8/16 Mashable!

Please add updates@feedmyinbox.com to your address book to make sure you receive these messages in the future. Mashable! - Social software and social networking 2.0. Google Loses Search Market Share … to Yahoo?! August 15, 2009 at 9:58 pm A week and a half ago, we highlighted numbers from StatCounter that demonstrated that Google was losing market share to Bing. This made sense: Bing is a new search engine with heavy marketing and compelling features. Numbers released by Nielsen tell a similar story: while Google grew from June to July, it still lost market share to its competitors – from 66.1% in June to 64.8% in July, a 1.3% drop. However, a closer look at the numbers reveals that Bing wasn’t the primary culprit – it was Yahoo which stole Google’s market share. Let’s put the numbers into perspective. Here are the June 2009 stats: You can see that Google has 66.1% of the market, with Yahoo in second place at 16.2% and Bing in third at 8.8%. Now here are the July numbers: Searches increased by 5% in July, but while all the major search engines grew, Yahoo’s growth shot up by 11%. The result is that Yahoo gained 0.9% market share, up to 17.1%. Bing had an uptick of 0.2% to reach 9%. According to the Nielsen numbers, it was Yahoo, not Bing, that dealt the damage to Google. It does make sense, when you think about it. Yahoo has really been in the spotlight this month for its search deal with Microsoft and the new Yahoo homepage. Still, 11% growth is enormous and somewhat unexpected. In the end, it doesn’t matter to Microsoft who takes searchers away from Google, just as long as they are taken away. Will this trend continue in August? Will Bing be able to keep up its growth? Or will the new Google search engine (Google Caffeine) change the game once again? The search engine landscape keeps getting more complex and more intriguing. Reviews: Bing, Google Tags: bing, Google, microsoft, Yahoo Apple Tablet Rumors: Separating Fact from Fiction August 15, 2009 at 7:12 pm Ever since a Financial Times article in July reported that an Apple Tablet would be launching before Christmas, the entire web’s been buzzing nonstop over the potential device. But with no information to feed the insatiable curiosity of tech enthusiasts, the rumor mill has exploded instead. Analysts claiming they tested it and rumored launch dates only scratch the surface. The rumors are getting out of control. That’s why we think it’s time to get everybody on the same page on the Apple Tablet. We’ve taken the most common tablet rumors, analyzed them, and provide you with our assessment of each rumor. Be prepared for a reality check, though. We probably know more about extraterrestrial life than we do about the Apple Tablet. Rumor 1: There Is an Apple Tablet Status: Unconfirmed, but likely. Analysis: With all of this talk about the Apple Tablet or the Apple iTablet, it’s easy to forget that there has been no announcement about it. Rumors about an Apple Tablet have swirled around since at least 2007. However, our impression is that the tablet is real, and that it’s coming very soon. Most sources have said that the Tablet exists. Apple patents and reports from multiple reputable media organizations add to the credibility of the rumors. Our take: It’s very likely that the Tablet exists. Rumor 2: Apple Will Announce It During the Week of September 7th Status: Possible, due to Apple’s history. Analysis: AllThingsD put out a report a few days ago claiming that Apple is having a keynote on September 7th. We’ve heard these reports from other sources as well. This wouldn’t be surprising if true – apple has had a big keynote to launch new products (especially iPod lines) generally after Labor Day, Sept. 7th. Whether Apple will actually announce the Apple Tablet is an entirely different story. While many believe that the Tablet will make its debut at this supposed keynote, Former MacWorld editor Jim Dalrymple says that it will not see the light of day until 2010, meaning an announcement wouldn’t come until then. Our take: We’re fairly confident a keynote is coming. We’re not as sure about the Tablet, though. Still, there’s a decent chance. Rumor 3: The Apple Tablet Doesn’t Arrive Until 2010 Status: Unknown. Analysis: Some reports say it will arrive before the Christmas season (if it even exists). Some say not until early 2010. There’s nothing definitive that points to either time frame, although Mr. Dalrymple does have his sources within Apple. Really it depends on how far development has gone (and how many snags Apple has hit). Launching for the X-mas season is ideal. Our take: If they announce it at the keynote, expect 2009. Otherwise, 2010. Rumor 4: It Will Run iPhone Apps Status: Well, it’s got to run an OS, right? Analysis: The tablet will run one of three things: the iPhone 3.1 OS (or a variation thereof), the Mac OS X 10 (or a variation), or a brand new OS. Building another OS seems like a waste in time, so we’re focused on the first two possibilities. Out of those two, it’s more likely to run apps. Most rumors describe the table as a giant version of the iPod Touch or iPhone, meaning it should run apps on a big screen. It could even be the “iProd” found in the most recent iPhone OS configuration, though that’s more likely to be the new iPod Touch line. Our take: More likely than not this thing runs apps. Rumor 5: This Is the Apple Tablet: Status: Pretty much debunked. Analysis: Looks right, feels right, but as Engadget has already been tipped to, the “Welcome” graphic is easily found on Google Image search. Besides, having a button in the very middle just isn’t practical from a usability standpoint. Our take: Can you say “Photoshop”? Conclusion There are a lot more rumors, but the point is that not a single thing about this Apple Tablet is confirmed. Not even its existence. The tablet could be announced in September. It could appear in 2010. It may not even exist. This is all speculation. Until someone from Apple confirms its existence publicly, be wary of tablet rumors and pics. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Soon enough we’ll have the truth. Tags: apple, Apple Tablet Nine Inch Rickroll: Rick Astley vs Nine Inch Nails [Video] August 15, 2009 at 4:23 pm When we brought you the Nirvana vs Rick Astley video, we hoped never to subject your ears to something that painful – but strangely awesome – ever again. Not gonna happen: a random YouTube user has “gone there” and remixed Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up (famous for the Internet meme of Rickrolling) with Nine Inch Nails’ The Hand That Feeds. Depending on your perspective, the result is either a travesty, or a stroke of genius. Take a look, and let us know your thoughts in the comments. [via Digg] Reviews: YouTube WP.me: Wordpress.com Launches Short URLs August 15, 2009 at 3:53 pm If you’ve got a Wordpress.com blog, you’ll be pleased to know you can now share an itsy-bitsy-Wordpress-linky to each of your posts. That’s right: WordPress has launched the WP.me short URL, designed for linking to your blog posts from space-limited sites like Twitter. It isn’t a general purpose URL shortener or rival to Bit.ly: it’s just for those on WordPress.com. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg writes of the launch: -WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world. -Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now. -These are all exposed in the using rel=shortlink. -It doesn't work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones. -The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around. -WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com. All of which is great, but raises the question: now microblogging has surpassed personal blogging, how does WordPress keep up? We haven’t heard much about Prologue, their self-hosted chat/microblog-thingy since its launch in early 2008. Does the personal blogging titan plan to take a real shot at the microblogs space? If so, how? Reviews: Twitter, WordPress Google Chrome OS Screenshots? August 15, 2009 at 2:14 pm An unfamiliar source sent us these, which claim to be screenshots of the upcoming Google Chrome OS. Are they real? Who knows, but we’ll confess we kinda like them – super simple for a web-centric experience. They’ll probably turn out to be mockups from a kid in Delaware. Or pinched from an Engadget story published years ago. Or something. We don’t care…they’re cool, and we’re only gonna keep prodding Google until we get to see the real thing. Do you want the Google Chrome OS to look like this? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Reviews: Google Facebook To User: Your Life is Empty [Pic] August 15, 2009 at 1:47 pm Who needs enemies when you’ve got Facebook? One user created a photo album called “Your Life”, and the following result ensued. We’re fairly sure this is a setup – after all, who creates an album called “Your Life”, rather than “My Life”? That said, the resulting screenshot may be interpreted as a thought-provoking commentary on our modern, hyper-connected lives that seek to mask our inner loneliness. Either that, or just a really funny joke. [via Digg] Reviews: facebook Best of Boxee: 5 Apps for Killer Entertainment August 15, 2009 at 1:32 pm Boxee is a great way to experience internet content on your television or PC. The company has just recently announced that they were able to raise an additional $6 million in financing, which means they can continue to build a better platform. In the next few months you can expect to see improvements to the product, more content, and Boxee on more devices. As it stands, however, Boxee is already chock full of entertainment in the form of applications. Boxee applications aren’t really applications in the way most of us understand applications. Instead they’re more like glossy windows that developers have built to bring the best internet content to our television sets and monitors. With Boxee applications you can watch your favorite web TV shows, listen to streaming music, browse your online photos, and see the web in a whole new light. If you’re just getting started with Boxee, or are a tried-and-true veteran, then chances are you’re interested in learning about the best that the application has to offer. So we’ve taken the best of Boxee and bundled it up into this blog post for your convenience. Keep reading to learn about remarkable ways to engage with online photos, videos, and music via the best apps in those categories. Boxee Apps: A Quick Tutorial If you’re using Boxee and you haven’t discovered the applications, then you’re missing out on the full Boxee experience. Here’s how to get started. When you launch and login to Boxee, select the “Menu” option on the left. A new pane will open up with the following options: Applications, Local Media, Browse, Downloads, and App Box. If you’re in the mood to discover applications, select App Box. That’s where you can browse around for apps that strike your fancy. To add an app to your personal Boxee application dashboard, just select it and click ok. You can also remove apps in this area as well. Select “My Applications” at the top, and click on the app you’d like to remove. Now, if you’re looking to actually enjoy the apps you’ve added, navigate back to the left-hand menu and select Applications. Here you can choose All, Photos, Video, or Music to view your saved apps. Best Music App: Pandora Pandora holds a special place in most of our hearts as a remarkable way to discover and listen to music online. We’ve spent years using their music discovery engine to mastermind the greatest stations to help us beat the work day blues or auto-DJ our social gatherings. With the Pandora app for Boxee, you can log into your account and experience everything you love about streaming music from the shiny entertainment dashboard. The app is visually very impressive, feature-rich, and pretty easy to manipulate. You’ll find your saved stations on the right-hand side, which you can close and open, and a history of your streamed music is clearly highlighted across your screen. You can still create stations and bookmark songs or artists as usual. Of course, the most important part of a music app for Boxee is the online streaming quality. Quality will always depend on your internet connection, with or without Boxee as your gateway to great music, but the good news is that the Pandora experience is only heightened on your television, with no performance issues that can be attributed to Boxee. Best Photo App: Facebook Photos If you have an Apple TV, you’ve probably already come to appreciate the magic of having your photos on the big screen. Boxee, however, brings a new social layer to the experience, as the application has inspired a number of third-party developers to create Boxee photo apps for your favorite social networks. One such developer, Junda Liu, has built a Facebook Photos app that gives you the ability to use Facebook Connect to connect Boxee to your Facebook account. You can view your Facebook photos, friends’ albums, and recently added photos in larger-than-life form. The app creates a rich photo experience that is really quite marvelous, especially when compared to Facebook’s standard presentation of photos and albums. If Facebook isn’t your photo site of choice, there’s always the Flickr and Picasa apps for Boxee, which are also quite nice. Best Cable TV App: CNN If you expect quality picture and a great, dynamic selection, than the CNN app will not disappoint. Once you launch the app, you can use the left-hand menu to browse top stories, most popular, staff picks, or peruse through categories like tech and business with the by section option. The CNN app is perfect if you’ve canceled cable and still want access to the network’s news stories, or if you’ve missed the day’s news and just want to catch up on your own time. Either way the CNN app is a great way to experience news stories via Boxee. Best Web TV App: Pure Pwnage Though this hit web series will soon find its way on your television (in Canada that is), one of Boxee’s most prolific application developers, Rob Spectre, has turned the series into a nifty Boxee app. So, you can watch the made-for-the-web series in all its glory on your television right now. Best Custom App: Make Your Own Here’s the best part of Boxee. If there’s online music, photos, or videos that you can’t find in the available apps (though most of them have you covered), you can use My Feeds to create your own RSS-based content app. This comes in handy if you want a quick way to access and keep up with specific podcasts and vlogs. Adding the web shows you want to follow is really pretty simple. First things first, find the RSS feed for the music, video, or photo content you’d like to add. Then, in Boxee, navigate to the Apps Box section and click on My Feeds at the top. There you can input the feed, designate the appropriate content, and add it so that’s a part of your application repository. Honorable Mention: We Are Hunted We Are Hunted is a fantastic way to discover new music. They scour the web for the 99 most popular songs every day, divvy them into a few different categories — like a Twitter chart — and then you can click to enjoy new music. We’re totally in love with the website, but now we’re even more enamored with the Boxee app. Add We Are Hunted to find and discover popular tracks for a completely unique music listening experience on your television set. Play this app at your next party, and it just might be the greatest way to add a little spice to your mixer. Reviews: Boxee, Flickr, Pandora, Twitter, facebook Tags: apps, boxee, boxee apps, Lists Twitter is Down: Long Live Twitter August 15, 2009 at 1:22 pm Twitter down! Yup, the microblogging site is suffering outages again this weekend: at the time of writing, the website is up but our Twitter apps are struggling. If you can’t make it through your day without satisfying your Twitter addiction, here’s a quick recap of all the top Twitter news we covered this week: Top Twitter Stories TWITTER ANALYSIS: 40% of Tweets Are Pointless Babble – At least according to a recent survey. Do you buy it? Twitter's Latest Security Threat: Botnets – The bots are coming, reports Adam Ostrow. Project Retweet: The End of RTs as We Know Them? – What will become of the humble retweet, asks Jennifer Van Grove. Twitter Co-Founder: What We Learned From The Attacks [VIDEO] – Biz Stone gets down to bizness. Twitter CEO's Wife Tweeting While in Labor – It’s a Twitter baby boom! SPAM CRACKDOWN: Twitter Mass Suspends Hacked Accounts – Twitter orders a large shipment of “Hacker-B-Gone”. Tasty Tweets: 55+ Foodies to Follow on Twitter – The foodies to follow when Twitter returns. Reviews: Twitter Retweet My FriendFace: The Best of Social Media This Week August 15, 2009 at 1:02 pm It’s been another busy week in social media, from Facebook’s acquisition of the status updates service FriendFeed to Twitter’s announcement that it will officially support retweets. We took a shot of Google Caffeine, cut calories with Facebook Lite and took a nap on some social media pillows. A guy caught a laptop in his butt, a judge banned Microsoft Word and Googlers wondered: “why do men have nipples?” Without further ado, here are the highlights from the past week in social media. FriendFace: Facebook Buys FriendFeed, Launches Realtime Search Facebook Acquires FriendFeed – The big news this week: social networking leader Facebook acquired status-update aggregator FriendFeed. The move likely signals Facebook’s desire to compete in the real-time search market. Watch Out Twitter! Facebook Launches Realtime Search – Facebook is getting serious about search: you can search for status updates from friends and public profiles. Facebook To Launch Facebook Lite – News broke this week that Facebook is working on Facebook Lite, a minimalist, fast-loading version of the site. FACEBOOK LITE: The Early Details and Screenshots – What’s Facebook Lite all about? We pull together the early details and a screenshot. FACEBOOK FIRED: 8% of US Companies Have Sacked Social Media Miscreants – Social media-related firings are more common than you might think, reports Adam Ostrow. Study: Facebook Increases Jealousy in Relationships – Does Facebook make you jealous? A study says: yes! Twitter to Support Retweets…But Are Tweets Pointless Babble? Twitter Announces Project Retweet – Twitter announced the upcoming launch this week of Project Retweet, its plan to make retweeting an official Twitter feature. What will the changes mean, we ask. TWITTER ANALYSIS: 40% of Tweets Are Pointless Babble – A new study claims that 40% of Tweets are “pointless babble”. We take a look at the results. Twitter CEO's Wife Tweeting While in Labor – That’s dedication: @sara Tweets during labor. She later gave birth to a baby boy. Social Media Pillows Are All Kinds of Awesome – What better addition to your personal “downtime” than a Fail Whale pillow? How about Digg, Reddit, or Facebook? Social media pillows might be for you. We Google So You Don’t Have To Google to Launch a New Version of Google Search – Google is working on its Caffeine update, the biggest change to Google search in years. Ben Parr takes a peek. What Does Google Think of Twitter? [Pic] – an amusing Google Suggest result shows what the Googling public really thinks about Twitter. Top 10 Funniest Google Suggest Results – When you type in a search term on Google, the search engine suggests terms to search for based on what phrases other searchers tend to look for. The result: some very funny observations about what people are really thinking, including the age-old question, “why do men have nipples?”. Google Caffeine: A Detailed Test of the New Google – We take Google Caffeine for a test run. Microsoft Maelstrom Microsoft Banned from Selling Word in the US – A Texas judge has ruled that Microsoft cannot sell Word in the US due to patent infringement. How will Microsoft get out of this bind? Microsoft: IE6 Cannot Die – Microsoft responds to the calls for an end to IE6, explaining why it’s not likely to happen any time soon. …And Finally Guy Catches Laptop With His Butt: YouTube Video Raises Eyebrows – Can there be any explanation for this viral video? Image courtesy of iStockphoto, AndrewJohnson Reviews: Digg, FriendFeed, Google, Twitter, facebook, iStockphoto   This email was sent to topblogsofthenet@gmail.com.  Manage Your Account Don't want to receive this feed any longer? Unsubscribe here.