looking very actively" at the possibility.

However, it sounded as if Nokia's entry would not necessarily resemble what we think of today as a notebook or even mini-notebook. "We don't have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a cell phone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging," Kallasvuo reportedly said. "Today we have hundreds of millions of people who are having their first Internet experience on the phone. This is a good indication."

Apparently, high school is never really over -- especially when it comes to social networking. The Internet might allow us to interact with people from every conceivable walk of life, but an MIT study says users gravitate to the same social cliques online that they occupy in the real world.

Even people who have hundreds of Facebook or LinkedIn connections are likely to only interact online with the same crowd of like-minded users, according to MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Damon Centola. On the bright side, Centola told The Standard, cliquishness can actually be good for the world.

RIM surprised a lot of people this week by announcing that apps sold in the soon-to-launch Blackberry App World online store will start at US$2.99 instead of competing with Apple's model, which allows 99 cent apps.

Blackberry developer forums have been relatively quiet about the announcement, but many smart phone owners have panned RIM's pricing structure, which starts with free apps, then jumps directly to $2.99 and tiers up in $1 increments until topping out at $9.99.

Web sites written in Russian, Korean and other non-ASCII characters soon will be able to have their addresses displayed in the same language.

Testing on 11 pilot sites with internationalized domain names (IDN) could be completed by the end of the year, according to Kim Davies, spokesman for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The URLs being tested in Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Japanese, Russian and a handful of other major world languages don't cover all possible character sets, but broadly represent most countries, Davies told The Standard. Only http://, which is automatically added by browsers, is displayed in English.

According to a new study, some smartphone owners spent as much on applications for their cell phones last year as they did on the devices themselves.

Call it the Apple App Store effect, says the ABI Research study on mobile storefronts. Despite having one of the smallest catalogs of all the development platforms -- now around 15,000 app titles compared to 85,000 each for Palm and RIM -- Apple's iPhone App Store has generated significant sales across the board.

Get ready for i.biz, u.biz and probably we.biz.

One- and two-character domain names are coming to the .biz extension if NeuStar, the company that runs the .biz registry, succeeds in getting the change okayed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).