If Google Wave eventually fails to live up to the promise and hype that accompanied its launch at Google I/O in May 2009, consider its demise an inside job. Arguably one of Google's biggest announcements of last year, Google Wave appears to be an afterthought among the tech trendsetters after the launch of Google Buzz in early February. Privacy concerns mostly laid to rest, Google Buzz is actually doing much of what Google Wave promised: collaborative discussion, media sharing, and social networking within an e-mail-like framework.

Google's negotiations with the Chinese government over censorship and Internet search should produce a resolution "soon," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Wednesday.

WhitePages.com has stopped ad networks from delivering ads to its site after they were found to contain fake antivirus malware. "On Monday morning WhitePages received reports from users [about] malware in the form of a fake antivirus upsell program that we believe originated (against our terms) from a third-party advertising network serving ads on our website, in addition to other websites," a WhitePages spokeswoman said in an e-mail late Tuesday. "We immediately suspended the networks in question at which time the reports from users subsided," she wrote. "We are working diligently to prevent this from happening in the future." A representative for the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works said on Tuesday that officials were looking at WhitePages.com and Drudge Report as possible sources of malware that had affected Senate computers the day before. Matt Drudge denied the accusation on his site and accused the committee of politicking. But several CNET readers reported that they too had been hit with the malware when they visited the Drudge Report Web site, a conservative news aggregator that sometimes authors stories too. Web sites that have ad networks serve their ads are susceptible to malware being distributed on their sites without their knowledge or involvement. Visitors to the Drudge Report, The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other Web sites were found to be delivering ads containing malware last year. The Drudge Report did not return an e-mail seeking comment Wednesday.

Facebook may pull in an excess of $1 billion in revenues, according to estimates and poking around on behalf of industry blog Inside Facebook. That's an increase from the same publication's estimate of $700 million last year. Facebook board member Marc Andreessen said last year that he projected the company would break $500 million revenue in 2009, and that it had the potential to be a billion-dollar company already, but that it was acting conservatively. (Naturally, Facebook says that as a privately held company it doesn't disclose its financials.) What can Facebook credit this big jump in revenue to? It's all about the Social Ads program. Facebook ditched banner ads altogether earlier this year when its longstanding ad partnership with Microsoft ran out and has chosen to focus on its edgier "engagement ads" program instead--and often these are sold by encouraging brands to promote their presence on Facebook with ad space. However accurate these new estimates from Inside Facebook are, Facebook is certainly making money--and it's making money because the Facebook "fan page" and complementary ad space to promote it are the hottest ticket in brand marketing right now. They won't always be, and Facebook will have to maintain that front-runner status in plenty of advertising innovations down the road as the industry evolves faster than ever. Plus, it's well-known that some of the biggest buyers of Facebook advertisements are social-gaming companies looking to pull in more players: how long can they, in turn, keep up their place in the sun? Critics have long since pointed out the number of third-party companies that are effectively dependent on Facebook for traction and revenue, but the reverse is likely true as well. Facebook has a potentially lucrative new revenue stream emerging when its virtual currency system, Facebook Credits, launches in full--Facebook takes a 30 percent cut of all proceeds. But the developer world isn't totally sold, and the product has grown far more niche from the days when it was rumored to be a "PayPal killer." As Inside Facebook points out, advertising is still the core of the company's business model. And here, it has to stay ahead of the pack more than ever.

A couple of years ago, they were everywhere: fresh, design-savvy start-ups, taking everything you might ever want to know your friends were doing on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, and goodness knows what else. Social-network feed aggregators--FriendFeed, Socialthing, Plaxo's Pulse--have been part of the dizzying array of Web apps ever since it became evident that the average Internet user was using more than one of these nifty social-media services and just might want to have them all in one place. But they've been on the way out for some time: FriendFeed sold to Facebook, and Socialthing to AOL, both brands buried within their sprawling new owners. And earlier this week, another small start-up in the space, the well-regarded Streamy, announced that it had closed its doors; one co-founder departed for Facebook, the second for social-gaming powerhouse Zynga.

The imagined inventions of Victorian-era French novelist Albert Robida may be coming closer to reality.