Amid highly-publicized hardware glitches and ongoing service shortcomings, what explains Apple's soaring consumer approval ratings? Blind faith, experts tell Fox News (hardly a foreign concept to Fox). "Apple is the new religion, say several academics," it writes. "It's not a matter of rationality, it's a matter of faith." Research published this month by two professors at Texas A&M University contends that the only way to understand the "slavish adoration and over-the top financial success of Apple and its 'Jesus Phone' (the iPhone) is to understand its minimalist, white-walled stores as the new churches of the tech generation," …

A right of passage for any young mogul, Facebook chief exec Mark Zuckerberg made his first pilgrimage to the Hill this week, meeting with Republican members of the Senate's high-tech task force to discuss a range of issues, and privacy in particular, the Washington Post reports. "Zuckerberg's private meetings came after a researcher released data on more than 100 million Facebook users, showing how easily it is to gather profile information about those users who are making their names, locations and email addresses available to the public," writes WaPo's Post Tech blog. "Federal regulators have become increasingly …

Ever wonder how often your personal information is sent to Google's serves? A new browser plugin named Google Alarm tells you exactly that. "When I started developing Google Alarm I was blown away to discover that 80+% of websites I visit have some kind of Google tracking bugs on them.," creator Jamie Wilkinson tells Mashable. The plugin, he said, it "meant to illustrate how this single unregulated company now captures more information about us than any government agency ever could." The plugin works by inspecting each page a user visits for Google-related URLs. It then delivers alerts …

If you hadn't heard, Amazon just tapped Facebook to offer site visitors a personalized page where they can see product recommendations influenced by friends, as well as their own tastes. Participating users will also get notifications regarding friends' birthdays, along with targeted suggestions about what to buy them. Social Beat describes the deal as "one of the social network's most important integrations yet." For one, "A deep Amazon.com-Facebook partnership could help corner Google in the e-commerce market," it suggests. "If consumers start looking toward their friends to find out what to buy, they could be able to …

If you couldn't already tell from the trailer, Columbia Pictures' forthcoming Facebook movie portrays Mark Zuckerberg as "vindictive and naïve." That's the conclusion GigaOm draws based on a leaked draft script of the film, "The Social Network," written by Aaron Sorkin. What's more, GigaOm's Liz Gannes believes the film has "a good chance of influencing popular opinion about the founder of one of the most-used web sites in the world." According to Gannes, Sorkin's telling is based largely on largely on Ben Mezrich's book "The Accidental Billionaires," a dramatization of the history of Facebook as told …

From cloud computing to Facebook killers, Google continues to invest in countless endeavors. Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan, however, suggests that the search giant devote more energy to search. In particular, "The pollution within Google News is ridiculous," writes Sullivan. "This is Google, where we're supposed to have the gold standard of search quality. Instead, we get 'news' sites that have been admitted -- after meeting specific editorial criteria -- just jumping on the Google Trends bandwagon, outranking the actual article causing the term 'chocomize' to be popular." Chocomize, in case you're wondering, is a Web site …

Along with other publishers, Time Inc. has heralded the iPad as its savior. Behind the scenes, however, the platform is the cause of great frustration, reports Media Memo. Why? "Because the magazine giant has been unable to get Apple to let it sell and manage subscriptions for its iPad apps -- much to Time Inc.'s surprise." For instance, the publisher was recently prevented from launching a subscription version of its Sports Illustrated iPad app, where consumers would download the magazines via Apple's iTunes, but would pay Time Inc. directly. Time Inc. execs "have been going nuts," sources …

Rumors that Google is quietly developing a Facebook killer, dubbed "Google Me," have been circulating for about a month. Now, sources tell The Wall Street Journal that the search giant is in talks with makers of "popular online games" to create "a broader social-networking service that could compete with Facebook." "By this point everyone and their mother knows that Google is trying to create a Facebook-type social networking service," writes TechCrunch. "It's been confirmed by Quora's Adam D' Angelo, given an ETA by a source internal to Google, and a name, 'Google Me' by …

Inundated by location-based questions from marketers, Forrester conducted a little research and found that just 1% of U.S. online adults are actually using LBSNs weekly, while 4% of them have tried them at least once. "The sample size of this 1% of adults who use LBSNs regularly is small, so our findings on their behaviors is directional only, but our research shows that these users are typically young, male, well-educated, and influential," explains Forrester analyst Melissa Parrish. Highly influential individuals, LBSN users are 38% more likely than the average US online adult to say that friends and …

Yahoo is sick of research firms underreporting its page-views, and it's not going to take it anymore! On Tuesday, the Web portal issued a press release calling out comScore for seriously underreporting its U.S. page views and duration metrics for June. "Yahoo says an error skewed the numbers in the June 2010 publication pretty badly," writes TechCrunch. "The company claims comScore underreported its U.S. page views by more than one billion and its duration metrics by more than 850 million minutes." Based on the corrected numbers, on a month-over-month basis, Yahoo's U.S. page views were down …