(Editor's note: Want to read an opposing viewpoint? Check out Why Most Twitter Users Give Up.)

A Nielsen report this week revealed that Twitter has an uncanny knack for hemorrhaging users. In fact, some 60 percent of new users bail on the service within a month. For those of us who've been tweeting for a couple of years, this isn't exactly a shocker. Many longtime users have gone through that initial period of wondering what, if any, use Twitter might be. And maybe it's better for everyone if those who don't get it refrain from tweeting until they do.

Is it really a surprise that, right after the rumors of AT&T and Verizon pairing off start hitting the news (again), suddenly Microsoft enters the picture? Out of the blue comes news of "Pink" a supposed Microsoft Zune-phone to be sold by Verizon. This doesn't seem like a mere coincidence.

While it's certainly possible Verizon will do both--selling iPhones and whatever "Pink" turns out to be, it seems just as likely that Verizon or its partisans may just be playing Apple and Microsoft off one another?

No matter how hard it tries, Facebook will never be a better Twitter than Twitter. While the two are both social networks, they are very different in what they are used for. One is for news, the other is for sharing, it's just that simple.

By trying to turn itself into a Twitter-like information stream, Facebook risks losing its focus on friends sharing information with friends. That is what I and millions of others love about Facebook and is a big part of why users don't like the ongoing user interface changes we've had to endure.

Google is being hit with its first (of many?) anti-Monopoly inquiries by the Department of Justice this week the NYTimes has learned.

The concern is over the $125 million settlement that Google came to with the Author's Guild and the Association of American publishers. A class action suit was filed in 2005 and claims that Google's practice of scanning copyrighted books from libraries for use in its book search service was a violation of copyrights.

It's good to know I am not alone: Many other people use Twitter a few times and can't think of a good reason to come back. With all the hype about Twitter's 140-character version of living, I'd gotten the impression that I'm the only one on Twitter who doesn't get why Twitter matters.

Not so, according to Nielsen data that shows 60 percent of people who use Twitter one month, even at its peak popularity, don't come back the next. While it used to be that 70 stayed away that improvement is not much to brag about--Twitter's customer retention is prone to peaks and valleys.

Is Apple's rumored "mediapad" entertainment device a threat to Amazon's Kindle e-book reader? I think it is, but the only people who may care are current Kindle owners, some of whom may end up wishing they had waited on their purchase.

As I have said before: The Kindle in kindling.

The Swine Flu emergency is demonstrating a lot of what is wrong about Twitter, but also some things that are right about it, too.

The bad: Anybody can post and sometimes what they post is flat-out wrong or worse. Couple this with an almost unprecedented sense of immediacy, and you've got a recipe for instant global misinformation.

It is sometimes hard to predict what developers will do when given a new platform to work with, but one thing seems certain: Opening Facebook to outside developers will make the service considerably more like Twitter.

Early this year, while millions of American businesses were struggling to hold on to their employees, Apple Computer was cutting staff. Why? So that the best non-holiday quarter in the company's history could be just a teensy bit better.
So that the $29 billion that Apple has on hand would remain totally secure.

Big companies sometimes wonder why people don't like them very much. Why many talented people want nothing to do with giant corporations like Apple.

Writing in the latest issue of Virus Bulletin (registration required), two Symantec researchers report what they believe is the first evidence of a major botnet consisting of compromised Macs. However other experts aren't so sure of the increased threat to Mac users.

Researchers Mario Ballano Barcena and Alfredo Pesoli found that Mac users who downloaded pirated copies of iWork 09 and Adobe Creative Suite 4 from P2P sites got more than the programs they intended. Added to the binaries were two malware variants--OSX.Iservice and OSX.Iservice.B. The malware executes a PHP script, running as root, that launches distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against sites. One site, dollarcardmarketing.com, reported a DDoS attack of more than 600Gb of Web traffic at its peak, according to the Washington Post.

While Apple has been successful with advertising that Mac users won't suffer the same number of viral attacks that Windows users endure, "unfortunately Macs offer no protection against the manipulation of emotions by malicious users," said Randy Abrams, director of education at ESET, an antivirus vendor.

Whether this is the first Mac-based botnet, Abrams said this probably wasn't the first. He told PC World, "usually the first is done by some really smart people and doesn't get discovered." Abrams noted that Macs today essentially run on Unix and in his blog he describes the parallels of this Mac malware with the first network Unix worm written by Robert Morris, Jr. back in 1988.

Other experts agree the media attention around this particular botnet is unwarranted.

"The story for Mac malware hasn't changed this week contrary to popular opinion," wrote Adam O'Donnell of Cloudmark in a blog post. That said, O'Donnell and experts who spoke to PCWorld all cited the need for Mac users to be educated on the threat landscape and at least start thinking about antivirus solutions for their desktops. Each stopped short of saying such purchases were absolutely necessary.

Based on this one example, as long as a Mac user avoids pirated software on P2P sites, their desktop remains safe. But O'Donnell writes "when we see what happens every day on the PC side happen once on the Mac side, then we all need to run out and buy anti-virus software."

Robert Vamosi is a freelance computer security writer specializing in covering criminal hackers and malware threats.

Facebook's offering its proposed terms of service to a public vote was nothing more than a PR stunt. And very few of the service's 200 million users wanted anything to do with it.

As voting closed on Thursday, news reports said slightly more than 640,000 ballots had been cast. That was far short of the approximately 60 million votes necessary to make the vote binding under Facebook's rules for the balloting.

Faced with a sour economy and offering products generally priced at the high end of their respective markets, Apple did what only Steve Jobs can be counted on to do: It released insanely great financial results on Wednesday. But will the profits continue?

CNN said Apple "thrashed Wall Street forecasts" for first quarter revenue and profit. And did so while Jobs is on extended medical leave, though the factors in last quarter's success were already on autopilot and had been for quite some time. It's that the company did so well in such a bad economy that makes people gasp.

In a move obviously meant to attract more mainstream users to Second Life and salvage some of the realm's lost momentum, Linden Lab will soon be moving mature content to a secondary continent within the virtual world. This has got to be a relief to all those businesses that wasted precious resources building digital offices and outlets in the pixel-based universe over the last few years.

Once touted as an essential locale for hip businesses to open up their doors, Second Life saw something of a real estate boom as companies such as Dell and IBM rushed to build their presence on Second Life's sprawling landscape. But once built, these massive corporate structures turned out to be little more than vast wastes of time and money--gigantic ghost towns in a non-existent gold rush.

With researchers reporting the first Macintosh-specific malware to be found "in the wild" on the Internet, Mac users want to know what to do. My advice: Nothing. But, this is a good news/bad news story.

The good news for Mac users is that you do not need to buy anti-virus software. The bad news is that one word must now be appended to that sentence, "Yet."

Wouldn't it be great to read on Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, reports that American cyber spies have penetrated the Chinese electric grid and may have left software behind that would allow Washington to plunge the People's Republic into darkness?

Or maybe the Russian press will wring its hands over the loss of terabytes of nuclear secrets, presumably to British or American cyber attackers.

The more Twitter appears in the headlines, the more useless it seems to become. When Ashton Kutcher, a so-so actor, better known for being Mr. Demi Moore, can become the first million-follower man, I have to wonder if there is something about a world presented in 140-character bursts that makes people simple.

Here is an idea: Change Twitter's 140-character maximum length to a 140-word maximum. Let's make all these tweeters with diarrhea of the fingers or the "like" button actually have to give some thought, meaning, and even context to what they want to share with the world. (Here word 116 in this post).

Maybe nobody else is sad that Time Warner Cable has (for now) abandoned its foray into consumption-based Internet service pricing, but I am. I was all set for the company to become the poster child net neutrality--a topic that is hard for many people to understand--and why it really matters.

The idea behind net neutrality is that the owner of the plumbing should not care what the plumbing is used for or who uses it. This means that just because you are the local cable company, you cannot discriminate in how your Internet service is priced to benefit your other businesses. This is exactly what it looked like Time Warner was planning to do.

Just when we thought the world was facing about as many threats as any one planet should have to contend with comes word that spam could be a source of global warming.

"The Carbon Footprint of Spam," a study commissioned by McAfee, found that in 2008 the transport and processing of spam contributed the same greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using 3 billion gallons of gasoline.

Does Steve Jobs love his customers? We're about to find out. AT&T wants to extend its monopoly on U.S. iPhone sales for another year, to 2011. Will Apple go for it, or will Jobs and company make iPhones more widely available?

If Steve really cares about customers, he'll make iPhones more widely available. I know many Verizon customers who'd like to buy an iPhone but don't want to change carriers to get one.

According to a new report on data breaches from Verizon Business, cyber criminals are no longer attacking where the credit card files are, but where they once were.

"Criminals are borrowing from digital forensics tools," said Bryan Sartan, director of investigative response for Verizon Business Security Solutions. He said criminals are now able to read deleted transaction data from unallocated disk space and from the pagefile, and he attributed some of that to businesses retrofitting or upgrading software on older payment appliances to be compliant with payment card industry regulations. "New software, old data."

Last year Verizon Business released a massive four-year study on data breaches. Although this year's report covers only one year the volume is nonetheless staggering: 285 million compromised records from 90 confirmed data breaches in 2008.

Sartan was unable to name the specific organizations investigated for this report, but he did say that last year targeted attacks against financial institutions rose sharply to 30 percent, just behind retail at 31 percent. He said targeted attacks, where the criminals knew what they wanted, had gone up in part because prices for credit card information on the black market had gone down. Knowing the data came from a financial institution increases its value, he said.

Ninety-nine percent of the records breached were from compromised servers and applications. Of those, 67 percent of the breaches were aided by significant configuration errors. Sixty-four percent of the breaches were the result of hacking. While SQL injection remained high as a means of attack, Sartan said the overall SQL numbers were on the decline.

Seventy four percent of the breaches were from outside sources, dispelling the idea that data breaches were largely the work of insiders. According to the report, IP addresses associated with external attacks came from Eastern Europe (22 percent), East Asia (18 percent) and North America (15 percent).

Thirty-nine percent of the breaches involved multiple parties, where a software flaw used at one company lead it being used against another company. "(The) attacker exploits Software X at Brand A Stores and later learns that Brand B Stores also runs Software X. An attack is then directed at Brand B Stores but only because of a known exploitable weakness."

Behind all this data is the fact that organized crime, not the lone criminal hacker, has the resources and patience to carry out these attacks. Sartan said that scraping credit data from volatile memory or reading deleted data takes a bit of technical sophistication. He said Verizon Business has found that software used in the breaches is often unique, specific to the targeted organization.

The full 2009 Data Breach Investigations report is available on the Verizon Business site.

Robert Vamosi is a freelance computer security writer specializing in covering criminal hackers and malware threats.

What does Time Warner Cable's screwing of it customers over bandwidth caps have to do with AT&T Wireless' screwing of its customers over their use of Skype on iPhones?

Lots, because each is an example of a technology company trying to protect its legacy business and not knowing how to move successfully into the future. If you imagine two bratty kids who don't want to "grow up" you pretty much have the picture.

The Apple rumor mill is once again running overtime on the topic of netbooks. If you believe the reports, Steve Jobs is himself leading the charge. My take: Whatever Apple does, it won't be a netbook in the usual sense, I also bet that Apple, if it does anything, will itself avoid using the n-word to describe it.

Excuse me if I am being too literal, but my definition of a netbook is a small notebook computer with a limited feature set that sells for less than $500 and is targeted primarily toward wireless connectivity.

How many people did the cable cutters kill? This is not an attempt to be overdramatic, but when you cut the fiber optic that provides dial tone and Internet to large numbers of people in four counties, as well as their 911 centers, you put lives at risk. If the outage continues long enough, at some point this risk becomes sad reality.

Did it is this case? We don’t know yet and may never know for sure, but intentionally putting so many people at risk pushes vandalism to the edge of being terrorism. And terrorists should be dealt with harshly.

The FCC is best known for colossal screw-ups, like America's cellular service. News that the Commission is interested in creating national broadband policy brings a mix of dread--and hope.

"If we do our job well," Interim FCC chair Michael Copps said in announcing the FCC's intent to improve broadband, "this will be the most formative--indeed transformative--proceeding ever in the Commission's history."

Gee, I can buy a Windows netbook or a Linux netbook. The price is the same. Which will I choose? Windows, of course. What do you think I am, stupid?

Apparently, I am not the only one who feels that way. A recent post in Microsoft's Windows Experience blog says that during February, close to 96 percent of netbooks sold shipped with Windows as the OS. That is up from under 10 percent of units shipped during the first half of 2008--and while the source is obviously Microsoft, that figure is actually right in line with Windows' overall marketshare.

IBM will be remembered as the last, best hope for Sun Microsystems. Unless you believe IBM wasn't serious and would have eventually walked away regardless, then Scott McNealy was foolish to any reasonable terms that Big Blue offered.

I can imagine no circumstance in which Sun will soon be worth as much as IBM offered for the company. Nor do I believe another potential suitor--of which there aren't many--will make as good an offer.

A purchase of Twitter by Google would allow a company that already knows too much about us to find out even more. And sell it to people who could aggressively use our words to pester us. Or worse.

Lacking any obvious way to make money, Twitter must be looking for ways to turn its search engine into a major revenue stream. How can Twitter do this in a way that users won't find obnoxious? Facebook has not been able to do it, and slides from controversy to controversy as a result.

Digg has launched an installation-free toolbar dubbed "DiggBar," an impressive helper that could change your web business. First, it changes the way you surf. Launch the service just by entering "digg.com/" in front of any URL, such as "digg.com/http://www.pcworld.com". Try it here; I'll wait.

Do you really need another toolbar? In this case, yes. The DiggBar has its pulse on a huge Internet community. And it easily appears and disappears on a whim, unlike a permanent toolbar. Here's why it's significant and how you can use it.

Twitter has been tweaking its search engine, experimenting with ways to sort results into your regular list of messages. But you can already subscribe to a search results in your RSS reader, which I prefer for tracking trends. These RSS search feeds create another great Twitter business tool.

Like Google Alerts, you can use these searches for your own market research; whenever people mention your company, competitors, or industry, the note will appear in your RSS reader. Here's how to get started, even if you don't have a Twitter account.