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Two researchers who set up doppelganger domains to mimic legitimate domains belonging to Fortune 500 companies say they managed to vacuum up 20 gigabytes of misaddressed e-mail over six months.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, announced a list of interesting engagement stats, and then slipped in this tiny piece of information in an informal business meeting on Thursday morning that “Users will begin to observe promoted tweets from companies you don’t follow.”

Zynga offers free games through Facebook, then studies data on how its audience plays them. It uses its findings to fiddle with the games to get people to play longer, tell more Facebook friends about them and buy more virtual goods.

And so it begins. After Yahoo this week gave CEO Carol Bartz the axe, the stock rallied on the suspicion on the Street that the company almost certainly has now been put into play, and might not last very long with its current corporate structure.

Google Inc. announced Thursday that it has acquired Zagat Survey LLC, the restaurant review and ratings service that is a go-to source for foodies everywhere.

If you're a seasoned Netflix instant streaming user, it may surprise you to know that the company has always had an official policy of limiting the number of simultaneous streams you're using. Now, Netflix has made that policy more concrete by producing an error message if you attempt to access your streaming account when it is already in use.

It has been a very long week for AOL. And it's about to get even longer. Last Thursday, word leaked that one of its employees, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, was launching a venture capital fund that would include an $8 million commitment from AOL (AOL). Then came a more official version via the NY Times, which included positive quotes from both Arrington and AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong.

The sudden ouster of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz wasn't triggered by one specific factor, but rather because Ms. Bartz wasn't reaching a series of performance targets.

Facebook's first-half revenue roughly doubled to $1.6 billion, underscoring the world's largest social network's appeal to advertisers.

When it comes to spreading popular content around the web, where you post matters. A study that link-shortening service Bit.ly released on its blog Tuesday shows that different kinds of links rise and fizzle at different speeds — depending on the platform they are posted on.