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Facebook holds a trove of information about its hundreds of millions of users, and many of them are more than happy to hand over some of that data — like a list of their personal interests — so that they can connect with their favorite companies or play a new game.  Thing is, despite the targeting opportunities afforded by this data, many businesses have still failed to take advantage of it. TextualAds is a firm that’s changing that for text messaging campaigns, by allowing businesses and large brands to push highly targeted SMS messages to their customers.

The service launched in September, and today it’s announcing that it’s closed a $650K seed round. The round’s investors include Dave McClure (500 Startups), Peter Boboff & Chris Redlitz (Transmedia Capital), Marcus Segal (Zynga), Shawn Simpson (former Googler), and Erik Moore.

TextualAds currently offers a signup application that SMBs can install on their Facebook Pages, prompting users to enter their zip code, age, gender, and telephone number. Once businesses have collected this data, they can use the TextualAds platform to target text message campaigns at specific buckets of users (say, women over the age of 30). Text messages are obviously a very powerful channel for businesses and advertisers, and the ability to target them makes them even more appealing. So far TextualAds has 1,200 businesses using it, but there’s much more to come.

In the next month, TextualAds will be launching the 2.0 release of its product, and it’s got several major household brands lined up as clients. The new version of the TextualAds application will feature a one-click signup — the service will better make use of Facebook’s platform and collect the user’s gender, age, and other content from their Facebook profile as opposed to making them enter it manually.

In addition to the streamlined form, TextualAds will be giving clients access to a sophisticated analytics dashboard, which will include data on users’ Facebook Likes, wall posts, and other content that many companies haven’t taken advantage of yet. The service will charge based on the amount of customization companies need, and large clients are paying $100,000 a year for whitelabeled versions of the product.

There are obviously other solutions for targeted text messages (we’ve covered Adenyo before) but TextualAds founder Craig Davis says that he hasn’t seen any other services tap into Facebook’s wealth of data.

According to Hitwise data released today, Facebook.com was the top visited website in the US in 2010, taking up 8.93% of site visits between January and November 2010. Google.com came in second at 7.19%, Yahoo Mail is third with 3.52% and Yahoo.com is fourth at 3.30%. YouTube came in fifth at 2.65 %.

While Hitwise came to the same conclusion back in March, this is the first time Facebook has been named most visited site of the year (crowding out last year’s winner Google). Comscore also shows Facebook.com passing Google.com in visits in November but all Google sites as still having more. According to Hitwise, visits to Google properties combined cover 9.85% of all site visits, making Google a formidable opponent.

“Facebook” also ranked #1 for most searched term of the year directly in front of the hilarious “Facebook login” at #2.

You can read the full results here.

Google is going after local businesses in a big way. It is promoting Google Places any time someone does a local search, it tried to buy Groupon for $6 billion, and it put star exec Marissa Mayer in charge of local products. Since the middle of December, it’s been running a $100 million marketing promotion aimed at small and medium-sized businesses to try to get them to sign up for AdWords.

Small businesses that sign up by December 31 have until mid-February to spend $100 on AdWords, after which they will be given another $100 credit. The promotion is good for “the first one million businesses only.” If one million businesses sign up and spend that $100 the total value of the campaign will be $100 million. Of course, the campaign won’t really cost Google anything. It is spending $100 to acquire these small local business as new customers. It has offered similar promotions in the past. But Google’s efforts go beyond offering these credits.

In fact, Google wants to make it so easy for small businesses to get on board, that it even offers a phone number to call up and a representative will help them set up their first campaign. This is a very different approach than the automated self-serve model Google was built on, but that is because local businesses need more hand-holding when it comes to online marketing. As Greg Sterling pointed out when the campaign kicked off in mid-December:

What we’re seeing at Google is a significant commitment to the local market and a related internal cultural shift.

Google needs to find its next leg of growth and local (which is intimately tied with mobile) is where it is putting a lot of its fire power.

The future of computing is mobile, and, unfortunately, the future of malware will probably lie there too. Well-funded mobile security startup Lookout has just posted a blog entry detailing what it calls “the most sophisticated Android malware to date”: a Trojan that’s being “grafted” onto legitimate applications. Fortunately, the odds of you being affected are quite low.

The Trojan in question has only been seen on third-party Android app marketplaces in China, which aren’t accessible without turning on “Unknown Sources” from Android’s settings menu (the vast majority of users only download applications via the official Android Market). And the infected applications request access to far more of the user’s data than they normally would (users have to approve these requests before installing an app), which can tip users off that something is amiss.

But, if you’re unlucky enough to have cleared those hurdles, here are some of the details on what Lookout believes the Trojan is capable of:

Though we have seen Geinimi communicate with a live server and transmit device data, we have yet to observe a fully operational control server sending commands back to the Trojan. Our analysis of Geinimi’s code is ongoing but we have evidence of the following capabilities:

Send location coordinates (fine location)
Send device identifiers (IMEI and IMSI)
Download and prompt the user to install an app
Prompt the user to uninstall an app
Enumerate and send a list of installed apps to the server

Lookout writes that this is more sophisticated than previously discovered malware because it attempts to hide what it’s doing through encryption and bytecode obfuscation. It also says that this is the first Android malware that could potentially be used to create a botnet, though it hasn’t seen any instances of a server actually communicating with the Trojan yet:

Geinimi is also the first Android malware in the wild that displays botnet-like capabilities. Once the malware is installed on a user’s phone, it has the potential to receive commands from a remote server that allow the owner of that server to control the phone.

One other thing to note: Lookout is in the business of mobile phone security — it offers applications for Android, BlackBerry, and Windows mobile — so it obviously stands to benefit from exposing these exploits.