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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Twitter, the fast-growing microblogging site now seeking ways to make money, expanded its terms for users on Thursday to allow advertisers to reach the Internet site's more than 45 million monthly visitors.

Twitter, the two-year-old venture capital-backed company that lets people send an unlimited number of 140-character messages, is just now beginning to ramp up efforts to monetize, or gain revenue from, its popular site.

On Thursday, it revised its "terms of service" to specify that it may run ads.

"We leave the door open for advertising. We'd like to keep our options open, as we've said before," founder Biz Stone wrote on Twitter's official blog. blog.twitter.com/

Advertising revenue is the time-honored way for Web sites to generate revenue while remaining free for consumers.

Explosive growth in social networking is attracting interest: worldwide unique visitors to Twitter's site reached 44.5 million in June, up 15-fold year-over-year, according to comScore.

Some analysts are skeptical that advertising will catch on in a meaningful way on social networks, arguing that companies are reluctant to juxtapose their brands with unpredictable, and potentially offensive, user-generated content.

Stone himself has said the company was wary of annoying its growing base of users by pummeling them with ads.

But other analysts point out that users of social networking websites tend to spend a lot of time on those sites, providing an attractive platform for advertisers to promote their brands -- especially if preferences are tracked.

Twitter kept its new clause on advertising open-ended, and stressed it was subject to change.

"The services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the content or information on the services, queries made through the services, or other information," the terms read. "The types and extent of advertising by Twitter on the services are subject to change."

"In consideration for Twitter granting you access to and use of the services, you agree that Twitter and its third-party providers and partners may place such advertising on the services...."

by Ryan Naraine via ZDNN

Security researchers have intercepted a fake Flash Player update creating a Firefox add-on that spies on a target user’s Google search results.

The malicious Firefox extension, called “Adobe Flash Player 0.2,” injects ads into the user’s Google search results pages and even has the capability to monitor the user’s browsing activities, particularly Google search queries using the Firefox browser.

It then sends the information it gathers to a hacker-controlled server.

Trend Micro has a detailed description of this piece of malware and some insight into why this could become a bigger problem for people migrating towards Firefox in search of better browser security:

We have seen a lot of malware target Internet Explorer in the past. This is probably one of the reasons why a huge number of users are opting to use alternative browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera instead. Though this used to be considered a safe computing practice before, it seems it no longer is with the proliferation of malware targeting the most popular alternative Internet browser — Firefox.

Users should be wary, as always, of downloading updates from unknown sources. They should also note that no browser is safe from malicious attacks as cybercriminals will do just about anything to infect users with their malicious code.

by Adrian Kingsley via ZDNN

Following a two-hour outage yesterday, Google has now managed to get its Gmail service up and running. This outage follows two other well-publicized outages in February and May of this year. What do these outages say about Google, and email in general?

Well, the most apparent conclusion that can be drawn in that Google is not infallible. The company is like every other and is prone to failures. And let’s remember that Gmail is primarily a free service, so we as users get what we pay for. This outage has, ironically, been put down to changes to the request routers that direct queries to the service’s web servers, changes that were meant to improve service. I doubt that if we all paid Google for the pleasure of using Gmail that you could eliminate downtime totally. Someone made a change, things went wrong, everything came crashing down. It happens.

But the fact that downtime is an inevitable side effect of relying on any technology doesn’t mean that every time Gmail suffers downtime, decision makers think twice about turning to Google for web services, especially services that they rely on like email. Email is a critical business service, and downtime not only frustrates, it costs money.

Is it realistic to expect 100% uptime? After all, email is something that’s been around for decades. Seriously, no, it isn’t, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, but it still doesn’t mean that people don’t demand it. As Gmail continues to grow, the seriousness of each outage period will grow. That said, even though expecting 100% reliability is unrealistic, it’s in Google’s interests to improve reliability and add measures to prevent the entire email system from collapsing.

Outages such as this also paint Google’s OS aspirations in a different light. Would a Chrome OS put increasing pressure on Google’s infrastructure and make outages more commonplace? Will users put up with this?

How did the Google Gmail outage affect you? Do you think that it’s time for a company to offer 100% uptime guarantee? Do Gmail outages make you suspicious of relying on Google?